Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016)
Auteur de Un plus grand espoir
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de Ilse Aichinger
Auckland: Hörspiele (Ilse Aichinger, Werke in acht Bänden (Taschenbuchausgabe)) (1991) 9 exemplaires
Spiegelgeschichte : Erzählungen und Dialoge — Auteur — 5 exemplaires
Neunzehn deutsche Erzählungen 3 exemplaires
Franz Kafka. 1883-1924. Katalog zu einer Ausstellung des Bundesministeriums für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten,… (1983) — Contributeur — 2 exemplaires
Kein Hügel für die wilden Pferde: Ein Tierbuch 1 exemplaire
CONSIGLIO GRATUITO 1 exemplaire
Spiegelgeschichte 1 exemplaire
Seegeister 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories (1986) — Contributeur — 339 exemplaires
The Slaying of the Dragon: Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination (1984) — Contributeur — 29 exemplaires
Deutsche Kurzgeschichten : eine Auswahl für mittlere Klassen (1972) — Auteur, quelques éditions — 5 exemplaires
Fiction, Volume 6, Number 1 — Contributeur — 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Aichinger, Ilse
- Date de naissance
- 1921-11-01
- Date de décès
- 2016-11-11
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- Austria
- Lieu de naissance
- Vienna, Austria
- Lieu du décès
- Wien, Österreich
- Lieux de résidence
- Linz, Austria
- Professions
- short story writer
novelist
Holocaust survivor
Playwright - Relations
- Eich, Günter (spouse)
Eich, Clemens (son) - Organisations
- Gruppe 47
Berliner Akademie der Künste
Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung - Prix et distinctions
- Austrian State Prize for European Literature(1995)
Literaturpreis der Stadt Wien(1974)
Marie Luise Kaschnitz Prize(1984)
Nelly Sachs-Preis
Georg Trakl-Preis - Courte biographie
- Ilse Aichinger was born to Jewish-Christian Austrian parents, and was raised a Catholic. She grew up in Linz and Vienna. With the rise of the Nazi regime, her family began to suffer anti-Semitic persecution in 1933. Ilse's education was interrupted by these events and during World War II she was sent to forced labor and lost all trace of her mother. Ilse was originally refused admission to medical school because she was half-Jewish. Although she eventually did enter medical school in 1947, she left to concentrate on her writing and also worked as a reader at the S. Fischer publishing house.
Membres
Critiques
Schlechte Wörter is a collection of short pieces (essays, stories, prose-poems - take your pick) from the first half of the 70s. As originally published in 1976 it also included the radio-play Gare Maritime, but in the 2015 collected works edition that has been moved into a separate volume of plays, and the editors have added the uncollected prose piece "Friedhof in B."
(I wondered if there could be a concealed joke here, because "Friedhof in B." opens with the cemetery in Nancy, and directly follows, "Rahels Kleider", which talks about an English schoolgirl called Peggy. It's unlikely that Aichinger could have been a Swallows and Amazons fan, but maybe the editor was...?)
The pieces clearly show how Aichinger was exploring ways of getting beyond the forced connections and causality of ordinary narrative: she generally starts out with an innocent-looking phrase, something random she has seen, overheard, or has just popped into her head, e.g. "the balconies of the home-countries are different", or "lovers of the western columns", or "the forgetfulness of St Ives", or just a nonsense word, like "Hemlin". Then she chases this phrase through a semi-controlled network of free associations to see what will happen to it. I assume she must have thrown a lot of such pieces away when they didn't lead anywhere interesting, but those she actually published are never simply random gibberish, but always give us some sort of new light on the way our minds and language and the world we live in work. Sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, always rather beautiful.… (plus d'informations)
(I wondered if there could be a concealed joke here, because "Friedhof in B." opens with the cemetery in Nancy, and directly follows, "Rahels Kleider", which talks about an English schoolgirl called Peggy. It's unlikely that Aichinger could have been a Swallows and Amazons fan, but maybe the editor was...?)
