Heroines from Abroad

Christine Marendon grew up in Bavaria with German and Italian as her languages; she is a significant translator as well as a radical eco-poet, keenly aware of social issues. This collection is translated into English by the leading UK translator Ken Cockburn.

Shortlisted for The 2019 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Translation Heroines from Abroad introduces a vibrant new voice to the English language. Christine Marendon’s enigmatic, meditative poems, translated here from the German and collected for the first time, draw on dreams, fairy tales and childhood memories to tap into a world beyond conscious reach. Marendon’s poems do not present ideas so much as embody states of mind. Something is realised through the poem, rather than said within it. Here, the voice is more important than the particularities of what is said – language, not words. For the translator, Heroines from Abroad is the fruit of seven years’ steady work. The poems’ clarity and subtle force, the ‘crystalline, precise quality of their lyricism’ (Sasha Dugdale), are testament to that humble, unhurried collaboration in words.