Yvan Goll

Yvan Goll: Yvan Goll (1891-1950) is one of the great lyric poets and authors of the twentieth century. His birth in Alsace-Lorraine gave him native fluency in French and German, making him a commanding bilingual poet, but his work is little known to English-speaking audiences today. His facility to absorb different cultures and points of view produced a large and varied body of work. Living and working among the Dadaists in Zurich, the Expressionists in Berlin and the Surrealists in Paris, Goll...See more

Yvan Goll: Yvan Goll (1891-1950) is one of the great lyric poets and authors of the twentieth century. His birth in Alsace-Lorraine gave him native fluency in French and German, making him a commanding bilingual poet, but his work is little known to English-speaking audiences today. His facility to absorb different cultures and points of view produced a large and varied body of work. Living and working among the Dadaists in Zurich, the Expressionists in Berlin and the Surrealists in Paris, Goll penned some of the finest love poems of our time. His satiric drama "Methusalem, or the Eternal Bourgeois" (1921), was a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd. His "Manifesto for Surrealism," honored Apollinaire and debated Breton. His early interest in film yielded "Chapliniade." His active life as a novelist, playwright, translator and publisher produced collaborations with Chagall, Dali, Picasso, Leger, Weill, Joyce, et al. Among those he published during his exile years in New York are W.C. Williams, Breton, Patchen, Henry Miller, as well as his own English collection, "Fruit From Saturn." His diagnosis of leukemia sparked his last passionate poems in "Traumkraut." This classic volume appears for the first time in English with Black Lawrence Press. Nan Watkins: Nan Watkins is a writer, translator, and musician. She holds degrees in German from Oberlin College and Johns Hopkins University, with further study at the University of Munich and the Academy of Music in Vienna. She has worked as reference librarian at Western Carolina University and lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her travel writing has appeared with Seal Press in "Season of Adventure" and "A Woman Alone," along with her memoir, "East Toward Dawn: A Woman's Solo Journey Around the World," (also in Chinese). Her conversations with musicians, made together with Thomas Rain Crowe, are documented in "Rare Birds" (University Press of Mississippi). Her translations from the German include Erwin Eisch's "Towards a Conception of Glass Art" (Eisch Retrospective, exhibition catalog), Karin Struck's "Voluntary Death" (Dimension), and Christine Bruckner's "Sappho's Farewell" (Oxygen). She translated Claire Goll's poems in "10,000 Dawns: The Love Poems of Yvan & Claire Goll" (White Pine Press) and has published translations of Yvan Goll's poems in "Asheville Poetry Review, International Poetry Review, House Organ, Beloit Poetry Journal." Her interest in the work of Yvan Goll has led to publication of several essays; her translation of Goll's late work, "Traumkraut," is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press as Dreamweed. See less