All Under One Roof Poems

The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Summer 2018.

The Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag, whose 2004 Selected Poems received the coveted Schlegel Tieck Prize, returns with All under One Roof.

Once more, Karen Leeder’s brilliant translations render a selection of Schlag’s most recent poems into English. The book draws on two substantial German-language collections, Sprache von einem anderen Holz (2008) and verlangsamte raserei (2014). There is also a new essay by the author in which she discusses the sources, politics, and strategies of her writing.

Love remains a central theme for Schlag, but an associative inward journey with new diction, and new orthography, is underway. Rüdiger Görner in Die Presse responded to the vibrancy of what he called the "Sprachpulsate" (pulses of language): "Evelyn Schlag’s poems have a kind of discreet presence; once spoken they have claimed their permanent place in the lyric cosmos."

Leeder’s selection traces a uniquely Austrian imagination at the heart of contemporary European poetry.

Karen Leeder (1962-) is a writer, translator and academic. Since 1993 she has taught German at New College, Oxford, where she is Professor of Modern German Literature. In recent years she has translated Volker Braun and Michael Krüger. She won the Stephen Spender Prize for her translation of Durs Grünbein.

Evelyn Schlag (born 1952) grew up in Waidhofen an der Ybbs in Lower Austria. She studied German and English at the University of Vienna before becoming a teacher in Vienna and, later, in her home town of Waidhofen. She has published a wide range of poetry, prose and short stories since 1981 as well as translations (notably of Douglas Dunn) and essays. An English-language Selected Poems, translated by Karen Leeder, was published by Carcanet in 2004, and an English translation of her novel Die Kränkung (Quotations of a Body), translated by Willy Riemer, appeared in 1998. Schlag’s works have been greeted with much critical acclaim, and she has received many awards, including the 1988 Bremer Förderpreis, the 1997 Anton Wildgans Prize, and the Otto Stoessl Prize in 1998. She was Lecturer for Poetry at the Institut für Sprachkunst (2010/2011) and a Member of the Judging Panel for Dublin’s IMPAC Prize 2012. In 2012 she was selected to represent Austria in the Poetry Parnassus (held at the Southbank Centre, London). She is a member of the Graz Literary Academy. She was awarded the Austrian Art Prize for Literature in 2015.