Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke: Die Ostsee. A process

Dear colleagues and friends, ladies and gentlemen, 

The Baltic Sea has been late in finding its place in European consciousness. Today we are approaching the Baltic Sea in a peaceful time, with largely open borders. The voices we have just heard come from another project, At the water’s edge, which collects and shares memories from the Baltic Sea region during the Cold War. The Cold War period saw a number of projects designed to promote knowledge of the Baltic Sea region’s different literatures.Trajekt, a series of books and annuals which existed from 1980-1986, was designed to contribute to Finnish, Finland Swedish, Lappish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian literature and cultivated a very specific North-Eastern European network ...

PLEASE READ THE FULL SPEECH HERE:

https://www.balticsealibrary.info/images/downloads/2018-Welcome-speech-die_Ostsee-A-process.pdf

Reading the Baltic / Die Ostsee lesen
13. - 16. September 2018
International Literature Conference and Reading Festival for the Baltic Region

On the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the Hanseatic city of Rostock and in a time of new tensions, the Baltic sea region is being reintroduced as a common cultural space: in readings, an international conference, an anthology and a multilingual online library, the open access Virtual Baltic Sea Library, will produce, present and discuss an intercultural Baltic literary canon.

Reading the Baltic - grant-aided by Kulturstiftung des Bundes -  provides a novel perspective on a sea shared by many neighbours  and on a common but longtime peripheral cultural area :  pieces of literature from many  places around the Baltic Sea will join up in a kaleidoscope of notions and experiences  that will bring differences to the fore , but yet might produce new unity as well.

ruokyte jonsson lianaFormer Lithuanian culture attachée to Sweden, co-translator of Sigitas Geda to Swedish, has just been nominated as the new culture minister of Lithuania: Liana Ruokyte Jonssson. Our congratulations and we wish her good luck for the new task!

We can now present two new essays,

by American author Gina Ochsner: Meeting Latvia (Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York)

and by the late Swedish author Birgitta Trotzig: Från en ort till en annan (Courtesy of Maria Trotzig)

and the following texts:

Chronicon Lyvoniae in Finnish

Egils saga in Lithuanian

Sigitas Geda's poems in Latvian, translated by Knuts Skujenieks

erlangen poetenfestVom 25. bis 28. August 2016 findet zum 36. Mal das Erlanger Poetenfest statt. Über 80 Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller, Publizistinnen und Publizisten, Literaturkritikerinnen und -kritiker kommen zu Lesungen, Gesprächen und Diskussionen nach Erlangen. Mit einer Fülle von Veranstaltungen rund um die aktuelle Literatur gilt das Erlanger Poetenfest als Auftakt zum deutschen Bücherherbst. Mehr als 10.000 Besucherinnen und Besucher werden zu den annähernd siebzig Veranstaltungen erwartet.

klaus juergen liedtkeFrom: http://newswave.eu

Not too far from my own home in Berlin lives Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke, writer, translator and head of the literature project “Baltic Sea Library”*. We meet on a grey, rainy afternoon in his appartment, have coffee at the kitchen window and talk about Liedtke’s relation to the Baltic Sea and the ambition that drives his engagement for literature from the region.

Tobias Koch: Dear Mr. Liedtke – before we start I would like to kindly ask you to present yourself in a few own words to our readers.