HAUS FÜR POESIE

Two Argentine poets, each of whom is seeing the publication of their first German-selected volume these days, will be visiting Haus für Poesie together with their translator Silke Kleemann:

Teresa Arijón and Bárbara Belloc are not only important voices in contemporary Argentine poetry but also translators and editors, connected through a long-standing poetic friendship. Among other projects, they jointly published the collection Orang-utans (La Rara Argentina, 2000) after a stay at an animal rehabilitation center.

Animals play a central role in Teresa Arijón’s (born 1960 in Buenos Aires) work beyond this collaboration. The poems in the German selection Gedichte und freilaufende Tiere (hochroth Heidelberg, 2025), covering the years 1988 to 2023, are populated by rabbits, pigeons, and wolves, which serve as “points of contact” between the poet and the world, as Silke Kleemann notes in her afterword. One poem reads: „Die Welt / ist ein Sturm im Auge der Biene, / in den Flügeln des Schmetterlings“. Arijón’s poems follow a “daring impulse” to touch the ambiguous reality in poetic speech, encircling it within a verse or metaphor. Or, as one poem puts it poetologically: „du wähltest die poesie wie einer das fischen wählt im reißenden fluss“.

Selected poems by Bárbara Belloc (born 1968 in Buenos Aires) are presented in German translation under the title So macht die Sonne die Nacht (parasitenpresse, 2025), compiled from her volumes El sonido (Cántico 2023, “The Sound”), Canódromo (Zindo & Gafuri 2015, “Dog Track”), and unpublished poems. In her work, Belloc constructs a mythically charged world that is simultaneously apocalyptic and forward-looking, „eine Art prophetischer Diskurs der sehenden Dichterin nach der Katastrophe“ (María Moreno). She vividly describes, for example, the “anthropocentric dog cosmos” of a dog walker, a tourmaline-colored bird prophet, or a galactic court scene “to judge our performance as a species,” in which Ijon Tichy stages poetry in defense of humanity.

The event will be interpreted Spanish–German. With kind support from ECHOO Conference Interpreting. The participation of Teresa Arijón and Bárbara Belloc is made possible through the Artist-in-Residence program Villa Waldberta / Ebenböckhaus of the City of Munich.

Reading & Conversation Teresa Arijón, Bárbara Belloc
Moderator Silke Kleemann