Posts featuring Friederike Mayröcker

It’s the Song One’s After: Alexander Booth on translating Friederike Mayröcker

You have to listen hard, and long, and then try and carry that listening over.

Early in her lyrical memoir, The Communicating Vessels, Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker has a crisis of faith: “And will anyone even read this . . . ?” she wonders. “. . . I see no goal, everything I touch, take up, after 1 short time seems flat and plain . . .” This kind of mid-project despair should sound familiar to many a writer—when the work feels futile, and the motivation to do it sapped.

But in some respects, Mayröcker had no choice but to write The Communicating Vessels. After the death of Ernst Jandl, her partner and collaborator of nearly half a century, Mayröcker took to the page to process her grief. She didn’t write her way out of pain so much as through it: in Vessels and its companion And I Shook Myself a Beloved, recently compiled together and published in English by A Public Space, the poet documents and reflects on her mourning process, her memories, and her daily life without Jandl.

Mayröcker’s style—unfettered, freely associative—can intimidate some readers. Literary translator Alexander Booth, on the other hand, was immediately captivated. In his masterly translation of Vessels, a work that confidently flouts grammatical rules and linguistic convention, Booth manages to enter Mayröcker’s mind and interpret her raw, cascading thoughts. It’s heartbreaking to witness her anguish and disorientation, while simultaneously astounding to revel in her complete liberation from the confines of language. In the following interview, I speak with Booth about the daunting, rewarding process of bringing Mayröcker to English-language readers. 

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): The Communicating Vessels was in fact the first book of Mayröcker’s that you ever read, handed to you by a bookseller in Berlin over fifteen years ago. How did you come to translate Vessels? Did translating this book change at all your understanding of or relationship to her and her work?

Alexander Booth (AB): As with many things, it was a fairly circuitous path! I first encountered Mayröcker’s writing in Jerome Rothenberg’s and Pierre Joris’ anthology, Poems for the Millennium, and was intrigued. But living as I was in the US, finding her books in the original German was somewhat difficult. Then at the end of 2003 I moved to Berlin. I had nowhere to be, nowhere to go. The city was dark. There was snow and it was cold and I was unemployed and sleeping on a kitchen floor. Mostly I wanted to read. And fall in love. What I got was The Communicating Vessels. And so I more or less began to translate bits and pieces as soon as I could—but for myself, mind you, as a means of getting a better grip on what was going on.

Later, unpublished and unknown, I had absolutely no idea how to go about contacting publishers, much less how to approach journals with something in translation. After some not exactly encouraging responses and years of rejections, I mostly gave up. Then, at some point, I began to correspond with Nia Davies, who at that time, in 2014, was editor at Poetry Wales. She ended up publishing a few of the aforementioned bits and pieces in the journal in connection to a piece on Mayröcker—at ninety and being translated into Welsh. Then, in late 2015—more than ten years after having first begun—out of the proverbial blue I received an email from A Public Space inquiring as to whether I had any longer excerpts, and would I be interested in putting together a kind of expose, and it went from there.

I’m not sure that translating this book changed my understanding or relationship that much, no, aging and experience did just fine on their own. But I will say that there are very few writers who will truly change the way you approach reading and writing, indeed change your reading and writing, and whose works will continue to teach you in surprising ways, year after year. There are also very few writers you will remember where you were, when you were, how you were, upon first reading. It is no exaggeration to write that Mayröcker was one of them for me. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to Morocco, Hong Kong, and the United States.

We are back with the latest from around the world! This week we hear about Morocco, Hong Kong, and the United States. Enjoy!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco

Some seven hundred exhibitors from Morocco and around the world descended on Casablanca for the Salon international de l’edition et du livre, which took place from February 9-18. Half open-air souk (rumor had it that one of the ambulatory vendors went so far as to offer women’s panties for sale!), half oasis of high culture, the book fair counted over 125,000 titles from forty-five different countries. Egypt, this year’s guest of honor, accounted for nearly fifteen percent of the titles on offer alone, and managed to ruffle more than a few feathers when an Egyptian publisher was allegedly caught displaying a book (A Brief History of Africa) whose cover featured a map of the continent depicting a “mutilated” Morocco—the disputed territory of the Western Sahara appearing as an independent nation under the Polisario flag. The presence of the book was firmly denied by the Ministry of Culture.

READ MORE…