Berlin: Under the Neomoon with Isabel Fargo Cole and Alexander Wells
8:00 pm CEST, Doors 7:30
Curious Fox Bookshop | Lausitzer Platz 17 | Berlin, Germany
Curious Fox Bookshop in Berlin welcomes Isabel Fargo Cole to discuss her new translation of Under the Neomoon by Wolfgang Hilbig. Isabel will be in conversation with Alexander Wells.
Widely considered to be one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Hilbig’s dark visions have long held readers aloft with their musical language and uncompromising assessment of the modern world. In Under the Neomoon, his debut short story collection originally published in East Germany in 1982, Hilbig’s persistent fixations—factory pits, rampant nature, and split identities—are at their most visceral and brilliant. Rendered into English by Hilbig’s longtime translator Isabel Fargo Cole, these short tales apply fluorescent language (“garlands of cast-iron flowers,” “tall dark-green water grasses”) to lives and spaces of foreclosed dreams.
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.
Alexander Wells is a critic and essayist living in Berlin. His work has been published by The Guardian, The Drift, The Baffler, New Left Review, and Meanjin among others; he is also Books Editor at the local print monthly The Berliner.
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.