Uljana Wolf is a German poet, translator, and essayist whose work explores what happens when languages touch, overlap, mishear one another, and change under pressure. German and English frequently meet inside her poems, alongside traces of Polish and other linguistic histories, creating a poetry in which translation becomes a generative literary practice.
False friends and linguistic slippage
Wolf is especially associated with the poetic possibilities of false friends: words that resemble one another across languages while carrying different meanings. In Falsche Freunde, translated into English by Susan Bernofsky as False Friends, resemblance becomes a source of comic error, semantic drift, and unexpected connection. A familiar-looking word can suddenly expose the distance between two linguistic systems.
Sound, etymology, and wordplay
Sound is one of Wolf’s principal tools. Consonants, syllables, cognates, echoes, and near-matches allow meaning to migrate across the line. Etymology also becomes a poetic resource: a word carries earlier uses, neighboring languages, and historical associations that can be activated through rhythm and juxtaposition.
Translation as composition
Wolf’s writing treats translation as part of composition itself. The movement between languages can generate form, expose assumptions about linguistic purity, and reveal how identity is shaped through speech. Her work often asks readers to experience uncertainty productively, following a phrase as it changes sound, grammar, and cultural position.
Poetry, translation, and politics
The politics of language remain closely connected to Wolf’s formal experiments. Questions of migration, classification, accent, belonging, and monolingual expectation enter poems through linguistic structure. Her translingual practice shows how language can both police boundaries and create crossings between people, histories, and places.
Essays and Etymological Gossip
Wolf has extended these concerns into essays and lectures. Etymologischer Gossip, awarded the 2022 Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the nonfiction/essay category, gathers writing on translation, poetry, language, and literary relation. An English edition, Etymological Gossip, translated by Sophie Seita, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.
Translator and literary collaborator
Alongside her own poetry, Wolf has translated and collaborated with writers working across several languages and traditions. Her translation practice includes poets such as Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, Erín Moure, Christian Hawkey, Valzhyna Mort, and Eugene Ostashevsky. This work reinforces the larger pattern of her writing: literary language develops through encounter, exchange, and transformation.
Where to read Uljana Wolf
Nightboat Books provides current information on Etymological Gossip. New York University and Pratt Institute provide biographical and teaching context. Readers can continue with modern poetry, sound devices in poetry, and German poetry in translation.