Dimension records

Dimension: Contemporary German Arts and Letters was a bilingual German/English literary journal edited by A. Leslie Willson, professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Founded by Willson in 1968, Dimension was published through 1994 in a total of more than eighty regular and special issues. Willson stated that the goals of the journal were to improve the quality of translation and redress the time lag between the appearance of new literary writing in German and its availibility to English readers. Dimension published poems, plays, essays, short stories, radio plays, excerpts from novels, and drawings by hundreds of German-language authors and artists, including Peter Bichsel, Günter Grass, Gerhard Köpf, Günter Kunert, Siegfried Lenz, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, Gabriele Wohamnn, and Christa Wolf. Through publication of well-known authors, discovery of new authors, and collaboration between authors, translators, and editors, Dimension came to be regarded internationally as an influential forum for contemporary arts and letters.

Dimension was funded by the University of Texas at Austin from its inception in 1968 through 1975. Funding was increasingly problematic after this, and when Willson's term as chairman of the University's German Department ended in 1980, he continued publication of Dimension without clerical or editorial support. Volumes 1-15:1 were designed and produced by the University of Texas Press at Austin. Starting with volume 15:2, Willson designed and produced the journal himself on an Apple computer. Dimension²: Contemporary German-language Literature , edited by Ingo R. Stoehr, began publication in 1994, continuing the format of the original journal.

A. (Amos) Leslie Willson (1923-2007), professor of German, author, editor, and translator, was born in Texas, studied journalism and German at the University of Texas at Austin, and earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1954. He was a member of the German Department faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, 1955-1961 and 1966-1992, and was emeritus professor of Germanic Languages, 1992-2007.

Willson's translations include novels by Michael Krüger (The Man in the Tower and Himmelfarb), Gerhard Köpf (There is no Borges; Papa's Suitcase; Innerfar; Bluff, or The Southern Cross; Way to Eden; Nurmi, or The Journey to the Trout; and Piranesi's Dream), and Ulla Berkéwicz (Angels are Black and White), and Hermann Kurzke's Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art. In addition to founding and editing Dimension, his work as an editor included several volumes of The German Library (Continuum Press). Willson co-founded the American Literary Translators Association in 1979 and was its first president. He served as president of the American Translators Association from 1991 to 1993.