Scardanelli

"Tumult, ferocity, ?ow, exaltation, immersion: Friederike Mayr?cker, among the world's greatest living writers, reinterprets literary vocation as total theater" --Wayne Koestenbaum

In Scardanelli, Friederike Mayr?cker, one of Austria's most well-known poets, 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 H?lderlin--"I do often go in your shadow"--who appears in the first poem of the book and stays throughout. Even the title refers to the name that H?lderlin signed many of the poems with after having been diagnosed with madness toward the end of 1806. Mayr?cker 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 Mayr?cker's language and unconventional use of signs and symbols presents to translation, Jonathan Larson manages to convey masterfully the unmistakable singularity of her work.

Friederike Mayr?cker (1924-2021) was born in Vienna. She has received countless awards for her writings that include among others the Georg B?chner Prize (2001), the Hermann Lenz Prize (2009) and the Austrian Book Prize (2016).