Jürgen Becker was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books--novels, story collections, poetry collections, and plays--all published by Germany's premier publisher, Suhrkamp. He has won numerous prizes in Germany, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, and the Hermann Lenz Prize, among others. Becker's work often deals with his childhood experience of WWII and the political consequences of the postwar division of Germany.
German | Germany | Short Fiction
January, 2013Fleeing a bad economy, the narrator of "Here, It's Quiet" leaves her beloved Berlin to take a job in a sedate, southern German city. Adjusting to her new home, she misses the noise and grittiness of the city she left behind, as well as the boyfriend who refused to come with her. She spends her evenings at the opera and visits the museum during her lunch hour, engaging with art as a way of escaping her banal work life and inuring herself from her personal turmoil. This story from a 2004 collection touches on themes author Anna Katharina Hahn continued to explore in her most recent novel, Am Schwarzen Berg, in particular the conflict between a lifestyle centered on an appreciation for art and the economic choices necessary to support that lifestyle.
German | Germany | Novel (excerpts)
November, 2012Dennis and Mark have been friends since high school. Mark vacillates between becoming a writer or a teacher, but Dennis discovered early on his calling as a sculptor of body parts in concrete and supports himself with work in a porno movie theater and other odd jobs. But catastrophic TV coverage of his first exhibit changes everything, both his career as an artist and his friendship with Mark.
Arabic | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
January, 2012The sibling rivalry between Yusuf and Yunus is already toxic in their childhood and goes ballistic as they mature, swap wives, trade identities, and adopt multiple additional aliases. The bleak setting for this tale of Cain and Abel is Iraq during the last years of Baath Party rule and the beginning of the American Occupation. Much of the story is recounted in flashbacks recorded on cassettes by Yusuf, but the "live" action occurs during only a few days as the hero traverses Baghdad to locate those responsible for a series of phone calls threatening him with punishment for crimes committed by his brother. Although Yunus has been declared dead by Iraqi authorities, Yusuf suspects that he may still be alive, may have returned with the Americans, and may want him dead. While both looking for and fleeing from his brother, after living under so many aliases, Yusuf finds that the one person hardest to get a clear picture of is himself.
Most of the characters' names in this novel have some extra layer of meaning. In a tribute to Kafka, one character refers to himself as Josef K. Yusuf is the name of the Biblical patriarch and the Qur'anic prophet Joseph, who in Sufism stands as an exemplar of human perfection. Yusuf's wife is Sarab, whose name means mirage. Yunus is Jonah, and his second wife, Maryam, whose child brings hope to the novel, is Mary. His four daughters by his first wife take their names from the cries for mercy of prisoners he has tortured. Harun Wali, the hero's friend who has fled Iraq, has a name that is suspiciously reminiscent of the author's, suggesting there may be some autobiographical scenes--like the one where children are thrown into Yusuf's cell--to this novel, which is this tribute to a lost generation of Iraqis.
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2011Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa's new case involves the murder of a woman who is almost dead already. Found in a coma by the side of a road, she is killed while lying unconscious in a hospital bed. Who is she, and is her death connected to several others in towns nearby?
Her story is connected somehow to a gang rape witnessed 25 years before by a boy who recorded its effect on him in his diary at the time. Now, a quarter of a century later, the guilty parties are being picked off one by one....
Joentaa, involved with a prostitute who refuses to tell him her real name, finds his attention diverted from the investigation when she disappears. This fourth Kimmo Joentaa case by German author Jan Costin Wagner follows the detective down two paths as he searches for a killer and for the mysterious woman he's involved with.
In October 1947, Richard Strauss went to London, where Sir Thomas Beecham had organized a festival of his music. The British, so soon after World War II, were still suspicious of this German who had remained silent about the Nazis while surviving in the Third Reich. A young reporter asked the 83-year-old composer about his plans for the future. "Oh," said Strauss, "to die."
In this end-of-life state of mind, Strauss began work on his last work, the Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder). He set the song cycle, which premiered only after his death, to verses written by two poets at a similar twilight stage of their respective lives, Hermann Hesse and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. Strauss's inspiration began with his discovery of Eichendorff's poem, Im Abendrot (At Sunset). Perhaps it was because Strauss and his wife had lived through a grim period of history over their fifty-four years of marriage that the composer was moved by the Eichendorff verse, which describes an old couple who've survived a life's journey through sorrow and joy. At around the same time, Strauss received a copy of the complete poems of Hermann Hesse, and Four Last Songs includes three of them: Frühling (Spring), September, and Beim Schlafengehen (When I Go to Sleep).
