Margitt Lehbert

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Les Murray and Margitt Lehbert in the Lyrikkabinett Munich 2014

Margitt Lehbert (born February 12, 1957 in Geneva ) is a German literary translator and publisher who mainly translates and publishes international poetry into German .

She was married to the Swedish translator and publisher Stefan Borg , who founded the book publisher Nimrod Förlag in 1994 . From 2005 to 2014 the publishing house was located at the couple's place of residence in the southern Swedish municipality of Hörby . Margitt Lehbert became a publishing partner in 2005 and directed the publisher's German series, which appears under the name Edition Rugerup . In 2011 she founded the independent German book publisher Edition Rugerup.

Life and career

Margitt Lehbert was born in Geneva as the daughter of German parents. She grew up there as well as in Washington DC, Mexico City and Bonn. In 1976 she graduated from the German School in her Washington High School . She then studied philosophy and German at the University of Konstanz and, from 1980, comparative literature at the University of Iowa in the USA , where she graduated in 1986 with a Master of Fine Arts (Translation) .

Lehbert then worked for the literary magazine Poetry World (now Modern Poetry in Translation in Oxford) and for the book publishers Anvil Press Poetry in London and Sheep Meadow Press in New York City. In 1988 she went to Berlin , where she worked as a freelance translator and taught at the Free University of Berlin , among other places . From 1994 to 1996 she worked as a freelance translator in Utrecht in the Netherlands and from 1996 to 2002 again in Berlin.

As a scholarship holder at the Writers and Translators Center in Visby , Gotland , she met her future husband, the Swedish translator and publisher Stefan Borg. Borg, a former fighter pilot in the Swedish Air Force, published works on existential philosophy and philosophical existentialism, mostly translated into Swedish by himself, such as those by Søren Kierkegaard and Nikolai Berdjajev in his homeland in his own small publishing house, Nimrod Förlag , which he founded in Lindesberg in 1994 .

Margitt Lehbert and Stefan Borg married, with Borg taking the surname Lehbert, but still using his maiden name when he was a translator and publisher. The couple lived and worked in Berlin for a few years and moved to Sweden soon after the birth of their two children. In 2005, Margitt Lehbert became a publishing partner in her husband's Swedish Nimrod Förlag AB. For a long time she headed the German series, which appeared under the name Edition Rugerup and which, as an independent publisher, mainly presents international poetry in German translation.

As a translator, Margitt Lehbert has mainly translated literary works of poetry and sometimes also short prose from international writers such as Carol Ann Duffy , Paul Muldoon and Les Murray from English into German . In addition, she translated German-language poems such as by Sarah Kirsch and Georg Trakl into English. She has now also done translations from Danish and Swedish into German.

She was nominated for the Paul Celan Prize for her translation of Les Murray's translations from nature .

In 2016 she received the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

In 2018 she received the Kurt Wolff Foundation Prize.

In 2018 she received a Barthold Heinrich Brockes grant from the German Translation Fund.

Margitt Lehbert lived with her family for twelve years on a farm in the southern Swedish province of Skåne län (historical province of Schonen ) near the village of Önneköp, which belongs to the municipality of Hörby, in the hamlet of Rugerup, where she translated and worked as a publisher. After separating from her husband, she lives and works in Berlin.

Translations (selection)

Non-fiction

  • Gabriele Köhler, Michael Köhler: Jena. Side lights . Jenzig-Verlag, Jena 2002, ISBN 3-910141-54-4 . (Text in German, English and French; translation into English)

Literary translations

Activity as a publisher

In her edition Rugerup in the Swedish Nimrod Förlag AB, Margitt Lehbert has published around fifty volumes of poetry by international writers in German, including the Australian Nobel Prize candidate Les Murray, the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith and the German poets Jürgen Brôcan, Klaus Anders, Thomas Art and Sabine Lange . She partially transcribed the foreign-language works into German herself. The publications were mostly bilingual. In addition, a number of novels , autobiographies and a non-fiction book on climate change were published.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b See biographical information at Edition Rugerup (see web links).
  2. a b c See biographical information in Ars Interpres Publications, Stockholm u. a. (English; see web links).
  3. a b See world literature on the farm: "It must flutschen!" , Conversation by Nils Kahlefendt with Margitt Lehbert at Deutschlandfunk on February 18, 2009 (see web links).
  4. See information about the Nimrod Förlag ( memento of the original from September 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at Edition Rugerup (accessed on July 12, 2009). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.rugerup.de
  5. Cf. Rugerup >> Nimrod Verlag ( Memento of the original from March 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Contribution to the series German Traces in Sweden at the Goethe-Institut Stockholm (accessed on July 12, 2009). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.goethe.de
  6. See poems as large as photos. Les Murray ends series with international literature ( Memento of the original from September 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Press release of the City of Oldenburg from April 26, 2007 (accessed on July 11, 2009). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.oldenburg.de
  7. According to the information on the homepage of Edition Rugerup's website, accessed on July 11, 2009.