So gehn wir denn hinab

It is one thing to know about the inhumane history of enslavement in the United States. It is quite another to read Jesmyn Ward’s novel and feel what life on a plantation might have been like. It is the story of Annis, a girl born on a rice plantation in South Carolina. Annis is separated from her mother, sent on a death march to the South and sold at a market in New Orleans. Again and again, she is visited by the ghostly woman Aza—perhaps the soul of her mother, perhaps a symbol of the experience of Black women in enslavement. While reading, one often asks oneself: Can this really be called life? And in the end, one thinks: It must be. In the tradition of authors like Toni Morrison, Ward gives the enslaved a voice and adds a deeply personal and poetic dimension to the historical discourse. Her language finds elegant metaphors for life in captivity, nature and secret love. Ulrike Becker’s outstanding translation conveys this narrative power into German without losing any of its precision or musicality.
—Khuê Phạm

Jesmyn Ward, born in 1977, grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. After studying literature in Michigan, she was a fellow at Stanford and writer in residence at the University of Mississippi. She currently teaches English literature at Tulane University in New Orleans. Jesmyn Ward is the first woman and the first African American to win the National Book Award, the most prestigious US literary prize, twice: for Salvage the Bones (published in German by Kunstmann in 2013) and for Sing, Unburied, Sing (published in German by Kunstmann in 2018). She has also received the MacArthur Genius Grant and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, among other awards.

Ulrike Becker studied American Studies and Theatre Studies. She has been working as a translator since 1989, specialising in literary translations from English. She also works as a cultural organiser and was part of the artistic management team of the Tanz im August dance festival in Berlin for ten years from 2003. She lives in Schöneberg in Berlin and Lingen (Ems).