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Gerrit Engelke (1890-1918) was born in Hannover to poor parents who soon moved without him to the USA, and was apprenticed to a house-painter. His poetry upholds spiritual values against industrialisation and war. Serving on the western front, he won the Iron Cross, swimming the river Yser. He died of wounds on 13 October 1918, shortly before the Armistice, in a British field hospital. The newspaper Die Zeit in 1956 called him a forgotten German poet.

Translator bio
Timothy Adès is a rhyming translator-poet into English, mostly from French, German, and Spanish, widely published, with (2025) eleven books and four awards, for Victor Hugo, Robert Desnos, Jean Cassou, and Alfonso Reyes. He rewrites English poems as lipograms (Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets) or puts them into Latin. He sells translated poetry books, his own and many others, in craft fairs. He is active on Facebook and YouTube, and is a Trustee of Agenda poetry journal.

In Couch Grass's four remarkable stories, the acclaimed Ethiopian author Adam Reta uses multiple voices that interweave throughout the narratives, offering the reader a richer perspective through a narration method he terms hitsenawinet. Footnotes reveal surprising elements, nursery rhymes develop into storylines, and silences convey as much meaning as spoken words.

A boy waits by a wall, whistling for the girl who has captured his heart. A writer believes his beard holds the secret to his art. A nursery rhyme echoes through a woman’s name, reshaping her fate. Chilli paste becomes both delight and ruin, tracing the fault lines of desire, history, and revolution.

In ‘Auntie Lomi Shita’, a dissatisfied housewife shares her wish to attend church more often with her husband. In response, he hires a maid to accompany her to church regularly. One Sunday, a man in disguise approaches her at church and confesses his love. This prompts her to use the maid as a courier to organise secret meetings with him, eventually leading her to leave her husband for her lover. In reaction to her betrayal, the seemingly powerless husband devises an elaborate plan for revenge.

Rendered into English for the first time by Bethlehem Attfield, Couch Grass invites readers into Ethiopia’s literary heartbeat, where everyday gestures carry philosophical weight and history lingers in intimate lives. Bold, experimental, and deeply humane, this collection introduces Reta as a pioneer who ushers Amharic literature onto the global stage.

To order: https://www.fidessaliterary.com/Books

Bethlehem Attfield holds a PhD in Modern Languages from the University of Birmingham. Her research concentrates on translating African-language literature. In October 2025, her translation of Adam Reta’s short story collection, Etemete Lomi Shita, was published under the title Couch Grass by Fidessa Publishing. Her translation of an Amharic novel by Yismake Worku, titled The Lost Spell, was published by Henningham Family Press in March 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2022 TA First Translation Prize by the Society of Authors. Additionally, she is the translator and producer of the audio musical story ‘Requiem for Potatoes’. In 2023, she received the Global Africa Translation Fellowship Award for her project, which aimed to create a more inclusive African literary canon, moving beyond the hierarchies that presently marginalise literature in indigenous languages.

Adam Reta is the author of eight anthologies and four novels written in Amharic. Born in 1958 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he earned his first degree from Addis Ababa University, majoring in Geography. He completed his Master's degree in the Netherlands and currently resides in Ottawa, Canada. Two of his novels won the HoHe prize for the best novel of the year (hoheawards.org) (የስንብት ቀለማት 2017 and አፍ 2019). His English story ‘Of Buns and Howls’ was published in ‘Addis Ababa Noir’, an anthology edited by Maaza Mengiste and published by Akashik Press in 2020. His short story የድንች መዋስት was translated by Bethlehem Attfield and published as a Kindle book in 2020. The translator also produced the story as an audio musical with original music, making it available on Findaway Voices, which is currently accessible on Spotify and 25 other audiobook platforms. Reta is highly esteemed among Ethiopian readers and critics for the depth of his writing, as well as for creating and introducing new literary techniques to Ethiopian literature. Various Ethiopian literary scholars have conducted research based on his work.