MILAN RICHTER

M I L A N R I C H T E R (born 1948 in Bratislava)

Slovak poet, dramatist, translator, publisher

Richter studied German, English and Nordic literatures and linguistics at the Comenius University in 1967 – 1972 and received his Dr. phil. in 1985. He was a Goethe Scholar in Weimar in 1984 and 2011 and a Fulbright Research Scholar at UCLA (Los Angeles, USA) in 1990.

He was an editor, free-lance writer, high-ranked diplomat (head of the Slovak Embassy in Norway 1993 1995), head of SLOLIA (Slovak Literature Abroad), and since 2001 he’s been a publisher (MilaniuM Press). He served as president of the Slovak Literary Translators Society in 1999 – 2003 and vice-president of the Slovak PEN Centre in 2000 – 2002. He was 1st vice-president of WAAC

(World Academy of Arts and Cul tu re) in 2001 – 2010 and a member of the European Academy of Poetry in Lu xe m bourg until its termination in 2011. Currently Richter is a member of the Grazer Auto ren versammlung and the Bjornson Academy in Norway.

Richter published 9 books of poetry in Slovak (Secure Place, 1987; Roots in the

Air, 1992; From Behind the Velvet Curtains, 1997; An Angel with Black Feathers, 2000; Secrets Wide Open, 2008, and others), one book of poems in 6 languages (Five Seasons of Life, 1998) and 10 volumes of selected verses in translation into German, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Czech, Arabic, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Macedonian.

He also wrote two theatre plays: Kafka’s Hell-Paradise (2006), Kafka’s Second

Life (2007) which were translated into 7 languages and published in Spanish, Serbian and Bulgarian magazines.

Richter translated 75 books and theatre plays, including Goethe’s Urfaust and parts of Faust I and II, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Kafka’s aphorisms and short prose, The Prophet of K. Gibran, complete poems of T. Tran strömer, selected verses of E. Dickinson, E. Hemingway, P. Neruda, E. Cardenal, H. Martinson, Lundkvist, E. Södergran, K. Espmark, Ö. Sjöstrand, K. Odegard, P. Tafdrup, Jandl, G. Kofler, novels of J. Cheever, R. Hochhuth, P. Härtling, A. Lundkvist, Gustafsson, books of J. Gaarder, D. Hammarskjöld and P. Wästberg, fairytales of H. C. An der sen and O. Wilde, and theatre plays of L. de Vega, P. O. Enquist, Ö. von Horvath, E. Canetti and N. Werdelin.

He edited the first anthology of Slovak literature on the Holocaust (God’s Alley, 1998).

Richter was director of the Jan Smrek Literary Festival in 2000 – 2011. He organized the Festival Kafka’s Matliary in 2007– 2009. Richter received Swedish Academy’s Translation Prize (1999), Golden Order of Merits for the Republic of Austria (2002), Royal Norwegian Order of Merit (2008), Bjornson Prize (2010), three translation prizes in Slovakia and several translation awards in Sweden, Austria and Slovakia.

Milan Richter’s Five Seasons of Life presents one of the few poets in Slovakia capable of writing on public themes without nervously looking over his shoulder at the recent past. His work is best in a conversational, unbuttoned mode, which moves from public incident seemingly casually recorded into perception, which is often startling and moving.

James Sutherland-Smith (British poet and translator)

Sensuality, absurdity, irony, and an insistence on values of a personality

in social relationships: all this in Richter merges with the conscious ness

of his Jewish experiential background. At the same time, as a European

intellectual of the 1990’s, Richter demonstrates his resistance to men in

power irrespective of their disguise.

Knut Odegard (Norwegian poet and translator)

Richter’s sixth collection From Behind the Velvet Curtains confirms that

fi n ding new, non-Slovak environments, so characteristic of his work,

is not only a source of enchantment, but also an opportunity for a poetic

report on the state of the contemporary world. This world, in poet’s

understanding, is not a safe world, but, to the contrary, it is an arena

where the man is endangered. (…) Remar k able here is the grasping of the

motif of the passing of one’s own individual time.

Jan Zambor (Slovak poet, literary scholar, and translator)

Milan Richter (…) one of the beaten poets in Slovakia.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti in City Lights Review, Nr. 4/1990