The pieces clearly show how Aichinger was exploring ways of getting beyond the forced connections and causality of ordinary narrative: she generally starts out with an innocent-looking phrase, something random she has seen, overheard, or has just popped into her head, e.g. "the balconies of the home-countries are different", or "lovers of the western columns", or "the forgetfulness of St Ives", or just a nonsense word, like "Hemlin". Then she chases this phrase through a semi-controlled network of free associations to see what will happen to it. I assume she must have thrown a lot of such pieces away when they didn't lead anywhere interesting, but those she actually published are never simply random gibberish, but always give us some sort of new light on the way our minds and language and the world we live in work. Sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, always rather beautiful.… (plus d'informations)
I first read Ilse Aichinger's The Bound Man when in college and felt a deep, instant connection with this powerful tale. I reread The Bound Man in my early 30s. And here I am, in my early 60s, drawn once again to this amazing short piece. The story opens with the main character, a man who remains nameless, waking up with the sun on his face and under the buzz of flies; however, "when he tried to whisk them away, he discovered that he was bound." Bound by a thick rope, that is. "His legs were tied all the way up to his thighs; a single length of rope was tied round his ankles, crisscrossed up his legs, and encircled his hips, his chest and his arms." He reflects, "perhaps children had been playing a practical joke on him." We are only given a few hints of his character, but one I especially enjoy is his sensitivity to natural beauty. "A few paces away lay the path across the plateau, and in the grass were wild pinks and thistles in bloom. He tried to lift his foot to avoid trampling on them, but the rope round his ankles prevented him." Here we have a man who wakes up bound in rope, struggles to his feet, can move only in hops, yet still is mindful of not destroying flowers in bloom!
A circus proprietor/animal tamer sees the bound man moving down a path. We read, "He moved slowly, to avoid being cut by the rope, but to the circus proprietor what he did suggested the voluntary limitation of an enormous swiftness of movement. He was enchanted by its extraordinary gracefulness." How impressed was the circus proprietor? The author writes, "The first leaps of a young panther had never filled him with such delights." So, we understand the bound man is sensitive and extremely graceful. It doesn't take that much imagination to see the bound man has the qualities of an artist, which adds to the charm and power of this fable-like story. The next thing we know, the bound man is the main attraction in the circus. The bound man's movement are nothing short of stupendous. "His fame grew from village to village, but the motions he went through were few and always the same; they were really quite ordinary motions, which he had continually to practice in the daytime in the half-dark tent in order to retain his shackled freedom. In that he remained entirely within the limits set by his rope he was free of it, it did not confine him, but gave him wings and endowed his leaps and jumps with purpose." Here we have metaphorically an artist working within set boundaries, say, for example, like a composer working within the framework of a string quartet.
The bound man's art reaches such a zenith, the author writes, "The result was that every movement that he made was worth seeing, and the villages used to hang about the camp for hours, just for the sake of seeing him get up from in front of the fire and roll himself in his blanket." Wow! The bound man is such an extraordinary artist he transcends the boundaries of simply performing as an artist for a set audience; for him, all of life is art. And to underscore how the bound man's art can be viewed as bound up (no pun intended) with life and death issues we read, "He was just the opposite of the hanged man--his neck was the only part of him that was free." Further on, the author notes how the circus proprietor's wife would see how much free play the rope allowed the bound man and also touch his tender wrists and ankles and how "he told her that sometimes he felt as if he were not tied up at all."
