It was Wolfgang Hilbig’s story collection The Sleep of the Righteous, published in 2015 by Two Lines Press, that brought the late German author and his translator, Isabel Fargo Cole, to my attention. It might seem as if they arrived hand-in-hand, after all her translation of his novel I (Ich) appeared from Seagull Books around the same time, but of course, she has translated works by a variety of German language authors before and since those two titles emerged. But it would be fair to say that her efforts to champion Hilbig, her deep appreciation of his work, and her ability to be able to bring his convoluted sentences and filmic imagery to life in English continue to win him more admirers with each subsequent release. Most recently, she was awarded the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize for her translation of Old Rendering Plant.
I have had the pleasure of interviewing this gifted translator twice now, and both times, when her generous responses to my questions arrived in my email, I read them with excitement and renewed appreciation. The latest interview was published at Splice this past week. You can read it here. In this piece, we talk about the most recent Hilbig release, The Tidings of the Trees, and the ways in which this work differs from last fall’s Old Rendering Plant. My questions were derived from my own reading of the book and were not sent until my review had been submitted for publication.
In the years since our first contact, I have read and reviewed Isabel’s translations of Klaus Hoffer and Franz Fühmann, and have added the works of several other authors she has translated to my library as well. But Hilbig remains central. So I am thrilled and honoured to be speaking with her in person in San Francisco on Tuesday night, July 24, as the Center for the Art of Translation celebrates her work, her recent award, and the release The Tidings of the Trees.
Details about that event can be found here. If you are in the Bay Area, please come out and join us!
roughghosts 
I read The Tidings of the Trees yesterday, my first experience of Wolfgang Hilbig.
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Haven’t read any. Your post makes me want to read some. SFO event post would be nice to read.
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In the next day or two I’ll try to pull something together. 😉
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I would imagine that a second conversation would be even more rewarding than the first under these circumstances. Glad you are finding such inspiration in words these days!
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Now that I’ve had a chance to interview Isabel twice by email and once in person (plus to chat for hours afterward, I fell very lucky to have gotten to know a translator I admire so much. Translators have become an important part of my literary circle—they add so much to the appreciation of language and literature.
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Ah, this was the interview that you were telling me about!
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One of the email interviews I think, conducted before the in-person one in San Francisco.
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