The Communicating Vessels

Two Portraits of Grief by Friederike Mayroecker

By: Friederike Mayrcker, Alexander Booth (Translator)

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Paperback | 15 April 2021

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

Friederike Mayroecker 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, Mayroecker turned to her art to come to terms with the loss. Taking its cue from the Andre 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.

Industry Reviews

"A raw literary meditation on loss." -Kirkus

"In Mayroecker's death-haunted late style, the poet's power expresses itself in a rigorous program of documentation and transcription... to preserve in poetry what is being lost or has been lost in life."
-Ryan Ruby, Poetry Foundation

"In his masterly translation of Vessels, a work that confidently flouts grammatical rules and linguistic convention, Booth manages to enter Mayroecker's mind and interpret her raw, cascading thoughts. It's heartbreaking to witness her anguish and disorientation, while simultaneously astounding to revel in her complete liberation from the confines of language." --Sophia Stewart, Asymptote

"With breathless abandon, [Mayroecker] has continually expanded her oeuvre and exploded notions of genre and convention, while always getting to the heart of this earthly living."
-BOMB magazine

"Friederike Mayroecker, among the world's greatest living writers, reinterprets literary vocation as total theater."
-Wayne Koestenbaum

"Through the powerful immediacy of her at times heart-wrenching language, Mayroecker proves that grief does not have to be private and can acquire a dignity that triumphs over any worry about decency."
-Heide Kunzelmann, TLS

"The Communicating Vessels, the depth of Friederike Mayroecker's grief and loneliness, as well as her awe and gratitude at the world around her, are brought vividly to life in English by Alexander Booth's translation."
-Anna Weber, White Whale Bookstore

Alexander Booth's translation masterfully gives way to Mayroecker's antics. One intuits that the translation is never ahead of the text, but that the galloping sentences in the original German exist independently of any equivalences.
-Carla Chinski, Full Stop

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