"…what starts growing in the middle"

When Oskar Pastior posthumously received the Georg Büchner Prize in 2006, a larger audience finally took notice of the most passionately innovative, playful and witty German-speaking poet. The latest volume of his collected works contains the works that demonstrate Pastior's inimitable use of traditional forms: his Sonettburger, Anagrammgedichte but also the 33 Gedichte von Petrarca that Pastior translated in his highly personal manner. For him, translation always meant the creative adoption of the old for new, idiosyncratic purposes.