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brütt, or The Sighing Gardens is the hallucinatory tale of an obsessive writer’s love affair late in life as told through the daily journal entries of the writer—a montage of relentless observation interspersed with found materials from newspaper articles, literature, and private correspondence. The process of aging and the process of writing are two persistent and carefully intertwined themes, though it is apparent that plot and theme are subordinate to the linguistic experiments that Friederike Mayröcker performs as she explores them. Mayröcker is known for crossing the boundaries of literary forms and in her prose work she creates a hypnotic, slurred narrative stream that is formal...
A lyrical requiem for Mayröcker's late partner, the writer Ernst Jandl. Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayröcker--and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayröcker immediately began attempting to come to terms with his death in the way that poets struggling with loss have done for millennia: by writing. Requiem for Ernst Jandl is the powerfully moving outcome. In this quiet but passionate lament that grows into a song of enthralling intensity, Mayröcker recalls memories and shared experiences, and--with the sudden, piercing perception of regrets that often accompany grief--reads Jandl's works in a new light. Alarmed by a sudden, existential emptiness, she reflects on the future, and the possibility of going on with her life and work in the absence of the person who, as we see in this elegy, was a constant conversational and creative partner.
Poetic prose meditations written in a lyrical stream-of-consciousness style from renowned Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker. It is summer in this book, even if nature often does not hold to summer. The flowers either have tiny buds or have long since withered. It is summer in the book, asserts Mayröcker's work, because the summer light is switched on: sometimes blazingly bright, sometimes darkened with thunderclouds. At the same time, there is a magical light in this writing. In these stream-of-conscious prose poem meditations, Mayröcker formulates a poetics of simultaneity of all that is not: "not the scenes I remember, rather, it is the sensations accompanying those scenes." Strictly composed in form and language while luxuriantly proliferated in daydreams and nightmares, just sitting around here GRUESOMELY now is a significant volume in the radical late work of the great Viennese poet.
For the first time available in English, two portraits of grief by Friederike Mayröcker, one of the significant European writers of our time. Friederike Mayröcker met Ernst Jandl in 1954, through the experimental Vienna Group of German writers and artists. It was an encounter that would alter the course of their lives. Jandl's death in 2000 ended a partnership of nearly half a century. As writers have for millennia, Mayröcker turned to her art to come to terms with the loss. Taking its cue from the André Breton's work of the same name, The Communicating Vessels is an intensely personal book of mourning, comprised of 140 entries spanning the course of a year and exploring everyday life in the immediate aftermath of Jandl's death. Rilke is said to have observed that poetry should begin as elegy but end as praise: taking this as a guiding principle, And I Shook Myself a Beloved reflects on a lifetime of shared books and art, impressions and conversations, memories and dreams. Masterfully translated by Alexander Booth, these two singular books of remembrance and farewell offer a stunning testament to a life of passionate reading, writing, and love.
A group of poems from the core member of the Vienna Group and one of Europe’s most intrepid avant-garde writers, this collection contains more than 300 poems from seven decades of writing. The poems are true to the legacies of romanticism and surrealism and exhibit the poet’s ability to push the limits of convention to reveal a deeper structure of existence, ranging from elation to abyss.
Poetry. Translated from the German by Jonathan Larson. In SCARDANELLI, Friederike Mayröcker, one of the most well-known poets in Austria, associated with the experimental German writers and artists of the Wiener Gruppe, continues to sharpen her mystical and hallucinatory poetic voice. Filled with memory and loss, these poems are time-stamped and often dedicated to friends they address, including Friedrich Hölderlin--"I do often go in your shadow"--who appears in the first poem of the book and stays throughout. Even the title, SCARDANELLI, refers to the name that Hölderlin signed many of the poems with after having been diagnosed with madness toward the end of 1806. Mayröcker uses her own eclectic reading, daily life, and the scenes and sounds of Vienna to find a new language for grief and aging--"I am counted among the aging ones though I would prefer to consort with the young (rose of their cheeks)." Despite the intractable challenges Mayröcker's language and unconventional use of signs and symbols presents to translation, Jonathan Larson manages to convey masterfully the unmistakable singularity of her work.
Expertly introduced and edited by A. Leslie Willson, the present volume is a collection to read and cherish, and to reread: to pass along and talk about. Its broad themes of tragedy, satire, and carefully observed daily living make it a cross section of German life and liveliness over the second half of the 20th century.
Elegiac, brimming with beauty, and grounded in daily life on a farm. An accessible and sweet document of human experience.
An essential edition of a major avant-garde poet: “Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives” (Ben Lerner, Jacket) Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.” Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.
The exhibition at Municipal Art Gallery of Athens, 2017 is the last exhibition project that Maria Lassnig was able to plan personally with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Around 50 works are on show - paintings and works on paper, especially watercolours - which seize upon motifs from Greek mythology and their expansive and permanent exchange with all Mediterranean civilisations. Although these works by Maria Lassnig are not so well known, they manifest characteristics typical of her work: the awareness of the body, the painterly rendering of the inner and outer world, as well as animal portrayals and landscapes. In an unusual selection from Maria Lassnig's oeuvre the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue with contributions from leading scholars and artists spotlight her unique visual idiom, in which she combines science with a subjective emotional life, and Mediterranean landscapes with figures from ancient mythology. Accompanies the exhibition Maria Lassnig: The future is created from the fragments of the past, 31 Mar - 16 Jul 2017, Municipal Gallery, Athens, Greece.