15/08/2025
Gobsh*te Quarterly presents An Evening of Translation
Mother Foucault’s Bookshop
(new, air-conditioned location, 715 SE Grand Ave., Portland, Oregon)
Friday, Sept. 19th, 7 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Douglas Spangle, winner of Oregon Literary Arts’ Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, will read his translations of German poets, ranging from “Bread and Wine”, from the now forgotten but immensely influential Friedrich Holderlin, thence to a short poem by Victorian-era C.F. Meyer, a Swiss poet perhaps best compared to Hardy, and proceed to The Flaying of Marsyas, by contemporary Swiss poet, Florian Vetsch.
Michael Shay will read work by Georg Trakl.
Caroline Wilcox Reul will read work by Dinçer Güçyeter.
BIOS & other info:
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is not especially well-known in English, though few writers in German are untouched by his influence – Nietzsche (Also Sprach Zaratustra), Rilke, Trakl, Heidegger, Celan, Hesse... and, more recently, his work has been interpreted by Finnish Death Metal musicians.
He was born into a Germany which did not yet exist, a jigsaw puzzle of petty states, in Württemburg, to a poor fundamentalist family. Meant at first to enter the Protestant clergy, he eventually studied at Tuebingen with Hegel and Schelling, digging into Classical Greek philosophy and literature.
Hölderlin produced a large body of work, much fragmentary, among which are several longer pieces, including Brod und Wein. Unable to find secure gainful employment beyond a few tutorial and curatorial appointments, despite being mentored by Goethe and Schiller, he was always impoverished. His enthusiasm for republican politics led him to travel on foot to France for the French Revolution, where he insisted he had been “struck by Apollo”. He began to be seized by schizophrenia.
"Brod und Wein" is one of his last coherent works. After a long mental decline, he was taken in by a sympathetic carpenter’s family and lived in a tower on their land. Visited by the curious, he denied ever having been a poet, but would pen a few verses pseudonymously as a 17th Century Italian named Scardanelli. After his death, he was forgotten, but like Blake, re-emerged by the turn of the twentieth century, to represent Modernism and points beyond.
Georg Trakl (1887-1914)’s poems are a haunting music: the sigh of bells, private dreams of the world collapsing, the wings of birds through banners of scarlet – some of the most memorable in the German language.
He was born and lived the first 21 years of his life in Salzburg, Austria. Failing Classics, he qualified as a pharmacist. In 1908, Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of Der Brenner, became his patron, regularly printed Trakl’s work, and endeavored to find him a publisher. The result was Gedichte (Poems), published in 1913.
Ficker also brought Trakl to the attention of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who anonymously provided him with a sizable stipend so that he could concentrate on his writing. In the autumn of 1914, and now in the German Army at Gródek, Trakl had to steward the recovery of some ninety soldiers wounded in the fierce campaign against the Russians. He tried to shoot himself from the strain, but his comrades prevented him. He lapsed into worse depression and wrote to Ficker for advice. Ficker convinced him to communicate with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein travelled to the hospital; Trakl had already overdosed on co***ne.
Florian Vetsch (1960- ) worked with Boris Kerensky for more than ten years on the publication of the anthology "Tangier Telegram: Journey through the literatures of a legendary Moroccan city". He has documented and translated the Beat generation – Ira Cohen, Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, and others, into German, and, living in St. Gallen, Switzerland, continues to produce cross-cultural work and regularly mount cross-cultural literary festivals.
In "The Flaying of Marsyas" Vetsch wears his playfulness lightly: he writes about beer; riffs on “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell; and describes being invaded by dead poets; he also writes about an old photograph of his mother as a young woman before WW2, and about the American journalist Mary Colvin, assassinated in Syria by the Assad regime. In the title poem he protests against the frightful punishments inflicted on artists, mystics or philosophers who challenge gods, priests, and politicians.
Dinçer Güçyeter (1979- ) was born in Nettetal and is a German theatre maker, poet, editor, and publisher. From 1996 to 2000 he trained as a tool mechanic, and subsequently worked as a restaurateur; in 2012, he founded the ELIF Verlag publishing house, which focuses on poetry. Güçyeter funded his publishing venture by working part-time as a forklift driver. He published Aus Glut geschnitzt in 2017 and Mein Prinz, ich bin das Ghetto in 2021. In 2022, Güçyeter was awarded the Peter Huchel Prize for his poetry; in 2023 his novel Unser Deutschlandmärchen won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. In 2024 he received the Else Lasker Schüler Prize.
Douglas Spangle (1951- ) was born in Roanoke, Virginia, and raised in a Park Service family. He spent his childhood in various western states before his family moved overseas. He finished high school in Ankara, Turkey, and attended University of Maryland's Munich Campus (1968-1971). He spent the next four years as a stagehand at the Münchener Kammerspiele Schauspielhaus.
He has been involved in all aspects of Portland’s poetry scene, curating city-wide poetry and cultural events such as ArtQuake, co-editing Rain City Review, hosting open mic series at Satyricon and other venues, and hosting the widely-known, decade-long open mic at Café Lena.
His many chapbooks include a translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry, Blood and Wine (Fly Leaf Editions, 2008). Author of A White Concrete Day: Poems, 1978-2013 (Reprobate/GobQ Books, 2013), recipient of Oregon Literary Arts’ Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, he is currently translating Swiss authors Christoph Keller, Florian Vetsch, and Clemens Umbricht for Gobsh*te Quarterly and several Swiss anthologies.
Caroline Wilcox Reul has an MA in computational linguistics and German language and literature from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. She is the translator of Wer lebt / Who Lives by Elisabeth Borchers (Tavern Books, 2017), co-editor of the poetry anthology, Over Land and Rising (9 Bridges, 2017), and translator of Am Morgen Sind Wir Aus Glas / In the Morning We Are Glass (2021). Her translations have also appeared in the PEN Poetry Series, the Broadsided Press, and other venues.
Michael Shay was born in Ludwigschafen am Rhein, Germany, and grew up in Chicago. As an undergraduate he was chosen to attend the summer session of the Iowa Writers Workshop in poetry, where he studied with Marvin Bell. He is author of The Words I Own (Reprobate/GobQ Books, 2020) and has published in South Carolina Review, Ni**od, and Rhino.