Toward the end of the tale, a wolf roams the countryside, killing livestock and terrorizing the countryside. The circus performers join the villages in an attempt to hunt down the wolf but their efforts fail. The bound man makes his way out to a distant hill and, predictably, encounters the wolf. The wolf pounces and the bound man seized the wolf by the throat. The author writes, to my mind, one of the most beautiful lines in all of literature:"Tenderness for a fellow creature arose in him, tenderness for the upright being concealed in the four-footed." Unbelievably, the bound man kills the wolf. The language the author uses to portray the struggle is pure poetry. Rather than tell how this magnificent tale ends, let me simply conclude by mentioning how, after learning how the bound man miraculously killed the wolf, the audience turns on the bound man. The circus proprietor's wife takes his side. "She shouted back at them that they needn't believe in the bound man if they didn't want to, they had never deserved him. Painted clowns were good enough for them." As in literature, as in life: the general population with their middle brow artistic values doesn't deserve the bound man-creative artist; for them, painted clowns are quite good enough. Existentialism? Surreal fable? Magical realism? This is a tale defying category.… (plus d'informations)
A circus proprietor/animal tamer sees the bound man moving down a path. We read, "He moved slowly, to avoid being cut by the rope, but to the circus proprietor what he did suggested the voluntary limitation of an enormous swiftness of movement. He was enchanted by its extraordinary gracefulness." How impressed was the circus proprietor? The author writes, "The first leaps of a young panther had never filled him with such delights." So, we understand the bound man is sensitive and extremely graceful. It doesn't take that much imagination to see the bound man has the qualities of an artist, which adds to the charm and power of this fable-like story. The next thing we know, the bound man is the main attraction in the circus. The bound man's movement are nothing short of stupendous. "His fame grew from village to village, but the motions he went through were few and always the same; they were really quite ordinary motions, which he had continually to practice in the daytime in the half-dark tent in order to retain his shackled freedom. In that he remained entirely within the limits set by his rope he was free of it, it did not confine him, but gave him wings and endowed his leaps and jumps with purpose." Here we have metaphorically an artist working within set boundaries, say, for example, like a composer working within the framework of a string quartet.
The bound man's art reaches such a zenith, the author writes, "The result was that every movement that he made was worth seeing, and the villages used to hang about the camp for hours, just for the sake of seeing him get up from in front of the fire and roll himself in his blanket." Wow! The bound man is such an extraordinary artist he transcends the boundaries of simply performing as an artist for a set audience; for him, all of life is art. And to underscore how the bound man's art can be viewed as bound up (no pun intended) with life and death issues we read, "He was just the opposite of the hanged man--his neck was the only part of him that was free." Further on, the author notes how the circus proprietor's wife would see how much free play the rope allowed the bound man and also touch his tender wrists and ankles and how "he told her that sometimes he felt as if he were not tied up at all."
Toward the end of the tale, a wolf roams the countryside, killing livestock and terrorizing the countryside. The circus performers join the villages in an attempt to hunt down the wolf but their efforts fail. The bound man makes his way out to a distant hill and, predictably, encounters the wolf. The wolf pounces and the bound man seized the wolf by the throat. The author writes, to my mind, one of the most beautiful lines in all of literature:"Tenderness for a fellow creature arose in him, tenderness for the upright being concealed in the four-footed." Unbelievably, the bound man kills the wolf. The language the author uses to portray the struggle is pure poetry. Rather than tell how this magnificent tale ends, let me simply conclude by mentioning how, after learning how the bound man miraculously killed the wolf, the audience turns on the bound man. The circus proprietor's wife takes his side. "She shouted back at them that they needn't believe in the bound man if they didn't want to, they had never deserved him. Painted clowns were good enough for them." As in literature, as in life: the general population with their middle brow artistic values doesn't deserve the bound man-creative artist; for them, painted clowns are quite good enough. Existentialism? Surreal fable? Magical realism? This is a tale defying category.… (plus d'informations)
I first read Ilse Aichinger's The Bound Man when in college and felt a deep, instant connection with this powerful tale. I reread The Bound Man in my early 30s. And here I am, in my early 60s, drawn once again to this amazing short piece. The story opens with the main character, a man who remains nameless, waking up with the sun on his face and under the buzz of flies; however, "when he tried to whisk them away, he discovered that he was bound." Bound by a thick rope, that is. "His legs were tied all the way up to his thighs; a single length of rope was tied round his ankles, crisscrossed up his legs, and encircled his hips, his chest and his arms." He reflects, "perhaps children had been playing a practical joke on him." We are only given a few hints of his character, but one I especially enjoy is his sensitivity to natural beauty. "A few paces away lay the path across the plateau, and in the grass were wild pinks and thistles in bloom. He tried to lift his foot to avoid trampling on them, but the rope round his ankles prevented him." Here we have a man who wakes up bound in rope, struggles to his feet, can move only in hops, yet still is mindful of not destroying flowers in bloom!
