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Fragmented: A New Translation of Selected Todesarten Texts
We wanted to end in madness and joy.
Onward. Onward. They thought.
Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is one of the most celebrated German-language writers. She turned to writing after completing her doctorate at the University of Vienna, producing radio plays, poems, prose, and libretti, and winning, throughout her career, the Gruppe 47 and Georg Büchner literary prizes, among others.
In her centenary year, this volume, Fragmented, presents a collection of previously untranslated drafts of Bachmann's work. These drafts are from unfinished stories, or are pieces cut out from works as they approached their final forms, and are grouped into four Eugen-Roman I; Ein Ort für Zufä Paralipomenon; Geschichte(n) einer Liebe; and Eugen-Roman II. This translation has been carried out by six undergraduates studying German at Elizabeth Dallosso, Sam Edwards, Anwen Jones, Anna Standish, Sophie Stewart and Adesh Takhar. It is edited by Oxford lecturer Isabel Parkinson.
The collaborative translators' introduction takes stock of the difficulties of translating her neologisms, her rushing, roaming syntax, her wordplay, as well as her prominent position in Austrian literature and culture. It sets out the collaborative approach taken and how six voices can arrive at one single rendering. The translators ask, likewise, about what it means to translate today as a human, on which the editor's introduction also dwells. Parkinson discusses what may be individual, creative, and distinct about work written and processed by humans, and asks what emerges when the process of translation, and of reading the finished work, is treated as a distinct literary lens in itself.
The fragments themselves stem from Bachmann's work on what was intended to be a significant cycle of novels, the Todesarten, of which only one (Malina) was complete at the time of her death in 1973. The fragments are not intended to present a distinct narrative in themselves, being taken from different phases of work, but they nonetheless tell stories in miniature, of leaving home and returning; of love and belonging; of history; and of illness, all illuminated throughout with atmospheric artwork. The syntax of the fragments is recreated as far as possible, resulting in sentences far longer than is common in English. The translators also follow Bachmann's lead in neologisms and wordplay. The result, then, is that the English-language reader is not merely told what Bachmann said, but experiences afresh the force and flavour of her words.
But this language barrier which lay between us was at the same time also a playing field of hope, which wouldn't have existed had we shared the same language and been capable of judging each other.
Two languages that want to be spoken as though they were a single one ...
The edition is part of the Writers in Residence series of the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford which started with volumes by writers in residence Ulrike Draesner and Yoko Tawada and recently included a collaborative translation of Hedwig Dohm's 'Werde, die du bist'. More information available via //editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/publications/.
Onward. Onward. They thought.
Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is one of the most celebrated German-language writers. She turned to writing after completing her doctorate at the University of Vienna, producing radio plays, poems, prose, and libretti, and winning, throughout her career, the Gruppe 47 and Georg Büchner literary prizes, among others.
In her centenary year, this volume, Fragmented, presents a collection of previously untranslated drafts of Bachmann's work. These drafts are from unfinished stories, or are pieces cut out from works as they approached their final forms, and are grouped into four Eugen-Roman I; Ein Ort für Zufä Paralipomenon; Geschichte(n) einer Liebe; and Eugen-Roman II. This translation has been carried out by six undergraduates studying German at Elizabeth Dallosso, Sam Edwards, Anwen Jones, Anna Standish, Sophie Stewart and Adesh Takhar. It is edited by Oxford lecturer Isabel Parkinson.
The collaborative translators' introduction takes stock of the difficulties of translating her neologisms, her rushing, roaming syntax, her wordplay, as well as her prominent position in Austrian literature and culture. It sets out the collaborative approach taken and how six voices can arrive at one single rendering. The translators ask, likewise, about what it means to translate today as a human, on which the editor's introduction also dwells. Parkinson discusses what may be individual, creative, and distinct about work written and processed by humans, and asks what emerges when the process of translation, and of reading the finished work, is treated as a distinct literary lens in itself.
The fragments themselves stem from Bachmann's work on what was intended to be a significant cycle of novels, the Todesarten, of which only one (Malina) was complete at the time of her death in 1973. The fragments are not intended to present a distinct narrative in themselves, being taken from different phases of work, but they nonetheless tell stories in miniature, of leaving home and returning; of love and belonging; of history; and of illness, all illuminated throughout with atmospheric artwork. The syntax of the fragments is recreated as far as possible, resulting in sentences far longer than is common in English. The translators also follow Bachmann's lead in neologisms and wordplay. The result, then, is that the English-language reader is not merely told what Bachmann said, but experiences afresh the force and flavour of her words.
But this language barrier which lay between us was at the same time also a playing field of hope, which wouldn't have existed had we shared the same language and been capable of judging each other.
Two languages that want to be spoken as though they were a single one ...
The edition is part of the Writers in Residence series of the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford which started with volumes by writers in residence Ulrike Draesner and Yoko Tawada and recently included a collaborative translation of Hedwig Dohm's 'Werde, die du bist'. More information available via //editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/publications/.
90 pages, Paperback
Published June 25, 2026
About the author
Ingeborg Bachmann
182 books685 followers“What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness.” This sentence from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics (1959-60) can also be applied to her own self-consciousness as an author, and to the history of her reception. Whether in the form of lyric poetry, short prose, radio plays, libretti, lectures and essays or longer fiction, Bachmann’s œuvre had as its goal and effect “to draw people into the experiences of the writers,” into “new experiences of suffering.” (GuI 139-140). But it was especially her penetrating and artistically original representation of female subjectivity within male-dominated society that unleashed a new wave in the reception of her works.
Although Bachmann’s spectacular early fame derived from her lyric poetry (she received the prestigious Prize of the Gruppe 47 in 1954), she turned more and more towards prose during the 1950’s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language. The stories in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year; 1961) typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its “orders” (e.g. of language, law, politics, or gender roles) and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order. The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha” (“A Step towards Gomorrah”) and “Undine geht” (“Undine Goes/Leaves”), are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German-language literature. Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general: “You monsters named Hans!” In her later prose (Malina 1971; Simultan 1972; and the posthumously published Der Fall Franza und Requiem für Fanny Goldmann) Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna. Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann’s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age: “I’ve reflected about this question already: where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped…. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”(GuI 144)
As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn’t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents; after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. She wrote her doctoral dissertation (1950) on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as “a seduction … to German irrationality of thought” (GuI 137). From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself” (GuI 144).
From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome. Despite her precarious health—she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure—she traveled to Poland in 1973. She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire.
Joey Horsley
Although Bachmann’s spectacular early fame derived from her lyric poetry (she received the prestigious Prize of the Gruppe 47 in 1954), she turned more and more towards prose during the 1950’s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language. The stories in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year; 1961) typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its “orders” (e.g. of language, law, politics, or gender roles) and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order. The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha” (“A Step towards Gomorrah”) and “Undine geht” (“Undine Goes/Leaves”), are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German-language literature. Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general: “You monsters named Hans!” In her later prose (Malina 1971; Simultan 1972; and the posthumously published Der Fall Franza und Requiem für Fanny Goldmann) Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna. Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann’s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age: “I’ve reflected about this question already: where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped…. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”(GuI 144)
As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn’t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents; after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. She wrote her doctoral dissertation (1950) on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as “a seduction … to German irrationality of thought” (GuI 137). From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself” (GuI 144).
From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome. Despite her precarious health—she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure—she traveled to Poland in 1973. She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire.
Joey Horsley
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