Strauss composed the Four Last Songs with Kirsten Flagstad in mind, and she sang the first performance on May 22, 1950, in the Royal Festival Hall, London, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Essays (excerpts) | German | Germany
November, 2010The entries that make up Dinge, die verschwinden (Things That Disappear) originated in part as columns that novelist, short-story writer, and theater director Jenny Erpenbeck published in the respected German daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. This work is a reflection on farewells, gathered under such headings as Men, A Simple Life, the Warsaw Ghetto, Words, Cemetery Visits, Garbage, and Memories. A blend of grief, melancholy, and humor, Dinge, die verschwinden assembles slivers of daily life into a portrait of the transience of life.
When German-born poet and playwright Nelly Leonie Sachs (1891-1970) was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, she observed that co-winner Shmuel Yosef Agnon represented Israel, whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people." The wide arc of her life from the fashionale Tiergarten section of Berlin to exile in Sweden began when she was born on December 10, 1891, the daughter of a prosperous manufacturer.
Growing up in the fashionable Tiergarten section of Berlin, she studied dance and music with private tutors, and began to write poetry at age 17. Sachs became renowned in Germany for her expressionist lyrics, but her life darkened with the persecution of the Jews as Hitler rose to power. Her fascination with Christian mysticism, in a collection of legends from the Middle Ages, published in 1921, led to her finding comfort in the mystical elements in ancient Jewish writings found in Orthodox Hasidism.
When she learned, in 1940, that she was destined for a forced-labor camp, a German friend, at great risk, journeyed to Sweden to meet with Swedish poet and 1909 Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlof, who had been a friendly correspondent of Sachs for many years. Jews were not permitted to leave Germany, but, from her death bed, Lagerlof persuaded Prince Eugene of the Swedish Royal House to intercede. He arranged a visa for Nelly Sachs and her mother. Selma Lagerlof died before their arrival. Settled in Stockholm at almost fifty years old, Sachs made a modest living by translating Swedish poetry into German. With the exception of her mother, every member of her family was killed in the concentration camps.
Her first collections of poetry, But Even the Sun Has No Home (1948) and Eclipse of the Stars (1951), dealt with the annihilation of six million Jews under the Third Reich. They did not receive as much attention as Eli: A Miracle Play of the Suffering Israel, which became a widely acclaimed radio play in Germany.
Before she became the first Jewish woman to win the Nobel Prize, on her 75th birthday, she received the 1965 Peace Prize of German Publishers. In accepting the award from the land she had fled, she said (in the spirit of concord and forgiveness that are among the themes in her poems), "In spite of all the horrors of the past, I believe in you.... Let us remember the victims and then let us walk together into the future to seek again a new beginning."
Nelly Sachs died in Stockholm on May 12, 1970.
(James McColley Eilers)
German | Germany | Short Fiction
August, 2009In 2008, the artist Markus Lörwald approached Selim Özdogan, asking for permission to print one of his stories in a catalog of his work. Özdogan, curious, asked to see some of the pictures for the book and offered to write a literary essay to accompany them. But in fact the pictures instantly gave him a title and the line, It could be so easy. And so the story was born.
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
June, 2009Carmen-Francesca Banciu’s Song of the Sad Mother is a novel about an anguished mother-daughter relationship set against the backdrop of Communist Romania. Its protagonist Maria-Maria is the daughter of two passionate party loyalists. Her academic aptitude and upbringing seem to destine her to become the embodiment of the party’s utopian concept of the new human. The only problem is that Maria-Maria is intent on writing her own destiny. The predetermined quality of Maria-Maria’s life coupled with the fact that she is tyrannized by a mother who is depressive and deeply distrustful of any type of happiness or pleasure, rob the protagonist of a childhood and cause cruelty and harsh discipline to take the place of maternal nurturing and reassurance. It is thus that Maria-Maria’s mother, whose only indulgence was deprivation, cold-bloodedly destroys her daughter’s dolls only to replace them with books, out of love and to impart upon Maria-Maria the valuable lesson of self-reliance. Armed with this lesson, Maria-Maria is able to take possession of herself and defy every party--and familial--expectation. She does this by leaving the past behind and becoming an émigré writer in post-Communist East Berlin. While the crossing of national and political boundaries proves catalytic for Maria-Maria in that it enables her to discover her autonomy and individuality, it does not wipe the slate clean of her psychic and emotional wounds. It is only by doing the work of remembering that she begins to exorcise her demons and heal the trauma of her painful relationship to her mother and her country.
(Elena Mancini)
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
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