Heroines from Abroad

Shortlisted for The 2019 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Translation Heroines from Abroad introduces a vibrant new voice to the English language. Christine Marendon's enigmatic, meditative poems, translated here from the German and collected for the first time, draw on dreams, fairy tales and childhood memories to tap into a world beyond conscious reach. Marendon's poems do not present ideas so much as embody states of mind. Something is realised through the poem, rather than said within it. Here, the voice is more important than the particularities of what is said - language, not words. For the translator, Heroines from Abroad is the fruit of seven years' steady work. The poems' clarity and subtle force, the 'crystalline, precise quality of their lyricism' (Sasha Dugdale), are testament to that humble, unhurried collaboration in words.

Christine Marendon (1964-) grew up bilingual (German and Italian), studied Italian in Erlangen and Siena, and graduated in 1999 with a thesis on Italian women writers in the nineteenth century. After working as a translator and publicist for some years in her native Bavaria, she now lives in Hamburg where she works with children with special needs.