Incentives – la nouvelle littérature d’Autriche

readme.cc propose un accès en plusieurs langues à la littérature autrichienne la plus récente. Réalisée en collaboration avec la Maison de la littérature à Vienne, cette plateforme de lecture offre un aperçu de l’actualité littéraire du pays.

Des critiques littéraires – journalistes et/ou universitaires – présentent des ouvrages qui viennent de paraître, de courts extraits permettent de se faire une première idée, des notices biographiques complètent la présentation.

Pour l’instant, ces informations sont disponibles en cinq langues : allemand, anglais, français, tchèque et hongrois.

Le projet « Incentives » cherche à promouvoir l’internationalisation de la littérature autrichienne et la traduction de textes récents.

Réalisation : centre de documentation pour la nouvelle littérature autrichienne (comptes rendus, notices biographiques) – association des traducteurs (traductions) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

http://www.literaturhaus.at

[ Recommandation de Literatur Schweiz ] «Shanghai is not a city. This is not the word that comes to mind. Nothing comes. Then astonishment at the noise. Noise like the ocean or an engine of war. A tumult, an infinity of perspectives, angles and surfaces amplifying the racket.» The man who dedicates himself to that megalomaniac colossus Shanghai in «Reinforced Concrete» – and does so with all his senses, especially his sense of rhythm and the sound of words – is forty years old and severely disabled since birth.
He is the author Philippe Rahmy, who was invited there by the Chinese Writers Association. This residency in Shanghai is, for Rahmy – who suffers from brittle-bone disease – the first time he has gone on a journey. «He has never learned to travel.» The city reveals itself to him in all its simplicity: «at the pavement edge…is all the banality that flowers on a piece of asphalt.» So, observations on everyday scenes, smells, light conditions, alternate with political and philosophical reflections on present-day China. The physically and mentally overwhelming brutality of Chinese daily life forces to the surface similarly powerful scenes and memories from his childhood. Shanghai becomes a picture-puzzle in which the pain of the places he visits brutally comes up against the pain of his disabled childhood. A childhood, in which a traumatic event, the author’s birth, is foreshadowed: «That moment is the moment of my death. It is the moment of my birth as a writer. We write in order to silence the beast in ourselves.»

(Sabine Graf)

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: www.12swissbooks.ch

[ Citation préférée ] «Shanghai is not a city. This is not the word that comes to mind. Nothing comes. Then astonishment at the noise. Noise like the ocean or an engine of war. A tumult, an infinity of perspectives, angles and surfaces amplifying the racket.»

[ Info ] Rahmy, Philippe: Béton armé. (original language: French) Reinforced Concrete. Éditions de La Table Ronde, Paris, 2013 . ISBN: 978-2-7103-7073-4.