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 among the more than three dozen participating writers. And 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.
