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bilingual edition, Austria, tr Peter Filkins ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Uplifting
Wht distinguishes Ingeborg Bachman's work is its humaneness.She was not simply against war or against a single, anecdotal issue; she was against inhumanity in general.From my point of view--that of a very rudimentary reader in German--the poetry was no less beautiful, though I read in English translation.I even feel that I was able to experience from within Bachmann's interest in the intersection of language and culture. In fact, after reading each poem in English, I was better able to move on to the German text, read it aloud to myself, and feel that I had a much better sense of the sound of it, which surely has enriched my experience of Bachmann.

Death by Translation
To echo the senitments of the only other reviewer, the original versions of Ingeborg Bachmann's poems contain some of the most beautiful phrases I have ever encountered.Also a wonderful window into a modern German culture that continues to bear the impossible weight of destruction, sorrow, and betrayal.

The translations, however, are not simply pedantic and lacking in all the subtle, lyric musicality of Bachmann's style, they are often downright inaccurate.I have only been leafing through the book for a few minutes, and have already encountered two type-os.This is irresponsible, and quite astounding considering this work was done by someone who considers himself a poet.A good translation could be a work of art in its own right.What a shame.

death-of-poetry styles
I couldn't even begin to speak of the value of Bachmann's poetry, personal and phenomenological as it is; can only be silent on the subject of its beauty.The two stars in this review are all hers, and the three missing are because Peter Filkins has made a tremendous effort to misconstrue and mutilate every line she wrote, leaving a horrible, pedantic, confused and leaden mess of English doggerel to stand in for her richly efficient Austrian-German poetic.If you can read German, all the German is here, so by all means buy the book and treasure it; if you can't, consider her poems as yet untranslated.May not be the worst abuse to good poetry I've seen (neither is the Hamburger Celan, although that's also pretty strange), considering that I don't for instance read Chinese -- but it's the one that has caused me the most genuine anger and frustration.

I don't think Filkins' translation was in poor faith; he appears to be a poet himself, which is surprising, and he does take pains to retain word order from the German and, most jarringly, preserve rhyme schemes.(Remember high school "translations" of Chaucer?Oh, the grief...)But there are just as many flat-out semantic errors in translation as ingenious attempts at preservation, and it's clear he has no intuition for Bachmann's thought patterns and her ear for sound.Here's hoping someone who does eventually replaces this "standard" text with a more sensitive rendering.

For the record, this reviewer has disagreed strongly with everything Susan Sontag has said about Central European literature, notably Peter Nadas' "A Book of Memories." ... Read more

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This is a work of sharp, unforgettable images and an irresistible narrative. Here is the story of lives painfully intertwined: the unnamed narrator, haunted by nightmarish memories of her father, lives with the androgynous Malina, an initially remote and dispassionate man who ultimately becomes an iminous influence. Plunging toward its riveting finale, "Malina" brutally lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourese between women and men. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A very well done translation
As an Austrian I literally grew up with Ingeborg Bachmann. No matter if you read her short stories, poetry, or novel, every single line is deeply compelling and challenging. I have read "Malina" so many times, and this translation truly came up to my expectations as far as quality.

~Pat Paul Jammernegg, author of Prototype

brilliant novel on a desperate subject
Ingeborg Bachmann is a truly great and underappreciated writer, and this is her masterpiece. It is also the earliest novel I'm aware of on the subject of the lasting impact of child abuse in adult life, written at a time when the possibility of such an experience was almost unspeakable. Her approach is never polemical, but dreamy and suggestive, and the ending is one of the most devastating in literature. Check out her poetry, too.

A cocktail of thoughts
Malina is a strange book that provoked my interest in what it means to love and live -- is the love-obsession justifiable? When there is noone else but a single person in your life, because you are just this way, doesit mean that there are many people like this one but you have not foundthem yet. Because Bachmann's stream-of-consciousness style, the book isreally difficult to follow, especially the part 'The third man' but onceyou have the patience to read and think continuously, to be shocked andstill know who you are -- it gives an enormous pleasure to know a littlemore of the world that is inside! ... Read more

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Darth Mother
Ingeborg Bachmann was one of the best German speaking poets. The comparison with Sylvia Plath is not unjustified, as reading this collection of poems will show.

Bachmann is a versatile writer, very much in command of style and diction. Her business is not only personal; her writing has a strong political and social perspective as well, and is therefore not locked in time.

I recommend to stay away from reading Bachmann right before going to sleep at night.

A haunting exploration of consciousness andlanguage
Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

The hauntingly beautiful poems in this volume give expression to a deep and often brooding poetic consciousness which is one and the same as language. Set free--the word is not casually chosen--language reconfigures itself in an act of renewal, achieving a new vitality. Thus, ultimately, no matter how somber they may be, in their very existence, the poems strike a note of historic victory over all of those forces of darkenss that surround the poet.

"Libraries," a poem from 1945 - 1956, is revealing of the quality and historic importance of the poems:

"The shelves sag./The volumes are weighted down with the past./Their sweat is dust./ The impulse is rigidity./ They no longer sturggle./ They have saved themselves/upon the island of knowledge./Soometimes they've lost their conscience./Here and there, protruding/from them, human fingers/point directly towards life/or twards heaven.

