Скачать или смотреть Ann Cotten & Anna Dinwoodie read from Liesl Ujvary’s SAFE & GOOD (seeking a publisher)

Safe & Good, Austrian writer/artist Liesl Ujvary’s first book of experimental poetic texts, breaks with expectations of poetic form to interrogate the suspicious linguistic fabric of postwar Austrian society. Originally published by Rhombus Verlag in 1977 and republished by Klever Verlag in 2017, it is a missing piece in the mosaic history of concrete poetry.

The poems in Safe & Good range in form from lists of sausages (which are also place-names) to legal documents (whose arbitrary demands and punishments suggest a child declaring herself ruler of the world). The book’s poetic experiments focus on details of everyday life in all their contradiction, earnestness, and absurdity, describing the familiar with such intensity that the reader senses a sinister presence lurking underneath the everyday. Ujvary masterfully captures strains of local diction that, to this day, cultivate undertones of hostility toward women and “foreigners.” The book’s laconic conceptual design documents the exhilarating, forceful anarchy with which Ujvary’s generation carved out a way to live as women on their own terms in this dark and limiting society.

Legacies of genocide paved over by housing development; the daily alienation of life in a society obsessed with efficiency, caught in impenetrable consumer chains, beset by brand strategies that become part of everyday speech – these themes of Ujvary’s work seem even more pressing amidst today’s globalized economy and rising nationalistic tides.

Author bio
Liesl Ujvary was born in Pressburg/Bratislava, Slovakia, in 1939, shortly before the Nazi takeover, and moved to Austria in 1945. Safe & Good (1977) was her first original publication, following a 1975 translated anthology of Russian underground poets entitled Freiheit ist Freiheit [Freedom is Freedom]. Ujvary has lived as a freelance writer in Vienna since 1971, publishing numerous books of poetry and prose as well as radio plays, photography, electronic music, and computer art. One of Austria’s most important modernist abstract writers, she has won numerous awards and influenced younger generations of writers and artists in the German-speaking world. Like many older female artists, however, she has not received the international recognition her work merits. Several of her shorter texts have been translated into English, including excerpts published (in our translation) in No Man’s Land and a short selection of poems from this book published in Fieldnotes, both in 2021.

Translator bios
Ann Cotten is an American-born Austrian writer and translator working in German and English. Her first book (Fremdwörterbuchsonette, 2007) was widely heralded by critics and established her as a fixture of the German poetry scene, and her work has since won many awards. Her translations into German of Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter and Rehearsing the Symptoms came out in 2021 and have been influential in reminding the German-language scene of Waldrop's multifacetious work. She can be reached via [email protected].

Anna Dinwoodie is a Berlin-based writer and translator. She graduated with an MFA in Literary Translation from Queens College, CUNY in 2022 and was the translations editor at Armstrong Literary from 2020-2022. She can be reached at [email protected].

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The translators have obtained permission from the original rights holder to translate this sample and share a recording of it on Translators Aloud.