Unexpected Development
AUTHOR
Klaus Merz
TRANSLATOR
Marc Vincenz
Merz is keenly attentive to daily life as a revelator of essential truths, and thus uses poetry as a way of returning closer to it; and “to unbecome what was.” Merz' “nearing” and “distancing” processes take place inside us, through language. By summing up so gently and exactly (but also sometimes drolly or pointedly) the movement of duality, Merz enables us to sense more fully, time and again, what it means to be alive: that “strange exhilaration within,” as he puts it in another of these splendid poems so vividly and resourcefully translated by Marc Vincenz.
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Marc Vincenz is a multi-lingual poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician, and artist. He has published over fifty books of poetry, fiction, and translation. His recent poetry collections include The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, Spells for the Wicked, All the Tricks of Language, and IRØNCLAD. Vincenz’s translation of prize-winning Swiss poet and novelist Klaus Merz’s An Audible Blue received the 2023 Massachusetts Book Prize for Translated Literature.
Publishing editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing, Vincenz lives in Western Massachusetts.
Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, the Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 35 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinianand his recent collections of verse are Out of the Dust, Unexpected Development, Helios Hauls and firm.