Rose Ausländer, "Mutterland Wort" – "Motherland Word": Exhibition, Workshop, Competition

Fate drove Rose Ausländer, one of the greatest women poets of the 20th century, halfway around the world. For her, writing meant "living! surviving!"

Born in 1901 in Czernowitz/Bukovina (then part of Austria, today in the Ukraine), as a Jew she was hounded by the Nazis, but managed to survive World War II in the Czernowitz ghetto. In 1946 she emigrated to New York and eventually settled in Düsseldorf in 1965, at which time very few people knew she had been writing poetry for 50 years.

An exhibition in commemoration of Rose Ausländer's 110th birthday anniversary ran in July at St James Theatre. The exhibition was a collaboration between the Wellington Goethe Institute, the New Zealand Centre of Literary Translation and Victoria's German Programme.

The exhibition was opened on 13 July by Austrian Consul Peter Diessl. Over 80 guests admired the beautiful photos on display and were moved by Ausländer's short yet powerful poems, the latter accompanied by English translations skilfully produced by students of the German Programme.

Dr Monica Tempian and Dr Richard Millington of the German Programme made the exhibition dynamic and interactive by inviting students, professional translators and acclaimed New Zealand writers to come up with their own English versions of the poems exhibited and enter them in a competition.

Listed in alphabetical order, the winners were:

"On being a poet" by Navina Clemerson

"Astonished" by Lloyd Jones

"No more light" by Sue McRae

"Bukovina I" by Kerry Nitz

The winning entries will be published on billboards around Wellington for two weeks starting 21 August, as well as online on the Goethe Institute website http://www.goethe.de/ins/nz/wel/enindex.htm