A Celebration of Wolfgang Hilbig with Translator Isabel Fargo Cole in San Francisco
Goethe Institut San Francisco | 530 Bush Street #204 | San Francisco, CA
Translator Isabel Fargo Cole joins us in San Francisco to celebrate the publication of Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Sleep of the Righteous. Cole will read from her translation of Hilbig’s career-defining story collection and talk about Hilbig’s career, work, and what it was like to translate the enigmatic prose of a German master with editorial director of Two Lines Press, CJ Evans.
Isabel Fargo Cole is a U.S.-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations include five books of Wolfgang Hilbig’s, including Old Rendering Plant, for which she received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. She has also been the recipient of a prestigious PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and her novel Die grüne Grenze was a finalist for the 2018 Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse.
Wolfgang Hilbig (1941–2007) was one of the major German writers to emerge in the postwar era. Though raised in East Germany, he proved so troublesome to the authorities that in 1985 he was granted permission to emigrate to the West. The author of more than twenty books, he received virtually all of Germany’s major literary prizes, capped by the 2002 Georg Büchner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor.