Congratulations to Christian Lehnert, who has been honored with the 2025 Friedrich Hölderlin Prize
We are delighted for theologian and poet Christian Lehnert, who has been selected for the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize this year. We are publishing a selection of Lehnert’s poetry, Wickerwork, translated and introduced by Richard Sieburth on April 29th.
In their comments, the prize jury wrote: “Through his literary production in the fields of poetry, narrative prose, and essayistic reflection, Christian Lehnert renews the great tradition of poetically discussing religion, nature, and the fundamental questions of human existence. Placing faith in the world-creating power of language, his poetry is characterized by a simplicity, concision, and musical beauty that is unusual in contemporary poetry. With great linguistic subtlety, a wealth of forms, and the most precise observation that draws on all the senses, Lehnert focuses his attention on nature in the fullness of its phenomena as well addressing fundamental human and spiritual experiences.”
Advance praise of Wickerwork includes the following:
Timeless, ecstatic, original: Richard Sieburth creates an intricate music for Christian Lehnert’s crystalline poems. Lehnert sees nature—amoebas, bats, lichen, whales—in a mystic glow reflected from Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, and the Zohar. To read these poems is to put a finger on the pulse of life, to feel algae as a membrane, ‘its yesterdays and tomorrows / sheathed in slime,’ and amethyst as ‘sediment in shock.’ An incandescent experience.
— Rosanna Warren
Richard Sieburth stands among the truly masterful English translators of our time. His perfect dictional pitch and musical dexterity, combined with staggering erudition, ring out not only from every line he translates, but in his choice of what to render and his framing of it all with prose that lights the way there and back. Sieburth’s latest translational revelation comes in the form of Christian Lehnert’s Wickerwork, the supple, metaphysicianal weave of which seems to emerge from several lifetimes of looking and reflection: “There the growth of things is never in doubt. // The linden / the lung-tree / is breathing out.”
— Peter Cole, author of Draw Me After: Poems
Emily Dickinson reminds us that ‘microscopes are prudent in an emergency.’ These visionary miniatures understand the essential part for the whole. With sheer compression and economy of expression, Lehnert gives us, through the material world, miraculously, the vast mystery of being on earth. Once again, Richard Sieburth’s work is astonishing and musical. As one says, good things come in small packages. It couldn’t be truer for this book.
— Peter Gizzi