Announcement
Dear readers of this website,
Springtide is a time for new things, not only flowers bloom, websites also sprout new branches or sub-websites. It is time to renew our acquaintance with Oscar Wilde's poems - if we have taken account of this part of his writing at all, submerged as they are by the sheer weight of his life story and letters, plays, his only novel and stories.
Five years ago I approached Günter Plessow, a former Berlin architect turned translator of mostly poems in retirement, through the internet asking him for permission to use his translation of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale". We quickly established a literary friendship based on the sustained exchange of works published and unpublished. One day in the summer of 2021, Günter surprised me with an anthology of Wilde poems he had translated into German. Using a quote from Wilde's poems "Helas", "a twice-written scroll" as a hint to entitle his collection "My life is a palimpsest", Günter then went on to include both "The Sphinx" and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", while I helped in editing and providing a glossary in the form of reading notes by a literary critic. Now I want Wilde's poems to be more widely read. Hopefully, the poems soon to be uploaded with additional comments will whet your appetite for more.
All best wishes,
Jörg W. Rademacher
