Autumn Fire
Translated by Timothy Adès
Karen Leeder. "Introduction". Timothy Adès. "Translator's Note"
1 November 2024. 82 pp. ISBN 978-3-901993-84-8 (= Poetry Salzburg Translation Series 1)
£11.00 (+ 3.00 p&p), €11.00 (+ 3.00 p&p), US$ 13.00 (+ 5.00 p&p)
"Ricarda Huch was a distinguished German intellectual and an important writer, and yet her poetry is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. Timothy Adès's translation of this last collection of her poems, with its wonderfully informative introduction by Karen Leeder, gives readers a clear view of a poet whose work skilfully combines traditional imagery and form with detailed observation and often idiosyncratic image. Adès's extraordinary ability to translate into rhyming poetry that sounds as natural as it does in the original – indeed, sometimes more so – is much in evidence here. This is not only a book that will give readers a valuable insight into the work of an important poet, but it is also an enormously pleasurable read."
Jean Boase-Beier
"Despite her renown as a novelist and historian, Ricarda Huch's remarkable poetic voice remains all but unknown outside her native Germany. Timothy Adès's work, in bringing Autumn Fire to an English readership, deserves great praise. Huch's idiom and her choices of form present a twenty-first-century translator with challenges to which Adès rises with great skill over and over again. As a result, these poems from the 1930s and 1940s sing into English, though the pain and suffering of two world wars – 'The bloodstained tracks of earth' – are never far beneath Huch's lyrical surface."
Martyn Crucefix
"A less courageous translator might have given us only Ricarda Huch's non-rhyming poems, selecting them from different volumes and different periods of her life and thereby, however inadvertently, disguising the poet's full reach and intensity. And because her work is so little known in the Anglophone world, few would have noticed what they were missing. Instead, Timothy Adès – whose wide-ranging translatory oeuvre has often sought out and celebrated rhyme as the plausible heartspring of poetic utterance – has not only discovered Huch's final work in its entirety for English-language readers, but invites us to hear her song."
Iain Galbraith