A circus proprietor/animal tamer sees the bound man moving down a path. We read, "He moved slowly, to avoid being cut by the rope, but to the circus proprietor what he did suggested the voluntary limitation of an enormous swiftness of movement. He was enchanted by its extraordinary gracefulness." How impressed was the circus proprietor? The author writes, "The first leaps of a young panther had never filled him with such delights." So, we understand the bound man is sensitive and extremely graceful. It doesn't take that much imagination to see the bound man has the qualities of an artist, which adds to the charm and power of this fable-like story. The next thing we know, the bound man is the main attraction in the circus. The bound man's movement are nothing short of stupendous. "His fame grew from village to village, but the motions he went through were few and always the same; they were really quite ordinary motions, which he had continually to practice in the daytime in the half-dark tent in order to retain his shackled freedom. In that he remained entirely within the limits set by his rope he was free of it, it did not confine him, but gave him wings and endowed his leaps and jumps with purpose." Here we have metaphorically an artist working within set boundaries, say, for example, like a composer working within the framework of a string quartet.
The bound man's art reaches such a zenith, the author writes, "The result was that every movement that he made was worth seeing, and the villages used to hang about the camp for hours, just for the sake of seeing him get up from in front of the fire and roll himself in his blanket." Wow! The bound man is such an extraordinary artist he transcends the boundaries of simply performing as an artist for a set audience; for him, all of life is art. And to underscore how the bound man's art can be viewed as bound up (no pun intended) with life and death issues we read, "He was just the opposite of the hanged man--his neck was the only part of him that was free." Further on, the author notes how the circus proprietor's wife would see how much free play the rope allowed the bound man and also touch his tender wrists and ankles and how "he told her that sometimes he felt as if he were not tied up at all."
Toward the end of the tale, a wolf roams the countryside, killing livestock and terrorizing the countryside. The circus performers join the villages in an attempt to hunt down the wolf but their efforts fail. The bound man makes his way out to a distant hill and, predictably, encounters the wolf. The wolf pounces and the bound man seized the wolf by the throat. The author writes, to my mind, one of the most beautiful lines in all of literature:"Tenderness for a fellow creature arose in him, tenderness for the upright being concealed in the four-footed." Unbelievably, the bound man kills the wolf. The language the author uses to portray the struggle is pure poetry. Rather than tell how this magnificent tale ends, let me simply conclude by mentioning how, after learning how the bound man miraculously killed the wolf, the audience turns on the bound man. The circus proprietor's wife takes his side. "She shouted back at them that they needn't believe in the bound man if they didn't want to, they had never deserved him. Painted clowns were good enough for them." As in literature, as in life: the general population with their middle brow artistic values doesn't deserve the bound man-creative artist; for them, painted clowns are quite good enough. Existentialism? Surreal fable? Magical realism? This is a tale defying category.… (plus d'informations)
A circus proprietor/animal tamer sees the bound man moving down a path. We read, "He moved slowly, to avoid being cut by the rope, but to the circus proprietor what he did suggested the voluntary limitation of an enormous swiftness of movement. He was enchanted by its extraordinary gracefulness." How impressed was the circus proprietor? The author writes, "The first leaps of a young panther had never filled him with such delights." So, we understand the bound man is sensitive and extremely graceful. It doesn't take that much imagination to see the bound man has the qualities of an artist, which adds to the charm and power of this fable-like story. The next thing we know, the bound man is the main attraction in the circus. The bound man's movement are nothing short of stupendous. "His fame grew from village to village, but the motions he went through were few and always the same; they were really quite ordinary motions, which he had continually to practice in the daytime in the half-dark tent in order to retain his shackled freedom. In that he remained entirely within the limits set by his rope he was free of it, it did not confine him, but gave him wings and endowed his leaps and jumps with purpose." Here we have metaphorically an artist working within set boundaries, say, for example, like a composer working within the framework of a string quartet.
