‘Sirena’ Features Works by Poets, Including Nobel Laureate

October 20, 2009

The current issue of “Sirena: Poetry, Art and Criticism,” an international and multilingual literary journal founded in 2004 by a Dickinson College professor, features works by world-renown poets including Herta Müller, recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature.
Müller, a German author whose Nobel Prize announcement read simply, “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,” is one of 12 poets featured in the fall 2009 issue of “Sirena,” founded and edited by Jorge R. G. Sagastume, professor of Latin American literature at Dickinson.

Müller is a prolific novelist and essayist whose works portray the human destruction of the Romanian dictatorship and the ruthlessness of the political exile. An internationally acclaimed author for nearly two decades, Müller’s works have been translated into more than 20 languages. In addition to the Nobel Prize in literature, announced Oct. 8, she has received the 1994 Kleist Prize, the 1995 Aristeion Prize, the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2009 Franz Werfel Human Rights Award.

Müller, only the 12th woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature since 1901, came to Dickinson as a writer-in-residence in spring 1996 and was awarded an honorary fellowship the following year. Other poets featured in the fall issue of Sirena are Ilse Aichinger, Michael Augustin, Ingeborg Bachmann, Artur Becker, Hans Bender, Bas (Bastian) Böttcher, Sarah Kirsch, Michael Krüger, Günter Kunert, Jan Wagner and Richard Wagner, who is Müller’s husband.

Published every October and March and distributed by The Johns Hopkins University Press, “Sirena” has published poetry in more than 20 languages. Each poem appears in its original language with facing translations in English and Spanish. The journal has published poets such as Günter Grass, also a Nobel laureate, Robert Creeley, Adrian Mitchell, Pearse Hutchinson, Clara Janés and Homero Aridjis. The journal publishes critical essays on poetry, art and translation studies as well as book reviews.

“ ‘Sirena’s’ goal has always been to reach its readers, and we hope that they will find in the writings published here secrets that will cause them to reflect upon the different and very particular moments that reality might present to them,” Sagastume said. “We also hope that our readers will share these discoveries with others who are open to everything poetry might bring to them, who read poems for the diverse ideas and emotions imparted.”