Uwe Kolbe plus Johannes Bauer
Wednesday 8th October
The Literature festival moved into foreign territory on Wednesday, for an event organised jointly with Northern Voices and Colpitts Poetry, and hosted by Durham County Council in the members' bar at County Hall.
Durham has a well-established literary twinning with the German city of Tübingen, which has led to strong bonds being formed between Durham poets Keith Armstrong and Michael Standen, and guest Uwe Kolbe.
Uwe Kolbe was the leading light of a new East German lyric poetry until his controversial work led to a ban on publication. He continued to write and self-publish in his own journal Mikado. In 1985 he was allowed to travel abroad and lived in Hamburg until the fall of the Wall allowed his return to Berlin.
Johannes Bauer
This might have seemed like an evening strictly for German speakers, and clearly a large part of the audience was able to appreciate Kolbe's poetry as he read it. But there was much for non-German speakers to enjoy as well.
Keith Armstrong set the scene with several of his own poems about visits to Tübingen, including one about the apartment provided for visiting writers at Langegasse 18. Michael Standen continued with a reading of his own poems and then introduced Uwe Kolbe.
This segment began with a loud and startling blast from the trombone of Johannes Bauer. Much of what followed took the form of a dialogue between poet and trombone. The North East has a tradition of brass, but nothing quite like this. This was not conventional melody: Johannes Bauer is a renowned trombonist and he traded phrases with Uwe Kolbe, seeming almost to argue against the poet's words. As Michael Standen remarked later, the sound was sometimes like a truculent car or a rumbling stomach.
Jo Tudor
Michael Standen also read some of the poems in the English translations he had prepared in collaboration with retired German lecturer Jo Tudor. She described their working method as "Mick fiddled with the translation once I told him what the ingredients were."
The result, particularly in the closing poem 030 - the dialling code for Berlin - a series of descriptions of the city in which the name Berlin recurred like an incantation, was to give even non-German speakers a way into the actual text of Kolbe's varied and sometimes sparse poetry.
The evening was supported by the Tübingen Cultural Office and the Goethe Institute.
