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 ] Bettina Balàka, who was born in 1966, is a very versatile authoress. She writes novels, short stories, poems, plays, radio plays and essays and has received many literary prizes. In Schaumschluchten (‘Foam Ravines’), Balàka presents about 50 poems, which may have been remotely influenced by Rilke and Trakl, Celan and Bachmann. Intriguingly, the titles of Balàka’s texts do not indicate any particular way of interpreting them. Instead, the individual lines of verse gradually evolve their own anarchistic potential. The result is not a unified structure, but instead something fragmentary, disjointed, a synthesis and metamorphosis. Irritating verses, with a high degree of linguistic magic, they remain with one for a long time after reading.

In Balàka’s in-between worlds and in-between times, Venice is not far from the Punjab, and dromedaries walk through Alpine ravines. Some things are funny, but still more things are eerie. Operated models wander through boutiques like puppets, while expectant mothers become transformed into werewolves. Occasionally, the splendour and the glory of a distant past exhales its poisonous breath. The images alternate between a tomb of princes and a mass grave, or tell stories of blood-soaked brocade, torn flags and broken ribcages. History becomes legend, passing into saga, myth and fairytale, and becomes mixed with motifs from fantasy films and horror movies. The past is dipped into the acid bath of knowledge. Decline and decay are the relics of dynastic adventure: “someone once made history here/ dropped sour apples here/ and below the fingernails/ bores the worm”.

Sometimes, if rarely, Bettina Balàka is very frank. In a lively and humorous poem, the devil becomes an almost likeable playboy: “The devil/ wears a fox collar/ and drives a devilishly foxy team/ and is also himself/ a rather young fox”. Balàka burlesque – further proof of this astounding writer’s exceptional ability to transform.

English translation by Peter Waugh.
Abbreviated review by Judith Leister, May 2009.
For the complete version: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=7258

[ book info ] Balàka , Bettina: Schaumschluchten . (Foam Ravines). (original language: German) Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz / Vienna, 2009 . ISBN: 978-3-85420-750-4.