Winner of the second Wonder Prize, i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where brings us Sophie Seita’s playful translations of one of Germany’s most innovative contemporary poets, Uljana Wolf. Being truly between languages, the texts in this collection place themselves squarely against monolingual identity politics, whether invoking Anna O, child language, aphasia, or the isolation of asylum seekers in Bavarian forests. Where the poet discovers multilingual lengevitch, the translator-writer turns the switch, and off we go following the „blur-print“ of their interlaced language: „a spark, a faltering unresting sway; en-wringed.“

Uljana Wolf is a German poet, teacher and translator based in Brooklyn and Berlin. She published four books of poetry with kookbooks (Berlin), most recently meine schönste lengevitchand SONNE FROM ORT, a collaborative erasure of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s sonnets with Christian Hawkey. English translations of her work appeared in three chapbooks, my cadastre(Norby Press), false friends (Ugly Duckling Presse) and ALIENS: an island (Belladonna*). A Spanish translation of her work, Fronteras del lenguaje, was published by La Bella Varsovia/Cosmopoética (Córdoba 2011). Wolf received several grants and awards for her work and for her translations, among them the prestigious Peter-Huchel-Preis for her debut, kochanie ich habe brot gekauft in 2006. Wolf translated numerous poets into German, among them John Ashbery, Charles Olson, Matthea Harvey, Christian Hawkey, Erín Moure, and Cole Swensen, and was the co-editor of the Jahrbuch der Lyrik 2009. She teaches German and poetry translation at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Sophie Seita works with poetry on the page, in performance and in video. Her books include 12 Steps (Wide Range, Cambridge, UK, 2012),Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014), and a feminist inter-genre artist book with Anna Moser, titled Aesthetic Failings, or A Dialogue (forthcoming 2015). Some videos have been exhibited and screened in the UK, US, Ireland, and Germany. Some video- and performance-work is availablehere and here. Her academic research focuses on avant-garde little magazines. Scholarships and awards include: DAAD, Studienstiftung, Hölderlin Study Abroad Scholarship, Queen Mary Principal’s Studentship, John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize, Charles D. Abbott Fellowship 2013 (Poetry Collection, SUNY Buffalo), Columbia University’s Gatsby Foundation, and a Beinecke Fellowship at Yale (2014).