(Deutsche Fassung hier). Christophe Fricker was born in Wiesbaden in 1978. He studied Political Science, German and Musicology at Freiburg, NUS (Singapore), and Dalhousie (Halifax, NS) and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the German poet Stefan George at St John’s College, Oxford. He was awarded a prize by Junges Literaturforum Hessen Thüringen (1995), was a Killam Scholar and a Lamb & Flag Scholar, President of the Oxford University German Society, editor of Zeichen & Wunder (1996-2001), Castrum Peregrini (2000-2006) and The German Quarterly (2006-9) and  Translator-in-residence of Junge Oper Rhein-Main (2004-2005). He has served as a peer reviewer for some of North America’s leading modern language journals, including PMLA, German Quarterly, and Seminar. He currently serves as Acting Director of the German Language Program at Duke University.

Fricker’s first collection of poetry, Das schöne Auge des Betrachters, was published by J. Frank in 2008. It was awarded the 2009 Hermann Hesse Förderpreis. The jury’s statement is posted on this website; more information is available on the news pages associated with the book, here on aufenthalte.info. Larkin Terminal — Von fremden Ländern und Menschen, a collection of portraits of places and people, is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2009 by Leipzig-based Plöttner Verlag. In 2007, Fricker was awarded a Merkur Essay award for an essay on Singapore.

Christophe Fricker’s collaboration with visual artist, Timothy J. Senior, has resulted in a number of projects, notably their illustrated book of poems and drawings, Das schöne Auge des Betrachters. Timothy J. Senior is a Research Scholar with the Information Science and Information Studies Program at Duke University. His research tries to establish ways in which the long-term consolidation of spacial memory can be visualized in the arts. Senior offers courses on the intersection between sciences and the arts and on the neurological basis of the concept of collective or cultural memory.

Another long-standing collaboration is the one between Christophe Fricker and Judith Wollstädter. Judith Wollstädter is a singer and an opera director. A trained lawyer, she works in cultural management. She has directed two productions by Junge Oper Rhein-Main: Gilbert & Sullivan’s Schwurgericht (Trial by Jury) and Domenico Cimarosa’s Operndirektor in Nöten (L’impresario in angustie). Both were performed in Christophe Fricker’s German translation. The former is of course a classic of English musical entertainment and a favourite with schools and independent companies. The German opera scene, still largely holding on to rigid categories of “serious” and “fun”, never really paid attention to Gilbert and Sullivan, so maybe this will be a new beginning. Cimarosa’s Farsa musicale is another work of musical umpf and hilarity; it brings to the stage the difficulties of — staging an opera.

An intense and productive relationship has developed over the years between Christophe Fricker and Bruno Pieger and Jane V. Curran. Bruno Pieger and Fricker edited a special issue of Castrum Peregrini dedicated to the works of Friedrich Hölderlin, their productive reception in literature and music and their translation into other languages. Jane V. Curran, Professor of German at Dalhousie University, and Christophe Fricker, inspired by a graduate course conducted by Dr. Fritz Heuer, produced a new translation of Friedrich Schiller’s seminal essay On Grace and Dignity. The published volume also includes six articles about various aspects of this aesthetic treatise.

• Photos by Marie Isabel Schlinzig (2), Rudolf Wollstädter, Nick Blobel, and from private collections.