Bad Words: Selected Short Prose (The German List) - Hardcover

Aichinger, Ilse

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857424769 ISBN 13: 9780857424761

Publisher: Seagull Books, 2018

Synopsis

“I now no longer use the better words.”
Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016) was one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, she 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Ilse Aichinger was one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Uljana Wolf is a German poet and translator. Christian Hawkey is a poet, translator, and educator who teaches in the Pratt MFA in Writing in Brooklyn, New York.
 

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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0857424769
• ISBN 13: 9780857424761
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224