Henry Holland: translator and writer, specializing in political science and poetry

Ongoing and Recent Projects 
 

My ongoing focus is on creating high-end, lucid and scholarly accurate translations in the fields of Cultural Studies, cultural events, and the Humanities more broadly. My clear specialism is on translating from German into English. However, I also work with other language combinations, primarily through working with co-translators: see below, for example, for my work with Jonis Hartmann, translating English-language poetry into German.

Since 2014, I have been contracted by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung to translate key sections of Rosa Luxemburg’s German writings, as part of the first Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, published by Verso Books. This project collates many as yet unpublished texts by Luxemburg in Polish and in German, with a team of translators specializing on various aspects of the work, under the guidance of our general editor, Prof. Peter Hudis. “Volume 3: On Revolution”, for which I translated large sections, will be published in October 2018. Alongside my paid translation work for the edition, I also work in a voluntary capacity as an editorial board member for the Complete Works.

In September 2018, I was commissioned alongside my co-translator Hazem Sheko to translate a festival program for Berlin’s Arabic Music Days, from Arabic into English. This is one of a series of translations that have been concerned with performance and cultural studies questions. In 2017, commissioned by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation South-East Asia, I translated the volume “ABC der Alternativen 2.0: Von Alltagskultur bis Zivilgesellschaft”, edited by Ulrich Brand, Bettina Lösch, Benjamin Opratko and Stefan Thimmel, and published by VSA-Verlag. This 350 page work looks in detail at the aesthetics of performance and civic action.

For 2019, I will be contracted to translate a 300 page German-language work on fictional anthologies in Bulgarian literature, written by Dr. phil. Henrike Schmidt.

My German writing partner, Jonis Hartmann, and I have been commissioned for the first ever book-length translation of the poetry of the Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963). Elif Verlag will publish our German translation, which is receiving funding from Literature Ireland, in March 2019. 

Translations: A Selection

·       November 2018: with my co-translator, Jonis Hartmann: first German print publication of the poetry of the American, 20^th century poet Richard Moore. Published in “Mütze”, a literary magazine edited by Urs Engeler.

·         September 2018: translation, in cooperation with Hazem Sheko, of program for Arabic Music Days, Berlin.

·         June 2017, with my co-translator, Jonis Hartmann: translation for German public radio, SWR, of the poetry of the American, 20^th century poet Richard Moore.

·         2014 until today: work on English-language translations for the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

·         Winter 2015, published in No Man’s Land: Translation of an extended autobiographical essay on the writer’s own experienced of being sexually abused, by Bodo Kirchoff, winner of the 2016 German Book Prize.  

·         Autumn 2015: publication of a selection of our translations of Louis MacNeice’s poetry, including the canonical poem Snow, published in Akzente, a preeminent German literary magazine. The autum 2015 edition was co-edited by Herta Müller.

       *   2011-2015: Poetry and prose translations of works by Peter Rühmkorf, Michael Buselmeier    and Tom Schulz, for No Man’s Land magazine.