The Communicating Vessels

Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Booth

By Friederike Mayröcker Translated by Alexander Booth

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About the Book

For the first time available in English, two portraits of grief by Friederike Mayröcker, one of the significant European writers of our time.

Friederike Mayröcker met Ernst Jandl in 1954, through the experimental Vienna Group of German writers and artists. It was an encounter that would alter the course of their lives. Jandl's death in 2000 ended a partnership of nearly half a century. As writers have for millennia, Mayröcker turned to her art to come to terms with the loss. Taking its cue from the André Breton's work of the same name, The Communicating Vessels is an intensely personal book of mourning, comprised of 140 entries spanning the course of a year and exploring everyday life in the immediate aftermath of Jandl's death. Rilke is said to have observed that poetry should begin as elegy but end as praise: taking this as a guiding principle, And I Shook Myself a Beloved reflects on a lifetime of shared books and art, impressions and conversations, memories and dreams.

Masterfully translated by Alexander Booth, these two singular books of remembrance and farewell offer a stunning testament to a life of passionate reading, writing, and love.

Author

Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021) was one of the leading figures of German literature and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Georg Büchner Prize. Among her books to have been translated into English are brütt, or The Sighing Gardens and Scardanelli.

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator who, after many years in Rome, at present lives in Berlin. His work has appeared in numerous print and online journals and he is the recipient of a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of the poetry of Lutz Seiler.

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