The students of German 450: The Task of the Translator (Spring 2013, Prof. David Gramling) have recently published their co-translation of British-Austrian poet Peter Waterhouse's 2003 prose poem "The Sound Valley". Their translation, published with the peer-reviewed scholarly journal TRANSIT (housed at University of California, Berkeley), is available for download here. Congratulations to German Studies students / alumni and co-translators: Andrew Ziesig, Ilija Wolinski, Kathleen Stack, Ashley Sherry, Kara Saunders, Kelsey Rader, Laisa Neuner, Judith Menzl, Morgen Daniels, Anna Dorste, Anneliese Chittock, and Sarah Allen. The 14-page prose poem, itself a meditation on Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 1902 text "A Letter", begins as follows:
"I first heard the words ‘Austria,’ ‘England,’ ‘Europe,’ ‘London,’ ‘Vienna’ in 1962, on one of our outings to the hills right outside the city, to the forests and animals. I heard them for the first time when my mother read a letter—read it aloud, because she liked to hear the language in the letter, aloud because it was an English letter that wasn’t written in English, maybe because she liked to hear this Other-English, or maybe so I could hear it. It seems it was a letter about a child named Katharina and a fish. “I’ll read the English letter aloud,” said my mother, and then she read in German. And so, her child became certain that English and German are one. The trees, the shadows beginning above, the oncoming darkness high in the trees, beginning high above at a joyful height."