One pleasure of walking the streets of St. Gallen, a town near the foothills of the Swiss Alps, was to climb its steep streets and staircases through winding passages, and then, surprisingly, to come upon a kiosk that advertised the Wortlaut literary festival, where I would be reading alongside the American poet Jan Heller Levi.
My rush of excitement couldn’t be helped, because I knew that book lovers of all kinds were expected to pack a couple of dozen Wortlaut events at the main downtown library and nearby venues.
At our own event, in addition to reading our poems, the other Jan and I would be interviewed — in English, no less — by two philosophy students, Julia Mülli and Lara Hofstetter, from the Kantonsschule am Burggraben, St. Gallen, a top academic high school. As it turned out, the enthusiasm of the crowd was more than evident; it was bracing — this despite the fact that we read and talked in English to German-speaking listeners.
(It’s impossible to believe that an American-speaking audience, even if it consisted of dedicated poetry lovers, would be able to tolerate, let alone appreciate, a pair of poets reading their work in German.)
Of course Jan Heller Levi and I were outliers. The other writers and artists — more than three dozen of them — presented their work in German. Admittedly, the Swiss poet and translator Florian Vetsch took the trouble to introduce the two of us in the native lingo, but still . . .
Since public funding for the arts and humanities in America has always been a struggle and now under the Trump-Musk regime has been totally eliminated in the federal budget, it was equally surprising to me that a small Swiss town with a population a tenth of Manhattan’s could and would support such a feast of culture. What is more, the Wortlaut festival made certain through municipal grants to pay the writers and artists for their participation. Imagine that.
