Telemann 360°: Poetry Slam "Untranslatables"

Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - 5:00pm

611 Spring Garden St
Philadelphia, PA 19123


This fall Tempesta di Mare is tracing the legacy of Germany’s brilliant and prolific writer, gardener and baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767). Already in the 18th century Telemann himself embraced avant-garde poetry, favorably new poetry by Brockes, Klopstock and Ramler, and supported young poets. The Poetry Slam “Untranslatables” explores his connections of words found in his poetry, high jinks of translation and some new poetry and uncovers the surprising relation between Telemann’s time in the 18th-century and today’s Philadelphia.


Besides writing three separate autobiographies in 1718, 1729, and 1740 himself, Telemann’s real love was poetry, opera- and cantata librettos as well as satiric novels. He never managed to write that big theoretical work, but he wrote eulogy-poems for his beloved first wife and his best friends Johann Georg Pisendel and Johann Sebastian Bach, and some of his poetries were published in the anthology Poetry of Lower Saxony.

The event is presented by Tempesta di Mare in partnership with the German and Composition Departments at the University of Pennsylvania, the Creative Writing Department of the University of the Arts, and The German Society of Pennsylvania.
Join us for Happy Hour in the German Society’s Bierkeller, before the workshop performance and talk upstairs in the beautiful Library.

The entrance is free and open to the public.
RSVP: https://tempestadimare.org/events/telemann-360-poetry-jam/

More information about Teleman 360: https://tempestadimare.org/telemann-360/

A big Thank you to the six Penn undergrads who translated eighteenth-century poems by Telemann, Brockes, Klopstock, and Ramler! Talk about challenging! You can hear them and their poet counterparts from the University of the Arts on Sept 27. Our translators are Freya Zhou, Helena Wang, Claire Dombkowski, Noah Katcher, Samuel Sanders, and Nina Regenstreif. Thanks also to Jehnna Lewis for being part of the coordinating team.