Schwitters, Kurt / Searls, Damion (tr.): Norway Poems and Three from England

Staircase Books, paperback

Translated by Damion Searls

Publication Date: October 20, 2025

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“As whimsical and profound as it is brief, the original power and pop of this collection of poems comes back to life in our time thanks to Damion Searls’ deceptively light touch.” — Anton Hur

“Kurt Schwitters was one of the great avant-garde artists of the twentieth century. A collagist of physical and linguistic detritus, he invented his own brand of Dada. Ever a child at play, he saw the nonsense of common sense, and built his poems from the sights and sounds of ordinary language combined in extraordinary ways. In my library, he stands alongside Gertrude Stein and the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms. Damion Searls has selected and wonderfully translated some poems Schwitters composed in Norway, where he fled from the Nazis. Searls also includes (and playfully translates into German) three of Schwitters’s translingual experiments—pieces composed in the UK after escaping the Nazis again, in his unabashedly imperfect learner’s English. What a beauty this book is!” — Eugene Ostashevsky

“In this important addition to the oeuvre of the great, strange Dada genius Kurt Schwitters available in English translation, Damion Searls translates poems Schwitters wrote in Norway, both before and during his years as a refugee there with his son, and in further exile in England. These multilingual, sonically playful poems, born out of the refractions of translation — and non-translation — are mesmerizing and, surprisingly, at times, tender and moving.” — Johannes Göransson