Literature Express • 2021-09-15, 7:30 PM
In 2000 more than a hundred poets from 43 European countries spent six weeks travelling across the continent – a working trip and reading tour through the whole of Europe. After all the upheavals and turmoil and the conflicts of the Nineties, it was also a journey of new beginnings. Now, twenty years on, poets who took part in the project as well as a younger generation of writers have been invited to write an essayistic, poetic reworking of the myth of the “Rape of Europa”.
Essays by Ana Luísa Amaral (PRT), Juri Andruchovych (UKR), Anna Davtyan (ARM), Marija Dejanović (HRV), Tatiana Faia (PRT & GBR), László Garaczi (HUN), Anne Haverty (IRL), Felicitas Hoppe (DEU), Konstantina Korryvanti (GRC), Mariët Meester (NLD), Astra Papachristodoulou (GRC & GBR), Alberto Porlan Villaescusa (Castile, ESP), Tomasz Różycki (POL), Aleš Šteger (SVN), Nenad Veličković (SRB), Christina Viragh (HUN & CHE)
Few ancient myths are as adaptable to current feminist, anti-patriarchal, anti-colonialist or capitalist-critical discourses, as ambiguous and mutable as the story of the abduction of Europa by Zeus. The contributions are complemented by seven poets from the younger generation who are also working on retellings of the myth. Has the great utopian promise of Europe already given way to disillusionment and frustration? What hope-giving poetic narrative, what resistant counter-myths can now be set against the end of illusions? Sixteen answers to these questions can be read on poesiefestival.org in mid-September.
Project leader: Felix Schiller, Matthias Kniep
Literaturexpress is kindly supported by the Goethe-Institut Madrid, the Embassy of Portugal, the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung and the Slovenian Cultural Institute.
with Ana Luísa Amaral (Portugal), Juri Andruchowytsch (Ukraine), Anna Davtyan (Armenia), Marija Dejanović (Croatia), Tatiana Faia (United Kingdom), László Garaczi (Hungary), Anne Haverty (Ireland), Felicitas Hoppe (Germany), Konstantina Korryvanti (Greece), Mariët Meester (Netherlands), Astra Papachristodoulou (United Kingdom), Alberto Porlan Villaescusa (Spain), Tomasz Różycki (Poland), Aleš Šteger (Slovenia), Nenad Veličković (Bosnia & Herzegovina), Christina Viragh (Switzerland)