Bleibt noch der Raum zwischen den Wörtern – Slowakische Poesie

In the organizer's words:

Four Slovakian poets will be guests at the House of Poetry on this evening and read from their works:

Mária Ferenčuhová (born 1975) is a poet, translator from French (including Samuel Beckett and Michel Houellebecq) and lecturer in documentary film. She has published five volumes of poetry. Two cycles of poems have appeared in German translation under the title Die Fähigkeit zur Abwehr (hochroth Leipzig 2023): Abwehrkräfte (translation: Stefanie Bose), eight portraits of human illness and fragility, each titled with the initials and age of those portrayed, and Bedrohte Art (translation: Ulrike Feibig) about the existential threat to the human species.

Katarína Kucbelová (born 1979) has published five volumes of poetry, a novel and the novella Čepiec, which appeared under the title Die Haube (INK PRESS 2023) in a German translation by Eva Profousová. In her latest cycle of poems K bielej (Skalná ruža 2022), the color white forms the central motif of a contourless, post-apocalyptic world in which the feeling of absolute uncertainty is omnipresent: "if we are lucky / we will not melt when the eyes / beneath the surface stop sparkling".

Dominika Moravčíková (born 1992) won the Slovakian literary competitions Poviedka (for prose) and Básne SK/CZ (for poetry) in 2019. Her poetry debut Deti Hamelnu (Skalná ruža, Engl. Children of Hamelin) was published the following year, followed by the prose volume Dom pre jeleňa (KK Bagala, Engl. House for the Deer) in 2022. Past and present coexist in her poems and combine to form a contemporary social critique: "the only problem is that everything / is too similar: that's why we have to constantly produce differences".

Michal Tallo (born 1993) has published a collection of short stories, translations of Andrew McMillan and Seán Hewitt into Slovakian and three volumes of poetry, most recently Kniha tmy (literárna bašta 2022, Engl: The Book of Darkness). The volume's unusual publication format - a box with notebooks, cards and letters - defies linear reading and follows the traces of a vanishing world: "and under your body the weather explodes, rivers stones, trees, days, hundreds of pairs / of human and animal eyes".

The event will be interpreted into Slovakian and German.
In cooperation with the Slovakian Literature Center and the Slovakian Institute
in Berlin

In reading & discussion: Mária Ferenčuhová | Katarína Kucbelová | Dominika Moravčíková | Michal Tallo
Moderation: Asmus Trautsch