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Maja Haderlap is a Slovenian-German Austrian writer and translator. She studied German language and literature at the University of Vienna and has a PhD in Theatre Studies. She has published volumes of poetry and essays in Slovenian and German, and translations from Slovenian. Haderlap was awarded the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis and the Rauriser Literaturpreis for her debut novel Engel des Vergessens (Angel of Oblivion). Tess Lewis is a translator from German and French and an Advisory Editor of The Hudson Review. She has been awarded translation grants from PEN America and PEN UK, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Max Geilinger Translation Grant for her translation of Philippe Jaccottet. She also writes essays on European literature for numerous literary journals including The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The American Scholar, and Bookforum.
Haderlap's abiding interest in language and the burden of history suffuses distant transit . . . as does her powerful sense of landscape . . . One particularly fine poem begins: how much the torn-open field i / stand before betrays. What Haderlap finds in those fields is elegantly captured in her poems - and splendidly rendered in Lewis's thoughtful translation. --Alexander Wells, Exberliner Maja Haderlap's poetry and prose combine poetic brilliance with explosive political power. --From the jury citation for the 2018 Max Frisch Prize Praise for Angel of Oblivion: Tess Lewis has done a fine job of translating Haderlap's lucid and lyrical prose...a hymn to remembrance - one urging us to salvage and safeguard the shards of our past from the tide of history. --Malcolm Forbes, The National Angel of Oblivion, with its doomed and colourful cast of real-life characters, as well as multiple cruel twists of fate, is a devastating story, never less than wholeheartedly told. --Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times Angel of Oblivion is a continuous, plunging attempt to express the disorderly but urgent moment of daring to master the unmasterable. There is nothing so crass here as an 'arc' or a redemptive release. The reader is on the hook until the end - at which point the narrative's underlying premises shimmer. --Ron Slate An arresting evocation of memory, community, and suffering. --Kirkus Reviews Haderlap's novel seems to transcend the boundaries between languages and histories. --Iga Nowicz, The Glossa Haderlap has written Angel of Oblivion in German with a clear and yet poetic tone, in which time is a solid glacier crushing underneath itself everything that the young hero once saw as wonderful and enduring. --Der Spiegel Though Haderlap wrote these poems in German, a language with a broader reach than Slovenian, Tess Lewis's English version conveys the poet's fraught relationship with her languages, and the ways in which Slovenian haunts the composition as well as the mythology and folklore of the collection . . . I sense that the gravitas of these poems has its source in both rivers : the extra-lingual psyche and the Ljubljanica, the river of Haderlap's home terrain, troubled with memories and remnants of war. --Heather Green, Harriet Books Additional Praise for Maja Haderlap: The desire to abolish borders, to free confined discourse, is inscribed in these poems as an ambivalent back and forth between escape and groundedness. --Ilma Rakusa, NZZ Wondrously expressive poems --Karl-Markus Gauss, Suddeutsche Zeitung There is no doubt that [Haderlap's poetry] sets a new benchmark in modern poetry with regard to thematic variation in linguistic reflection and direct expression. --Walter Pobaschnig, literaturoutdoors Haderlap's poems are political but without pathos. And they are poetic without being artificial. This is no mean feat. Strongly recommended. --Tiroler Tageszeitung