The bound man's art reaches such a zenith, the author writes, "The result was that every movement that he made was worth seeing, and the villages used to hang about the camp for hours, just for the sake of seeing him get up from in front of the fire and roll himself in his blanket." Wow! The bound man is such an extraordinary artist he transcends the boundaries of simply performing as an artist for a set audience; for him, all of life is art. And to underscore how the bound man's art can be viewed as bound up (no pun intended) with life and death issues we read, "He was just the opposite of the hanged man--his neck was the only part of him that was free." Further on, the author notes how the circus proprietor's wife would see how much free play the rope allowed the bound man and also touch his tender wrists and ankles and how "he told her that sometimes he felt as if he were not tied up at all."
Toward the end of the tale, a wolf roams the countryside, killing livestock and terrorizing the countryside. The circus performers join the villages in an attempt to hunt down the wolf but their efforts fail. The bound man makes his way out to a distant hill and, predictably, encounters the wolf. The wolf pounces and the bound man seized the wolf by the throat. The author writes, to my mind, one of the most beautiful lines in all of literature:"Tenderness for a fellow creature arose in him, tenderness for the upright being concealed in the four-footed." Unbelievably, the bound man kills the wolf. The language the author uses to portray the struggle is pure poetry. Rather than tell how this magnificent tale ends, let me simply conclude by mentioning how, after learning how the bound man miraculously killed the wolf, the audience turns on the bound man. The circus proprietor's wife takes his side. "She shouted back at them that they needn't believe in the bound man if they didn't want to, they had never deserved him. Painted clowns were good enough for them." As in literature, as in life: the general population with their middle brow artistic values doesn't deserve the bound man-creative artist; for them, painted clowns are quite good enough. Existentialism? Surreal fable? Magical realism? This is a tale defying category.… (plus d'informations)
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 42
- Aussi par
- 20
- Membres
- 450
- Popularité
- #54,506
- Évaluation
- 4.0
- Critiques
- 7
- ISBN
- 81
- Langues
- 9
- Favoris
- 3
This was Aichinger's second collection of "stories" (Erzählungen), but you shouldn't expect actual narratives. They are surreal, dream-like flights of fancy, in which words, most of them very concrete, often domestic or agricultural in range, seem to be chosen with a calculated randomness so that sentences make short-range sense but fight against every attempt our minds make to impose some kind of long-range order or message or symbolism onto them. There are giants, like the milkmaid of St Louis, and dwarves, like the infantry who accompany Diogenes on his journey; there is a gigantic fan in the title story; there are hares who decide after living for many generations in the sandy bay of Port Sing to mount an expedition to the (unexplained and inexplicable) Sacred Mountain, and so on. Random travel seems to be a recurrent theme: a farmer in search of weather proverbs sails from Brittany to Western Scotland, goes thence by rocket to Utah, and ends up by the sacred river in Mecca. But there are theories, the narrator points out, that Mecca is not on a sacred river. Tell that to the crocodiles.
In the late story "Meine Sprache und ich", the narrator's language becomes a character in her own right, the two of them are travelling over various frontiers together, and it is the language, not the narrator, who appears suspect to the border guards. Aichinger seems to have had a deep-rooted and growing distrust for language herself, and she constantly feels the need to challenge assumptions about words and their meanings and associations. The stories are wonderfully disorienting and disturbing, but it doesn't do to read too many at once, or you end up like a visitor to a giant gallery of abstract art...… (plus d'informations)