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 formally seamless while simultaneously overstepping all the bounds of grammar and style. She is always pushing to expose the limits of language and explore its experimental potential, seeking a re-ordering of the world through the re-ordering of words. Her multilayered texts are reminiscent of the traditions of Surrealism and Dadaism and display influences from the works of Beckett, Hölderlin, Freud, and Barthes. Yet, much of Mayrocker’s writing simply has no corollary and the experience of reading Roslyn Theobald’s brilliant translation grants the English-speaking audience an unforgettable encounter with this completely original work.

brutt, or The Sighing Gardens (Avant-Garde & Modernism Collection)

Literature & Fiction

Mayröcker, Friederike

United States

Northwestern University Press

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.

Requiem for Ernst Jandl (The German List)

Poetry

Seagull Books

Exploring longing, lust for life, ageing, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, études is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayröcker’s almost daily entries give us a unique view into the interplay between desire and her motivation for writing. In Mayröcker’s case, she writes both to keep a vanished world present and to exploit the possibilities of being present for constant experimentation. The poems in this volume are not only studies of how the mind works, moving from fragment to fragment, but also experiments with techniques of repetition, typography, collage, and quotation. Mayröcker transform the humble page into spaces of radical openness. After all, she says, a poem is that which “opens everything up.” Each poem is date-stamped, and each date acts as a kind of permission for Mayröcker to pour in everything from notes on doctor’s visits to gorgeously structured elegies to obsessively repeating fragments of memory that act upon the whole like bits of recurring melody. Rarely before has the intimate process of writing been so exquisitely laid bare than in études. Traversing the boundaries of literary forms with Mayröcker’s distinctive style, this important volume strikes an admirable balance between playfulness and serious inquiry.

études (The German List)

A horse who really is a dog accepts a cloud's invitation to fly off together.

Pegas the Horse

Kaufmann, Angelika

Neugebauer Press

More than an account of a train trip from Paris to Vienna, Night Train depicts a journey through life, as conceived by the female narrator. In poetic prose that is as magical as it is honest, the speaker reflects on issues such as time, childhood, and the process of aging. In light of our ultimate destination of death, the question reverts to what it means to be alive. Life is seen as an opportunity for self-development, that is, for creativity coupled with sexuality, which for an author means writing.

Night Train (STUDIES IN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE, CULTURE, AND THOUGHT TRANSLATION SERIES)

Contemporary

Ariadne Pr

Heiligenanstalt (Dichten 1)

Burning Deck

Poetry. Hailed as the grande dame of post-modern German poetry, Friederike Mayrocker has been an innovator for over forty years. Born in 1924, in the 1950s Mayrocker became involved with the Vienna Group, whose members met to discuss, collaborate and experiment in poetry and theater. Translated by Mary Burns who comments about Mayrocker: Translation of her work involves dealing with dual-language cross-overs, dream words, inventions and unusual usages, and alliterations with overtones which are difficult to bring fom one language to another. (Translator's Note)

Peck Me Up, My Wing

Smokeproof Press

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.

The Communicating Vessels

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

A Public Space Books

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.

Scardanelli

The Song Cave

Originally written in German by one of Austria’s most important experimental poets, From Embracing the Sparrow-Wall, or 1 Schumann-madness, is a “revisionary incantation” of the lives of 19th-Century composer Robert Schumann and pianist Clara Schumann, alongside that of the poet herself, Friederike Mayröcker, and her “heart-and-hand companion,” Ernst Jandl. Initially conceived as a musical performance and published as a textual record of a radio play, this book showcases Mayröcker’s wild, innovative use of language, as well as her unique mode of textual production, in which details and lines from lives and letters are interwoven with her own. In the words of the translator, Jonathan Larson: “Robert Schumann’s diary entries set up the source motif, their relations of sexual experience, personal medical history, and artistic musing are all flush sampling materials for Mayröcker to recompose a new text from an old one, as if it were written as a reinterpretation of Robert Schumann’s diaries (‘1 has to feel it, 1 has to feel language, to lay on or take off 1 weight here and there like pharmacist scale, so it must sound, so tuned’).”

From Embracing the Sparrow-Wall, or 1 Schumann-madness

Literary

OOMPH! Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mayröcker, Friederike. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mayröcker, Friederike