TELEMANN 360°: Poetry Slam “Untranslatables”

Happy Hour & Performance Roundtable

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). In the 18^th century Telemann himself embraced avant-garde poetry, especially 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 a 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 Ratskeller, before the workshop performance and talk upstairs in the beautiful Library.

The entrance is free and open to the public.