Of Conscience and Courage: Remembering the Poet Hilde Domin
Wed. May 1, 2024
12:00 - 1:30 pm ET (US)Hybrid Zoom Webinar and In-Person
Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library, Brandeis University Campus
*Co-presented with the Goethe-Institut Boston.
**Pizza, Berliners and coffee will be provided for lunch for in-person attendees.
About the Event
Join translators Sarah Kafatou and Mark S. Burrows and singer-songwriter Deborah Langstaff for an exploration of the writings and life of the poet Hilde Domin (1909 - 2006).
Hilde Domin fled Nazi Germany when, as a Jew, she was no longer safe there. Returning permanently to Germany in the mid-1950's, she quickly found recognition as a poet of memory and reconciliation. For the rest of her long life she wrote and spoke in a tone poised between vulnerability and trust, on behalf of moral and civic values worth living for.
Domin wrote of "people like us we among them", providing a voice for victims of persecution everywhere. Her exquisitely lyrical poems of conscience, and of courage discovered in desperation, speak very directly to every reader.
In 2023, Mark Burrows and Sarah Kafatou each independently published a selection of Hilde Domin's poems, The Wandering Radiance and With My Shadow. They will present and discuss Domin's witness as a writer, joined by Deborah Langstaff who will perform her original settings of several of the poems.
About the Speakers
Sarah Kafatou holds degrees in English and American History and Literature from Harvard University and an MFA in poetry from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. Her first book, a political and economic history of Latin America, was written in Greek and published by Nefeli Editions in Athens. She has been a Research Associate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard and has taught English literature at Harvard and American poetry at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has translated into English major works by Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Pushkin and Dante, and is the author of a memoir, Pomegranate Years (Paul Dry Books, 2019). She is also the author of an as-yet unpublished novel based on the lives of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and other artists close to them. In addition, she is a painter, with one-person exhibits in Germany and Greece and with a 40-page, illustrated catalogue of her work.
Mark S. Burrows is a scholar, poet, and translator, and is poetry editor for Wildhouse Publishing and for the journal Spiritus. As a historian of medieval European culture, his research interests focus on mystical literature and poetics. His recent translations of German poetry include Rainer Maria Rilke’s Prayers of a Young Poet (the original version of poems later collected as Part I of The Book of Hours, the Iranian-German poet SAID’s 99 Psalms, and, most recently, The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin. He lives and writes in Camden, ME. www.msburrows.com
Deborah Langstaff - Deborah Langstaff is a musician and composer who sets spiritual texts to music. Her intention is to make them broadly accessible, inviting and enriching a deep receiving of inspiring and heart-opening poems and prayers. Her song settings include the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, Hannah Senesh and Mary Austin, as well as psalms and ancient Sanskrit prayers. While living in Europe, Deborah began working on a song cycle of the poems of Hilde Domin which she and her husband, a native German speaker, translated into English. During this process she was invited to meet Hilde, who loved the musical settings and requested that they be recorded. The two artists formed a deep and lasting friendship.
Deborah has recorded two CDs of songs of spiritual texts with varied instrumental accompaniment: Take Wing in Song and Request, Songs of Poems of Hilde Domin. She works as an executive leadership coach from her home in Providence, Rhode Island.