Stefan Hyner, “This Other World Not Civilized”: Full reading
Hyner reads “All night that wind rattled the windows" | Hyner reads Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching, Chapter 80 | Hyner reads Li Tai Po’s “Inquiry Amidst Mountains"
Using some of his translations from Chinese poetry and his own poems, Stefan Hyner will talk about the 'history' and implications of what it entails “to hop a few feet, to one side, and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all” (Lew Welch). “If one doesn't join in, one stands on the outside and standing on the outside you get a good look on the inside and the sentiments attained from this look then expressed in words becomes poetry. I always believed poetry has to stand up for the victims of civilization.”
Brought up in Schwetzingen, in the Rhine Valley, Stefan Hyner experienced the 'anthropological change' (Nanni Balestrini) some people went thru growing up in the ’70s in the West when the utopia became reality in some 'institutions' for a short time. After an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker he studied Chinese and East Asian Art History at Heidelberg University. 1978 and 1979 he took part in the ONE WORLD POETRY FESTIVALs in Amsterdam where he made the acquaintance of many US-American poets he eventually translated into German. From 1981 to 1990 he traveled extensively in Asia and the Americas. Since then he's been living close to his family home in the small hamlet of Rohrhof on the banks of the river Rhine. His work has been translated into English, Italian, French, Swedish, and Chinese.
Stefan Hyner's books include 10 000 Journeys: Selected Poems, Here Before Again, In Stead of a Bullet, Both Gone, "This Other World Not Civilized": Lao Tzu, T’ao Yüan Ming, Li T’ai Po (essay and translations). He edited Home Among the Swinging Stars: Collected Poems of Jaime de Angulo, and Franco Beltrametti's From Almost Everywhere: Selected Poems 1965–1995, and has translated a number of US-American poets into German.
A recent interview was published at Galatea Resurrects