Taking its name from an old map used in the early ages for navigating by ship, Portolan, by Daniela Danz, redirects our gaze from land to the seas, following the routes of container shipping that, in our globalized world, connect us all through tourism, warfare, commerce, and ecological disaster. Between these lines of distribution and destruction, a space for immersion and contemplation emerges. With this book, Monika Cassel gives us the first English translation of one of Germany's most inventive and celebrated poets.
Daniela Danz was born in Eisenach in 1976. In 2024 she held the professorship of poetics at the University of Bamberg and curated the international Poetica festival in Cologne. She is vice president of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature and the Bavarian and Saxon Academies of the Arts. She has worked as an art cataloger and museum director; currently she directs a nationwide youth competition to foster democracy. She is the author of five books of poetry, two novels, and an essay collection, all in German. She lives with her family in Kranichfeld, a small town in rural Thuringia, Germany. Monika Cassel is a poet and translator who has received the 2024 John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation from the Poetry Foundation and been featured in Deep Vellum's Best Literary Translations 2025 anthology. She has been awarded a Travel Fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association as well as a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, and she attended JUNIVERS, an international meeting for translators of German poetry at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. A former educator whose work teaching creative writing to high school students was supported by the Lannan Foundation, she lives in Portland, Oregon, and is an assistant poetry editor for Four Way Review.
"In Portolan, Daniela Danz's English language debut, the rich lyric language draws a new map, one in which shipping containers replace ships, illuminating how our lines of connection--political, historical, and personal--are pressurized by our endlessly commodified world. Whether through dense unpunctuated paragraphs or more clipped lyric songs, all readily available to the English reader through Monika Cassel's impeccable translation, the immensity of Danz's intellect is utterly clear, a delight to read. 'Oh my beautifully filled blooming fading head, ' writes Danz, and yes, yes, I agree."--Sally Keith, author of Two of Everything and River House and a Guggenheim Fellow "Portolan leaves land maps behind and takes us far out to sea. There we find trade routes busy with the mechanisms of capital and the conflict, pollution, and instrumentalization that come with them. But the poems offer us immersion in both the literal and metaphorical sense: a journey through what is below the surface. Poetry from Homer to Hoelderlin, history, art, myth, a kind of religious mysticism, the little lives and losses of the everyday. Part ecological outcry, part ecstatic submersion, this is a dense poetry that works with repetition and sound. Sometimes dancing, sometimes creating new forms, or congealing into immersive blocks, it is always in search of connection. Monika Cassel has taken us into the heart of this struggle, with translations that follow Danz's feints and forms to the letter but manage also to sing. A singular voice in German now available to an English readership."--Karen Leeder, Oxford University, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Schlegel-Tieck Prize "As a poet, Daniela Danz is an explorer. Her poems illuminate unknown territories; they are excursions into geographically uncharted distances, into regions of striking earnestness, poems of great analytical power."--Durs Gruenbein, winner of the Georg Buechner Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize "Daniela Danz has long been counted among the most important poets in Germany."--SWR Kultur Radio "Danz's sovereignly written and sophisticated book of poems goes in search of voices that are often unheard--flora as well as fauna, and, especially, the voice of our conscience, which we still perceive all too faintly."--Bjoern Hayer, Frankfurter Rundschau "In traversing the poles of concretion and abstraction, of scattering and gathering, of sinking as disposal and sinking as exaltation, of reason and faith, Portolan arrives at deeply moving images. . . . Danz always considers the structural demands of her poems, crafting verses that are both highly erudite and sensual, deeply sad like the sea, and suffused with a delicate melancholy in their lightest, brightest moments. . . . In these poems we find what Paul Celan attested about poetry in his Buechner Prize speech: 'an infinite expression of mortality and to no purpose.' Danz's poems practice this with attention and care; they prompt us to take a deep breath without obscuring the pain that being human, with all of its overbearingly limited nature, tends to hide under the surface."--Beate Troeger, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung "Not about romanticized shipwrecks or simply about the cunning and crude business of global commerce, Portolan by Daniela Danz charts the seafaring provenance of the things that build our lives while navigating the fossilized terrain of interiority as it becomes soft and wet again in the wake of faithful feelings. The sure and exacting hand of the translator, Monika Cassel, brings this ship of ancient longing closer to 'the lions of the unknown.'"--Dong Li, author of The Orange Tree and translator in residence at Princeton University
