Incentives - New Literature from Austria

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Project realization: the Office of Documentation of Contemporary Austrian Literature (reviews, author’s portraits) – The Association of Translators (translations) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

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[ book tip by Incentives ] “Yes, well… what our kind, when poet- / icising away, understands by poems –“br />
In the thin volume An den Mond (‘To the Moon’), Julian Schutting collects together “nature poems”, poems “on art“, “political poems” and poems “on poems and poets”. Born in Amstetten in 1937, he regards his poetry as a creative application of the literary past, of the characters of Shakespeare and Schiller, or the verse of Goethe and Hölderlin. Schutting relates his poems to classic works of literature, he continues them, integrating them into a new context; redesigns them and, in doing so, changes one’s view of them. His writing has become an activity, a creative reading.
In reflecting about the nature of poetry, about the power of the word, about the relation between art and death, Schutting creates, from his side, verbal artworks which joyfully reconstruct and ironically call into question their creation and arising. Despite their free rhythm and their open form, his poems seem curiously anachronistic, they breathe the educational heritage of antiquity, the spirit of the Enlightenment, the morbid sensuality of Romanticism, they resound like an echo from an age long past. Yet this call does not go unanswered. Schutting opposes it with the voice of the contemporary poet. He is aware that, today, it is no longer possible to sing innocently and naively, without any aberration, about surrendering to the beauty of nature or to happy love.

The ideal of the true, the good and the beautiful can only still be evoked in denial: “What is true is ugly”, and “What is beautiful [is also] ugly, not beautiful!” Yet for all that, Schutting’s poetry is by no means gloomy and comfortless, nor does the author tend to make moralising gestures. His tools are the poetic language, to which he feels an obligation, and only with that is he able to penetrate to reality and art, sometimes in earnest, sometimes ironically.br />
English translation by Peter Waugh.

Abbreviated review by Martina Wunderer, March 2009
The complete version

[ book info ] Schutting, Julian: An den Mond. (To the Moon). (original language: Deutsch) Residenz, St. Pölten, Salzburg, 2008 . ISBN: 978-3-7017-1505-3.