Selected Poems

The prize-winning Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag has one of the most distinctive and subtle voices in contemporary German-language writing. Among her most recent poems are the Summer Elegies, published to much acclaim in Austria in 2002. These, with selections from her earlier work, are included, with an introduction by Karen Leeder and a full interview with the poet.

Schlag uses the term 'elegy' in the same spirit as Ovid does; it is a mode which includes the themes of love, of place, and of the passing of time and the urgencies it induces. Schlag has developed a rapid, nuanced, unpunctuated style which involves the reader in various creative ways. Her world is as emotionally opulent as her beloved Tsvetaeva's, with whom she shares an impatience with faint-hearted love, and her tones can be as volatile and various as hers. Most of her poems secrete narratives, and those narratives are linked to her life in its widest sense. Her landscapes and the creatures, human and otherwise, that inhabit them are unforgettable.

Evelyn Schlag (born 1952) grew up in Waidhofen an der Ybbs in Lower Austria. She studied German and English at the University of Vienna before becoming a teacher in Vienna and, later, in her home town of Waidhofen. She has published a wide range of poetry, prose and short stories since 1981 as well as translations (notably of Douglas Dunn) and essays. An English-language Selected Poems, translated by Karen Leeder, was published by Carcanet in 2004, and an English translation of her novel Die Kränkung (Quotations of a Body), translated by Willy Riemer, appeared in 1998. Schlag’s works have been greeted with much critical acclaim, and she has received many awards, including the 1988 Bremer Förderpreis, the 1997 Anton Wildgans Prize, and the Otto Stoessl Prize in 1998. She was Lecturer for Poetry at the Institut für Sprachkunst (2010/2011) and a Member of the Judging Panel for Dublin’s IMPAC Prize 2012. In 2012 she was selected to represent Austria in the Poetry Parnassus (held at the Southbank Centre, London). She is a member of the Graz Literary Academy. She was awarded the Austrian Art Prize for Literature in 2015 and was award a Hay Festival Medal for Poetry in 2018. Karen Leeder (born 1962) is a writer, translator and academic. Since 1993 she has taught German at New College, Oxford and is Professor of Modern German Literature there. She is also a translator of German poetry into English, most recently Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems (with David Constantine, 2014), Michael Krüger, Last Day of the Year: Selected Poems (2014) and Ulrike Almut Sandig, Thick of It (2018). Her translation of Evelyn Schlag’s Selected Poems (2004) won the Schlegel Tieck Prize in 2005 and she won the Stephen Spender Prize in 2013 for her translation of Durs Grünbein.