How to make an assessment of the writings/works of Friederike Mayröcker?
Maybe by not doing so.
1
For a long time it was Friederike-Mayröcker-and-Ernst-Jandl.
They were inseparable in many way, the ways that really mattered.
They collaborated on performance and radio pieces – their work was more sound art, vocal layering, than what we think of as a ‘play’, ‘drama’.
And between them they won innumerable prizes. Among them the top, Georg Büchner Prize, for Friederike Mayröcker.
Friederike Mayröcker’s work has always been distinctive.
The Poetry Foundation site tells us, She is associated with the experimental German writers and artists of the Wiener Gruppe (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/friederike-mayrocker).
Widely and deeply read, the work she has produced is deeply referenced – whether to Robert and Clara Schumann’s Marriage Diaries, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Hölderlin, and probably a huge number that I do not recognise.
And not only European writers: she references Frank O’Hara, Jorie Graham, James Joyce, in Scardanelli alone. Elsewhere she gives John Dowland, Gertrude Stein, Glen Gould, even Blixa Bargeld of Einsturzende Neubauten – in other words, very eclectic.
Friederike-Mayröcker-and-Ernst-Jandl are/were both Austrian writers, born within a few years of each other in 1020s Vienna.
This places them in the same environment and time as Ingeborg Bachmann (born Klagenfurt, Carinthia, but Vienna-based). Her novel, Malina, is based in Vienna’s district 6, whilst Friederike Mayröcker has lived a few minutes tram journey away, in district 5, for fifty years or more.
Ernst Jandl.
He wrote he started off as a conventional enough poet, but then he went to a meeting of concrete poets/Dadaists… and the fun they were having, the enjoyment…. Joie de vivre was very much his.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Jandl
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPCR17dvfmg
But then he went and died in 2000. After fifty years together.
2
Her subsequent publications include:
Requiem for Ernst Jandl (2001. Published Seagull Books, 2018),
Embracing the Sparrow Wall Or 1-Schumann-Madness (2011; Oomph Books, 2019),
Scardanelli (2018; The Song Cave, 2018),
chart the loss, and also continuance:
When your soul is bleeding, says Elke Erb, how can you not find words, says Elke Erb, among Mongolia melancholy monochrome and green passers-by, is he not sending you a profusion of loving-souls, and you in their midst…(translation Roslyn Theobald, Requiem for Ernst Jandl)
And you can read here the shifts of register, tone. The repetition is like a reminding, a keeping-concentration, and so not flowing away with distress – there is that, it is part of grieving, has to be allowed/admitted/lived-with.
The text is not public display, nor wholly self-referential, but walks a path where the borders blend. Do not think of strict demarcations between states, intents, because there are none.
And yet the text is here presented for publication. There have been public readings.
This is the personal made the default; the public persona has been ousted. There have been more than enough of those, thank you.
To read/listen, is to navigate the seas, the jungles and seas, of living responsiveness to the self’s and the world’s demands.
Book blurb gives us:
Tumult, ferocity, flow, immersion… reinterprets literary vocation as total theatre (Wayne Koestenbaum, Scardanelli)
( – Scardanelli is one way Friederich Hölderlin addressed himself in his ‘madness’.)
The title of her earlier, 1990s and long out of print selection in translation on Caracanet, is Raving Language
…this quiet but passionate lament grows into a song of enthralling intensity.(Roslyn Theobald, Requiem for Ernst Jandl)
There is also ‘quiet… intensity’ in Embracing the Sparrow-Wall Amid The Ivy:
whether the wet laundry in my chamber and thinking of Silvie what all she requited to me on that day when HE was buried she slept beside that night because I was afraid to remain alone and the composition >>To Silvia<< by Franz Schubert which haunted me because I had cried a lot and the winter tapped against the glass…
This is not rambling, but following a trail.
Jonathon Larson, translator of, and in his Introduction to, Embracing the Sparrow Wall, writes of her constructions as a ‘cloud of sound‘, and of her ‘density and grain of phrasing’.
Her writing purposely eschews construction issues, rules and habits of argument, discussion, the public voice, the ‘poetic’, for flow that eddies, discovers itself, discovers others.
