Friederike Mayrocker – författare

Brutt, 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 Mayrocker performs as she explores them. Mayrocker 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 exploring the experimental potential of language, seeking a re-ordering of the world through a re-ordering of words. Her multilayered texts are reminiscent of the traditions of Surrealism and Dadaism and display influences from the works of Beckett, Holderlin, 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.

Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayrocker and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayrocker 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, Mayrocker 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.

A diary-like sequence of poems from one of Austria’s best-known contemporary voices.Exploring longing, lust for life, aging, 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 transforms 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.