Peter Filkins

Peter Filkins is an American poet and literary translator. Filkins graduated from Williams College with a Bachelor of Arts and from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts degree. Filkins is best known for his translations of post-war German literature into English. Filkins was the first to translate H. G. Adler's novels into English.^[1][2] Adler, a Jewish Czech intellectual, survived several Nazi concentration camps and wrote both novels and non-fiction about the Holocaust. The Journey and Panorama, the two novels Filkins translated, were written soon after the war – The Journey in 1950–1951 and Panorama in 1948, but publishers disliked Adler's literary take on the Holocaust and they were not published until the 1960s, and then largely ignored during Adler's lifetime.^[3] Writing in The New Yorker, Ruth Franklin described Adler's books as "modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil".^[3] Before Filkins' project, only one of Adler's books, a work of history, had been translated into English, a situation that one scholar of German literature described as “one of the great intellectual scandals of our time.”^[4] Filkins decided to translate Adler's work after discovering The Journey at Schoenhof's Foreign Books, a used book store in Cambridge, Massachusetts.^[5] Filkins' translation of Panorama was listed as one of the best books of 2011 by The New Republic's editorial staff.^[6]

Filkins previously translated the complete poems of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and two of her novel fragments, as well as a novel by Alois Hotschnig. In addition, he has published four collections of his own poetry.

Filkins has taught literature and writing at Bard College at Simon's Rock since 1988.^[7]

Bibliography

Poetry

• Filkins, Peter (1998). What She Knew. Orchises Press. ISBN 978-0-914061-66-3.
• Filkins, Peter (2002). After Homer. George Braziller. ISBN 978-0807615058.
• Filkins, Peter (2010). Augustine's Vision. New American Press. ISBN 978-0-9817802-9-0.
• Filkins, Peter (2012). The View We're Granted. Johns Hopkins. ISBN 978-1421406329.

Literary translations

• Bachmann, Ingeborg (1994). Songs in Flight: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. Marsilio Pub. ISBN 978-1-56886-009-1. Trans. Peter Filkins
• Bachmann, Ingeborg (1999). The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-1204-9. Trans. Peter Filkins
• Hotschnig, Alois (1999). Leonardo's Hands. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-2387-5. Trans. Peter Filkins
• Bachmann, Ingeborg (2005). Darkness Spoken. Zephyr Press. ISBN 978-0-939010-84-4. Trans. Peter Filkins
• Adler, H. G. (2008). The Journey: A Novel. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6673-5. Trans. Peter Filkins
• Adler, H. G. (2011). Panorama: A Novel. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6851-7. Trans. Peter Filkins

References

1. "FACULTY MEMBER PETER FILKINS FIRST TO TRANSLATE AN H.G. ADLER NOVEL TO ENGLISH". Bard College at Simon's Rock. Retrieved 7 February 2012.
2. Lourie, Richard (9 January 2009). "Displaced Minds". The New York Times Book Review. Retrieved 7 February 2012.
3. Franklin, Ruth (31 January 2011). "The Long View". The New Yorker. Retrieved 7 February 2012.
4. Shulevitz, Judith (28 January 2011). "A Vanished World". The New York Times Book Review. Retrieved 7 February 2012.
5. "H.G. Adler's "The Journey": Poet and Writer Peter Filkins Reads from His Translation". Chicago Amplified. WBEZ. 11 February 2009. Retrieved 7 February 2012.
6. "TNR Editors' Picks: Best Books of 2011". The New Republic. 23 December 2011. Retrieved 7 February 2012.
7. "Peter Filkins". Bard College at Simon's Rock. Retrieved 7 February 2012.