Musicians are referenced often, and ‘orchestration’ is one way of describing her writing. And yet musical orchestration is a very regulated transposition of forms.
Her placing of words, phrasings, is with pin-point accuracy of skill. Perhaps this is a kind if transposing.
Of course, this taxes the translator’s skills hugely. She has been very fortunate in the ones listed here; they have done the work great service in making it available and also accessible to us.
All this points out the uniqueness of her writing, her forms, purposes.
3
The Elke Erb quote, above, is interesting.
Elke Erb has lived throug the East German regime, from almost its beginning to its end. With the GDR’s iron emphasis on socialist realism and materialism, the survival of the term/concept ‘soul’ is all the more striking. Is this persistence, or resistance?
Wiki tells us:
In his years of madness, Hölderlin would occasionally pencil ingenuous rhymed quatrains, sometimes of a childlike beauty, which he would sign with fantastic names (most often “Scardanelli”) and give fictitious dates from previous or future centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hölderlin
Why do I mention this?
The Poetry Foundation tells us She has also cited Friedrich Hölderlin as an important influence, describing his poetry as a type of drug she takes before writing.(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/friederike-mayrocker)
The disjunction between the tuning-into what Wiki termed the ‘childlike beauty’, and Poetry Foundation’s description of her creation from that: ‘the apparently random: the habitual use of collage techniques which layer seemingly disparate levels of experience‘ is very revealing.
The Institute of Modern Languages site, tells us of : the tension between a playful and freely associative poetics on the one hand, and concentrated discipline on the other.
(https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/research-centres/centre-study-contemporary-womens-writing/languages/german/friederike-mayröcker)
Her earlier work has used the formal format of much experimental work, from the Oulipo writers onwards. We see this in:
Will Wither Like Grass. My Hand too and Pupil
will wither like grass . my foot and my hair and my silentest word
will wither like grass . your mouth your mouth
will wither like grass . how you gaze into me
will wither like grass . my cheek my cheek and the little flower
which you know is there will wither like grass
will wither like grass . your mouth your purple-coloured mouth
will wither like grass . but the night but the mist but the plenitude
will wither like grass will wither like grass
—Translated from the German by Richard Dove http://www.greeninteger.com/green_integer_review/issue_4/Friederike-Mayröcker.htm
David Constatine, in his translations of Frederich Hölderlin writes, ‘Hölderlin is a poet we can read with our own atrocious times in mind. He is a deeply religious poet whose fundamental tenet is absence and the threat of meaninglessness. He confronted hopelessness as few writers have, he was what Rilke called “exposed”; but there is no poetry like his for the constant engendering of hope, for the expression, in the body and breath of poems, of the best and most passionate aspirations’
(http://www.jbeilharz.de/hoelderlin/fh.html)
Hope, then, and the ‘best and most passionate aspirations‘ – there I think, we have it.
There is in her writing what she terms, ‘tender prose’.
She is very specific and determined about this description. See the interview for Green Integer Review: http://www.greeninteger.com/green_integer_review/issue_4/Friederike-Mayröcker.htm
And so:
4
The title of her latest book Scardanelli, as we seen, is one name chosen by Frederich Hölderlin in his ‘madness’ phase.
And if we read the writings of each we see many similarities in style.
She had been working on and towards a language of expression for her grief, and ‘Raving Language’ was one description.
In contrast, her book, Scardanelli, consists of short – little more than a page at most, often much less -pieces. Lyrical remembrances of walks with Ernst Jandl, friends afterwards, walks in the mountains, Venice.
I say lyrical, because they are marked by emotive recapturing of moments of happiness, stillness.
If we read Frederich Hölderlin’s later poems – see James Mitchell’s: http://holderlinpoems.com/list_of_poems.html – we see similar short works, that capture similar moments of lyrical recapture.
Each book is different, in style, approach, and this really attracts me.
Rather than holding the same achieved poise in address, she experiments, goes where the need takes. For each book is an event, comes from a need rather than an flow of text, play of language, keeping oneself in the market.
michael9murray 
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