Translating has long been a core component of a lot of my scholarly research, which tends to rely heavily on German media theory and/or nineteenth century (brain) science. Beginning in 2015, I have also started to pursue literary translation. I am currently working on a compendium of nineteenth-century drug fiction (translated from German into English) and have published a translation of an early twentieth-century poem-manifesto that features Walt Whitman.
My annotated translation of Walt Whitman’s 1852 novella Jack Engle into German has appeared in May 2017 (Das abenteuerliche Leben des Jack Engle, Berlin: Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis). It was reviewed (in German) by Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Südwestrundfunk, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and Fixpoetry. Kurt Darsow (WDR) has called it “definitely the preferred” German translation, Pascal Fischer (SWR) considered it to be “clearly the more bibliophile edition” and noted its “textual fidelity,” while Nicolas Freund (Süddeutsche) has praised it for hitting “the right tone for a serialized novel from the 19th century.”
I am currently working on a German translation of Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing.
I’ve also designed and lead translation workshops centered on Whitman at the International Walt Whitman Week in Dortmund, Germany, in 2018.
