What do you think?
Rate this book
The Communicating Vessels
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.
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.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
224 pages, Paperback
Published June 2, 2020
2 people are currently reading
136 people want to read
About the author
Friederike Mayröcker
110 books52 followersFriederike Mayröcker (born 20 December 1924 in Vienna) is an Austrian poet. From 1946 to 1969 Mayröcker was an English teacher at several public schools in Vienna. In 1969 she took a release from working as a teacher and in 1977 she retired early.
She started writing as a 15-year-old. In 1946, she meet Otto Basil who published some of her first works in his avant-garde journal Plan. Mayröcker's poems were published a few years later by renowned literary critic Hans Weigel. She was eventually introduced to the Wiener Gruppe, a group of mostly surrealist and expressionist Austrian authors.
Friederike Mayröcker is recognized as one of the most important contemporary Austrian poets. She also had success with her prose and radio plays. Four of them she wrote together with Ernst Jandl, with whom she lived together from 1954 until his death in 2000.
Her prose is often described as autofictional, since Mayröcker uses quotes of private conversations and excerpts from letters and diaries in her work.
Mayröcker describes her working process as follows: "I live in pictures. I see everything in pictures, my complete past, memories are pictures. I transform pictures into language by climbing into the picture. I walk into it until it becomes language."
A German biographical movie documenting Mayröcker's life and work was released in 2008
She started writing as a 15-year-old. In 1946, she meet Otto Basil who published some of her first works in his avant-garde journal Plan. Mayröcker's poems were published a few years later by renowned literary critic Hans Weigel. She was eventually introduced to the Wiener Gruppe, a group of mostly surrealist and expressionist Austrian authors.
Friederike Mayröcker is recognized as one of the most important contemporary Austrian poets. She also had success with her prose and radio plays. Four of them she wrote together with Ernst Jandl, with whom she lived together from 1954 until his death in 2000.
Her prose is often described as autofictional, since Mayröcker uses quotes of private conversations and excerpts from letters and diaries in her work.
Mayröcker describes her working process as follows: "I live in pictures. I see everything in pictures, my complete past, memories are pictures. I transform pictures into language by climbing into the picture. I walk into it until it becomes language."
A German biographical movie documenting Mayröcker's life and work was released in 2008
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 24, 2022
Mayröcker is a writer of the highest echelons.
Her literature exists on a level of almost pure consciousness. Not a stream of consciousness per se, because the poetry is just too considered, and still it’s as immediate and as engrossing as thought. Surreal in its rejection of logic, philosophical in its adherence to epiphany blooming inside an expression of literature. Grief. Joyful. Joyful.
Her literature exists on a level of almost pure consciousness. Not a stream of consciousness per se, because the poetry is just too considered, and still it’s as immediate and as engrossing as thought. Surreal in its rejection of logic, philosophical in its adherence to epiphany blooming inside an expression of literature. Grief. Joyful. Joyful.
Read
July 29, 2024The Communicating Vessels offers two grief sequences in memoriam to Mayröcker’s late husband, the poet Ernst Jandl. Mayröcker’s experimental (non)style, a kind of heavily recursive diaristic stenography, is singular and enthralling, and formally probes the limits of sense in order to get closer to the reality of mourning. It is a beautiful thing to behold, the entirety of which kept me on the edge of tears. Her death this year is an incredible loss for world literature, but the continued effort of bringing her to the English-reading audience should be celebrated.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews