Hydra's Heads

The Swiss/German author Nora Gomringer is one of the German language’s best known and loved contemporary poets. In the early 2000s she was a prominent voice in Germany’s young slam scene, and her background in performance continues to inform her work. Her writing blurs the boundaries between performance and page poetry, as well as often intersecting with other art forms, from film to music and visual art. Her work has won her a number of awards, including the Joachim Ringelnatz Prize in 2012 and the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Award in 2015. In 2019 she was the Max Kade Professor for the Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio. Nora Gomringer lives in Bamberg, where she is director of the International Artists’ House, Villa Concordia.Reimar Limmer works as a graphic designer and illustrator with a particular focus on work in the arts. His illustrations for Nora Gomringer’s Trilogy have been showcased in exhibitions in Cologne, Vienna, Zurich and Hanoi. He lives and works in Bamberg.Annie Rutherford makes things with words, and champions poetry and translated literature in all its guises. She works as Assistant Director at StAnza, Scotland’s international poetry festival, and translates from German, Russian, French and Belarusian. Her translations include Nora Gomringer’s Hydra’s Heads (Burning Eye, 2018), Volha Hapeyeva’s In My Garden of Mutants (Arc, 2021) and Isabel Bogdan’s novel The Peacock (V&Q Books, 2021). She is currently working on translations of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Kinga Toth.

Annie Rutherford's translation of Nora Gomringer's poetry/prose/performance work is a Very Good Thing for English-language audiences. This work is determinedly offkilter, revelling in body discomfort, twisting to peer at lovers and history with a microscopic, often sardonic, gaze. There is a gritted effort to dissect the tongue, in more ways than one, and a hauling of national history and complicity into the present tense. She is not interested in comforting the reader and yet, for all that, there is unsentimental tenderness here, a sardonic-but-never-cynical, deeply felt joy. Rachel McCrum; Beautifully translated into the sort of English that feels utterly natural and rhythmically complete while managing to preserve the mouthfeel of Nora's inventive, electrifying German, Hydra's Heads delights with constructions such as `waterfeet' and `chimneying', `Youyouyours' and `Imemine'. In little poems and long poems, words are breathed into life so they become more than tool or musical instrument but letter flesh that pulses up and out from the page. The Holocaust hunkers near the heart of the book, not shied away from but acknowledged in simple, felt language as inherited nightmare and reminder of our human weakness. Love also blushes through the pages; sweet exhalations on a mirror or train window, the self dreaming the other in a moment which cannot be caught but is, and is. JL Williams