Description
Book SynopsisA moving work of fiction from one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016) survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga escaped with one of the last
Kindertransporte to England in 1938. Many of their relatives were deported and murdered. Those losses make themselves felt throughout Aichinger’s writing, which since her first and only novel,
The Greater Hope, in 1948, has highlighted displacement, estrangement, and a sharp skepticism toward language. By 1976, when she published
Bad Words in German, her writing had become powerfully poetic, dense, and experimental. This volume presents the whole of the original
Bad Words in English for the first time, along with a selection of Aichinger’s other short stories of the period; together, they demonstrate her courageous effort to create and deploy a language unmarred by misleading certainties, preconceived rules, or implicit ideologies.
Trade Review"That this text holds its sonic magic in translation is a testament both to the extraordinary ears and poetic wisdom of the translators and to Aichinger herself. Each word feels both surprising and inevitable: in English as in German. This surety of voice is rare." * Words without Borders *
Table of ContentsA Werdly Country: On Ilse Aichinger and Her Language
My Green Donkey
My Father Made from Straw
The Mouse
The Arrival
The Crossbeam
Memories for Samuel Greenberg
Port Sing
Five Proposals
Only Joshua
The Jouet Sisters
My Language and I
Bad Words
Stains
Doubts about Balconies
The Connoisseurs of Western Columns
The Guest
Ambros
Dover
Privas
Albany
The Forgetfulness of St Ives
Rahel’s Clothes
Cemetery in B.
Wisconsin and Apple Rice
Hemlin
Surrender
Salvage
Galy Sad
L. to Muzot
Sur le bonheur
Consensus
Insurrection
Queens
Snow
Translators’ Acknowledgements
