Gregory Maertz is a professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. Educated at Northwestern, Harvard, and the University of Heidelberg, he developed expertise in British and German nineteenth-century poetry, philosophy, and prose fiction as well as German visual art from the 1920s through the 1950s. An immersion in the German language and culture has been central to Maertz’s academic career, resulting in the publication of several books and many articles. Maertz has also lent a hand in organizing major international art exhibitions around the controversial theme of cultural production in Nazi Germany. The decision to begin translating classic German poems—by Goethe, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and others—was inspired by a desire to return to the literary enthusiasms of his youth. The inclusion here of fictional or pseudotranslations from imagined German, Ancient Greek, and Hawaiian sources represents an experiment in literary and historical speculation. Maertz’s new collection was written at his home in Griggstown, New Jersey following visits to Honolulu, the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the village of Obereggen in the South Tyrol, and Munich. Others were inspired by his travels throughout Europe and a long residency in Heidelberg during his student days. Formally in dialogue with traditional poetic genres like the sonnet and the ballad, Maertz’s new poems adapt these forms to commemorate deeply personal experiences and feelings. Maertz’s first book of poems, The Charisma of Animals (2023), may be purchased from Finishinglinepress.com and his other books are available on his Amazon author’s page.
PRAISE:
Following The Charisma of Animals, his versatile and accomplished debut collection, Life is Memory/Memory is Life: New Poems and Translations takes Gregory Maertz’s poetry in new, equally evocative directions. Its richly allusive verse traverses a lifetime’s span of places and experiences. Along the way, Maertz’s new poems communicate moving, Proustian ruminations on temps perdu. Interspersed with historical vignettes, Maertz’s new collection is additionally enhanced by expert translations of poems by German writers ranging from Hölderlin to Goethe, from Heine to Rilke. Maertz’s renderings of more than half a dozen made-up poems attributed to the fictitious “Eva Scharfenberg” as well as from Ancient Greek, German, and Hawaiian “sources” constitute, moreover, a striking act of imaginative translation.
–Frederick Wegener, Professor of English, California State University Long Beach
Gregory Maertz’s second book of poems is a lyrical journey into the poet’s past, which is simultaneously, in the mind of this erudite writer, the past of Western Civilization. The poems themselves explore the possibilities of what Maertz calls “active nostalgia,” a phrase that gestures toward both the glories of remembered experience and the lacerating effects of grief.
–Harry Wonham, Professor of English, University of Oregon
Life is Memory/Memory is Life journeys across the world and back again with stunning language and vivid imagery—noticing the wonder of what surrounds us, and what greets us in our memory. Gregory uses his deft and elegant writing to peel back the beauty all around us, from a feral cat to apple trees, to the glow of the moon, from grand vistas to the presence of a memory. This collection is at once deeply intimate and universally moving.
–Lauren Suchenski, Author of All You Can Measure and Full of Ears and Eyes Am I (both Finishing Line Press)
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