Lannan Readings & Conversations

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

with Charles Simic
Wednesday December 11 2002
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, considered Germany's most important living poet, is also a highly regarded essayist, journalist, dramatist, editor, publisher, and translator. Born in 1929 in Bavaria, he was educated in German universities and also the Sorbonne in Paris. His many awards include the Nuremberg Cultural Prize and the Pasolini Prize. The most recent volume of his poems to be translated (by Michael Hamburger) into English is Kiosk, published in 1997.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger Bio and Cross Links


Charles Simic has published over sixty books of poetry as well as many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and moved with his family to the United States in 1953. His poetry first appeared in The Chicago Review . The poet Seamus Heaney describes Simic's work as, "Surrealist, and therefore comic, but with a specific gravity in his imagining that manages to avoid the surrealist penalty of weightlessness."

Charles Simic Bio and Cross Links