Clearly, language is mired in the past, is petrified, no longer engaged in any vitality-giving struggle, and no longer engaged in acts of conscience. The final four lines are mysterious; but one possibility is that even within this stagnant heap of language, encouraging human signs are to be found. These, surely, are the inspiration for Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry, here collected.

This reviewer is in no position to comapare Filkins' translations with the original German texts that accompany them.In their own right, at the very least, they are pleasant enough. However, they should really serve as a crutch for the naive German reader to enter the original texts. With just a little preparation in the pronunciation of German the translations help to open up the richness of the original language.

Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry is not well enough appreciated in the USA, though she may be the foremost German language writer of the post war period. This collection should prove her value. The poetry is not easy, but it is fascinating and reawarding to read.

Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann ... Read more

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This is collection of the stories written by a distinguished German author who died in 1973. Reading these stories entails abandoning the terms of one's own comfort. The author's relentless vision demands that readers allows themselves to be hypnotised, taken over by her repetitive cadences and burning images of grief and loss. And yet, in the beauty of her images there is a tremendous affirmation of the world. ... Read more

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This volume brings together the two most important women writers of postwar German literature: Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) and Christa Wolf (b. 1929). Both grew up during the National Socialist era, and in their adult lives have remained critical of their respective societies' failure to confront the history of this era. ... Read more

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A fine overview of these gifted German women
I felt on fire when I put down this volume after having read what surely must be Bachmann's masterwork, "Murderers and Madmen".I couldn't believe I had never heard of this writer before, with her machined prose and sense of the dread rightness of things, from the nature of suffering, the fate of the soul, the burden of responsibility of those caught in history's choking floodwaters, as well as the burden of those who blew up the dikes.It absolutely took my breath away.Likewise, Crista Wolff's magnificent story, "No Place On Earth", an imagined dialogue between two brilliant historical misfits, Heinrich Von Kleist, and the Romantic poet Karoline von Guenderrode, left me in awe.Both would commit suicide shortly after Wolff's imagined conversation; both meet and walk and achieve--however briefly--a place in the world for themselves.This sort of exercise is so tempting to writers--what would our heros say, should they meet?Wolff pulls hers off by knowing her characters so intimately that if you are a Kleist fan, in particular, you will be shocked at how true the conversation rings, paranoia, obsessions, social unease and all.Needless to say, Kleist just barely acknowledges Karoline's own burdens.That, too, rings true.Lovely.

Bachmann's "The Good God of Manhattan", another of her Vienna stories, and a Wolff essay on Bachmann's feminist oevre complete this very competent collection.But, please, if you are an English teacher, consider giving "On Murderers and Madmen" as an assignment to your advanced students--it's one of the most brilliantly crafted short stories I've ever read.

... Read more

Amazon.com Review
Perhaps it's something in the air, or an ironic additive found exclusivelyin the Danube, but Central Europe seems to breed a certain kind of mordantand malicious stylist. From Joseph Roth to Robert Musil to Thomas Bernhard,there's a tendency to go straight for society's jugular--without, however,relinquishing an iota of humor. And Ingeborg Bachmann, who perished in afire in 1973, surely fits into this lineage. A poet, librettist, essayist,and fiction writer, she made postwar Austria the object of her skepticalscrutiny. She saw a nation with blood on its hands and corruption in itsheart, not to mention an ongoing gender war between Mann andMadchen. And nowhere did she address these conditions with morepassion and penetrating wit than in The Book of Franza & Requiem forFanny Goldmann.

Neither work was quite finished at the time of Bachmann's death. But inboth cases, translator Peter Filkins has assembled manuscripts and variantsinto a coherent whole, and turned the author's high-density prose intoeminently readable English. The Book of Franza represents a pitchedbattle between the sexes--or more particularly, between the eponymousheroine and her manipulative psychiatrist of a husband. How could she haveoverlooked debris of Dr. Leopold Jordan's previous marriages?

Only now do I wonder about the other women and why all of them disappearedwithout a sound, why one no longer left the house, why another turned onthe gas, while I myself am the third who amended herself with this name,becoming the third Frau Jordan.... Yet I hung myself with my immaturethinking, with my careless rapture for his charged wire of thought, for hadI touched a high-voltage wire, causing electrocution, severe damage, andburns, it would have been faster and gentler, and certainly no worse.

Product Description
Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was one of the most significant post-war women writers in German language literature and remains one of the most important writers of our time. Over thirty years after her death, her work continues to attract the critical attentions of a wide general readership as well as scholars from many different disciplines, not least because her poems, short stories, critical essays, radio plays and novels deal with issues that continue to haunt contemporary culture: history, gender, exile, war, memory and the Holocaust. A poet, writer and trained philosopher, Bachmann relentlessly proved what she believed was the potential of language and writing to raise awareness and effect change in a culture marked by violence against women, individual and collective trauma, the effacement of memory, the forgetting of atrocities, and the silencing of victims. The multifaceted, interdisciplinary approaches to Ingeborg Bachmann's work make this collection appealing and relevant to both critics and scholars of Ingeborg Bachmann and to everyone interested in critical theory and contemporary culture. ... Read more