Beyond this forest

Revisiting an op-ed I wrote last summer, and announcing some good news.

In the summer of 2024, which already feels like it happened in another century, I published an opinion piece on CNN. (You can read it here.) In addition to sharing my thoughts about the relationship between acts of vandalism and problematic language, I described my recent visit with graduate students in Germany who have been translating my poetry. Their exceptional sensitivity to the layered meaning of words inspired and touched me; efforts toward balancing clarity and context promised nuance for a German audience alongside profound respect for my work.

Today, I learned that my collection entitled GRAVITY will be released in a bilingual German/English edition by a publishing company called Rimbaud. The German title will be JENSEIT DIESES WALDES, or BEYOND THIS FOREST. (Some of the detailed reasons for this choice are explored in the CNN piece.)

I heard the good news about the publication deal via email from my dedicated Austrian colleague, a professor of American Studies who has been teaching a “Rosner translation seminar” at Dortmund University and closely supervising the graduate students I mentioned above. Professor Walter Gruenzweig, who earned his PhD at the University of Iowa where he focused on Whitman and Emerson, explained that “the main thing is that they [the publishing house] like your poetry and feel it will fit with the authors they already published (such as Whitman, Rimbaud, and Celan).”

How I wish I could tell the news to my long-ago Stanford professor, John Felstiner, renowned scholar and translator of Paul Celan’s poems, who taught a brilliant course on “Literature of the Holocaust” and passed away in 2017. Decades after I was an undergraduate student of his, I was able to visit his class to talk about my own work.

And how I wish my parents were still here to share this moment.

As it happens, the English edition of GRAVITY has gone out of print, so I’m extra grateful to know that a new version of the book will soon be available. Here’s what the cover of the now-out-of-print edition looks like:

GRAVITY originally came out as a chapbook all the way back in 1996. The book doubled in size when it was published by Atelier26 Books, and it included many stunning images by my dear friend, the very gifted artist Lola Fraknoi. Lola is also a daughter of Holocaust survivors.

The last piece of good news for today is that the cover of the new German/English edition is going to feature the gorgeous painting by Gustav Klimt that I write about in the poem, “Beyond This Forest.” It’s about beauty and war and the way once-innocent words can be transformed by their associations with violence. I wonder if poetry can also help remind us of the possibilities for peace, in spite of everything.