MANA Verlag

Robert Sullivan is one of the most important Maori and New Zealand poets. His third book of poems “Star Waka” is a fascinating opus between oral Maori and post-modern poetry tradition. It consists of one hundred poems, each concerning a waka – the Maori expression for ‘canoe’, or more generally ‘vehicle’, ‘container’ –, a star or the ocean. The waka has a special importance for the Maori as they derive their tribal membership from the large wakas of the Polynesian settlers who once came to Aotearoa several hundred years ago. All poems together are constituting a narrative in the oral Maori tradition, an odyssey across the ocean of collective and individual memory, in search for the home, place and identity of Maori in today’s New Zealand.

To achieve the deserved attention for the poetry of Robert Sullivan and for Maori literature in general, we from MANA-Verlag would like to bring this waka to Germany. We are aiming to release a German edition of “Star Waka” on the occasion of New Zealand being Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012. It will be the first German edition of a work by Robert Sullivan.

As you may know, poetry is an adored, but hardly saleable art. Therefore, we need your support to put this project into practice.

If our funding goal should be reached, we will produce and release a bilingual edition of the book, which will also include a introduction to the work, a glossary, and as an epilogue a previously unreleased interview with the poet Robert Sullivan. The amount of € 1,500 will be needed for editing, setting and layout, and printing of the book with an edition of at least 750 copies.