What We Missed

A pandemic passion project by poet, Karen J. Head, with Sandra Danneil (Editor), Randi Gunzenhaeuser (Lead German Translator), and Anne-Francoise Le Lostec (French Translator), What We Missed: New and Selected Poems in English, German, and French was supposed to be a summer project in which students at TU-Dortmund would translate three to five poems as part of a seminar on poetry translation. Instead, it grew into a nearly two-year project, during which a French translator also joined. Head selected poems from five of her previous collections as well as new poems from over twenty years for translation by the students. The topics of the poems are wide-ranging, from the poet's memories, people and places of her life. Collectively, everyone in the world missed many things because of the pandemic. However, the project group discovered some bright moments during which they found ways to reach across virtual and cultural landscapes to do work they might otherwise never have had time to complete.