Selections from études
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Donna Stonecipher on Friederike Mayröcker’s études:
Friederike Mayröcker’s études (2013), soon to be published in my translation by Seagull Books, is a book-length sequence of prose poems that engages with mortality, with memory, with nature, and with language itself, among other concerns. Critic Ernst Osterkamp of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the book “a declaration of love to the German language” and said Mayröcker has proved herself “the master of the prose poem.”
In the book, Mayröcker achieves something with the form of the prose poem that I have seen no one in English yet do. Although inspired by Francis Ponge’s prose poems, hers operate very differently. Using repetition, unusual typography, frequent capitalization, underlining, and various other devices, Mayröcker creates a means of channeling emphasis, drama, and feeling into the block of the prose poem in an exciting and unprecedented way. Mayröcker is now 90 years old, and this book is in many ways a reckoning with aging and with her own mortality, often expressed through the mortality of flowers.
The poems, which suggest regular diary entries feeding off the particulars of Mayröcker’s day, represent a perfect synthesis of wildness and control. While Mayröcker obviously allows her imagination and associative powers great freedom, the poems are always shaped by an admirable rigor. They build upon one another, accumulate and disperse, circle around and away, and engage in an at times spirited, at times despairing internalized argument with themselves. Wordplay is rampant, investigations into etymology are undertaken with obvious joy, and a synthesis of life and art is achieved that has few peers in poetry in any language.
Friedereke Mayröcker was born on December 20, 1924 in Vienna. She has been steadily publishing highly innovative, affecting, and questioning poems since 1956. She is much less well-known in the English-speaking world than her longtime partner, Austrian poet Ernst Jandl. This imbalance needs to be corrected, for Mayröcker is a quiet international treasure.
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The five selections above appear with the permission of Seagull Books which will publish études by Friedereke Mayröcker in February, 2020.