Thursday 24 and Friday 25 May 2012, Cardiff University

The Learned Society of Wales is pleased to support the Cardiff School of European Languages, Translation and Politics ‘Poetry Under Pressure’ series.

 Professor Gerrit-Jan Berendse FLSW has invited to Cardiff University two poets from Germany, to explore with us the multi-facetted concept of “Poetry under Pressure”. Uwe Kolbe and Richard Pietraß have been poets writing in remarkable circumstances: they were writing, editing and translating poetry behind the Iron Curtain in the GDR; today they are poets writing in the contemporary Berlin Republic; they also wrote during the pressured era of transition between those two cultural contexts.

Germany, at the heart of Europe, has a cultural history full of pressures and fissures of various kinds. It also has a rich lyric tradition, which like the country’s cultural history, deserves to be better known in the UK.

The proposed project is expected to exchange the poets’ knowledge of “poetry under pressure” in the (former) German Democratic Republic to Welsh poets who produce their art under very different circumstances but in similar processes of marginalisation and cultural hegemony.

Supported by the Learned Society of Wales, Literature Wales, Cardiff School of European Languages, Translation and Politics and the Saxon Academy of Arts.

 For further information please see: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/europ/newsandevents/events/underpressure.html