Meridian Chernivtsi

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The Meridian Chernivtsi is an international poetry festival that takes place in Chernivtsi , Ukraine at the beginning of September . It has taken place every year since 2010.

Festival program and locations

The festival program includes poetry readings , discussions, theater performances, concerts, and book presentations. The venues are the rooms of the National Jurij Fedkowytsch University of Chernivtsi , the Central Palace of Culture renamed from the former Jewish National House, the Paul Celan Literature Center, which opened in 2014, and other public rooms and spaces.

History of the festival

The festival was founded in 2010 by the Russian-Ukrainian dissident Igor Pomerantsev and his nephew Svjatoslav, who works for the Radio Svoboda radio station . In the period that followed, it received significant funding from the Goethe Institute in Kiev , Ukrainian institutions and media, as well as European literary fans and cultural sponsors. Over the course of five years, the event extended beyond the venue of Chernivtsi : The event provided the impetus for a poetic tour. In 2013, parallel to the literary newspaper ZeitZug, published by the Prague photo poet Milena Findeis , there was a poet's procession with readings. In 2014, the Meridian Chernivtsi was part of a month-long series of events following the course of the sun, from Charkiw to Kiev, Chernivtsi, Lviv , Ternopil , Warsaw , Krakow , Prague , Munich , Stuttgart , Cologne and Vienna . In 2015 the poetic roadshow was expanded to Paris and Frankfurt am Main. In 2016, the Odessa Meridian took place in August, and the Lutsk Meridian in Lutsk in October 2017 .

Participants in the festival

The festival has been attended by writers from Europe (mainly from German-speaking countries) and Israel since the beginning. It take from the Ukrainian authors among others Oksana Zabuzhko , Yuri Andrukhovych , Serhiy Zhadan , Oleksandr Boychenko , Andrij Bondar , Boris Chersonskij , Yuri Isdryk , Marianna Kijanovska, Dmytro Lasutkin , Vasyl Makhno , Igor Pomeranzew , Taras Prochasko , Ostap Slyvynskij, Maryana Savka part . The younger generation of Ukrainian authors is also heavily involved, among others Kateryna Babkina , Irena Karpa , Andrij Lyubka , Iryna Wikyrtschak . From the German-speaking area u. a. Friedrich Achleitner , Max Czollek , Franz Josef Czernin , Michael Krüger , Andreas Neeser , Katja Petrowskaja , Dragica Rajcić , Ilma Rakusa and Klaus Reichert took part. Traditionally, there are also numerous participants from Romania and Poland every year. France is also present, most recently through Eric Celan, Bertrand Badiou and Philippe Beck . Because of the once high proportion of Jewish intelligentsia in the urban population of Chernivtsi, poets from Israel are also regular festival participants. In particular, the festival is also a stage for the young generation of writers.

translator

The work of the translators is particularly commendable at the festival. Petro Rychlo in particular acts as a mutual mediator of texts between the German and Ukrainian languages ​​in Chernivtsi . Other participating translators were Mark Belorusets, Taras Ivasiutyn and Claudia Dathe. Also Evgenia Lopata , for several years, festival director and Young European of the Year 2015, translated.

Publications

Associated with the festival is the publishing house of the same name, Meridian Czernowitz, which publishes works by participating authors. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the event, four almanacs with a selection of texts were published that were presented during the event and previously also translated into German as part of the translation grant. The Czernowitz-based publisher Knyha XXI is also friendly with the festival. Finally, there are also close links to multilingual literary magazines: Zu ZeitZug in Prague and the “Radar” published in Krakow .

Scholarships

The festival includes a grant for writers and translators who live and work in the residence for a limited period of time.

Namesake

The literature festival was named after Paul Celan, who was born in Chernivtsi . He explored the picture roughly as follows: Life means touching the meridian - and that means the constant movement in which human life takes place. The apex of the course of the sun moves on incessantly, in it it is important to hunt for sun rays and warmth again and again, even if we cannot catch them.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.meridiancz.com/
  2. ↑ Celan had said in his speech on the occasion of the receipt of the Büchner Prize of the German Academy for Language and Poetry in 1960 as follows: "I find something - like language - immaterial, but earthly, terrestrial, something circular, about the two poles in Something that returns to itself and at the same time - happily - even criss-crossing the tropics: I find ... a meridian. With you and Georg Büchner and the state of Hesse, I just thought I touched it again. " The full text of the speech can be found on the academy's website. Perhaps Celan also thought of the old Pulkovo meridian of the Russian Empire, which runs not too far east of Chernivtsi and which applied here before the prime meridian of Greenwich. Czernowitz as an alternative and orientating new meridian in contrast to the Pulkowo meridian was in any case the initiators of the meridian Czernowitz in mind.

Literature and web links