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Dr. Peter Waterhouse, born in Berlin in 1956, lives and works in Vienna. He studied German and English in Vienna and Los Angeles, is a poet, prose writer and translator (he has translated poems by Michael Hamburger, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Roberta Dapunt and Andrea Zanzotto, among others). For years, Waterhouse has been running "Versatorium – Association for Poems and Translation", a platform for young Übersetzer_innen, Wissenschaftler_innen and Künstler_innen who translate together in literary form and reflect theoretically on the translation process. His most recent production consists exclusively of prose texts that are difficult to classify in the sense of the genre, such as the extensive prose volume War and the World (2006) shows that it is at once an essay, poetry, narrative, and a work of linguistic philosophy, where autobiographical and fictional elements are closely interwoven. Recent publications: The finch. Introduction to Reading (2016), The emigrants (2016), Equus. What Kleist's name is not (2018).
The essay "Další stanice – Let's stop exaggerating" was published this year in the magazine Konterbande, an Internet publication on the poetics of translation. A train ride to the Czech Republic becomes a trigger for reflections on borders, languages, border crossings (concrete and metaphorical), until Czech and German become 'almost identical' languages, or one merges into the other. The guide for this excursion is Hašeks Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války. The text was written as part of the author's work on a large prose work about his grandparents, who were born in Opava.