Project: Transit of Venus
Transit of Venus – Poetry Exchange
Transit of Venus – Poetry Exchange
A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, becoming visible against the solar disk.
During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black disk moving across the face of the Sun.
The Transit of Venus has fascinated the contemporaries since its discovery in 1639 and plays an important role in the history of New Zealand and in the cult of the Maori people.
The Transit of Venus on the 6th June 2012 was the inspiration for an international, multilayered poetry project. New Zealand's appearance as the Guest of Honour 2012 at the Frankfurt Book Fair was a good opportunity to realise it.
In June 2012 the German poets Uwe Kolbe, Brigitte Oleschinski and Ulrike Almut Sandig visited New Zealand to experience the Transit of Venus together with the New Zealand poets Hinemoana Baker, Glenn Colquhoun and Chris Price, and to try to condense it into poetry.
In October 2012 the New Zealand poets travelled to Germany to meet the German colleagues in a translation workshop “VERSchmuggel / reVERSible" at the Berliner Literaturwerkstatt and to translate each others ‘Transit of Venus’ poems. After a presentation in Berlin and Hamburg the project, the poets and the translations were finally presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Here lyrikline.org presents three ‘Transit of Venus’ poems of each participant as well as the translation into the other language.
This Project was organised by the Goethe-Institut New Zealand, the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington, the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, New Zealand’s Ministry of Culture and New Zealand’s Publishers Association, and was supported by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Another Transit of Venus will be not seen again until 2117.