Incentives - New Literature from Austria

readme.cc provides multilingual access to the latest Austrian literature. In collaboration with the Literaturhaus in Vienna the reading forum offers the latest insights about literature published in Austria.

Literary journalists and researchers introduce current new publications; reading samples allow for a closer look at the texts; short portraits of the authors complement the picture.

The range of information is currently available in five languages: German, English, French, Czech and Hungarian.

The Project "Incentives" targets at the internationalization of Austrian literature, respectively the translation of current texts.

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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[ המלצה מאת 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

[ ציטוט אהוב ] «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.»

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