Oswald Egger (b. Italy / Austria) 1963

Oswald Egger (b. Italy/Austria)

1963

Born in Lana, Italy on March 7, 1963, Oswald Egger graduated from the University of Vienna. He currently divides his time between Vienna and Hombroich, Germany.

     His first book of poetry and theatrical works was Der Erne der Rede, published in 1993. Gleich und gleich followed in1995, a year in which he won the Austrian “Staatstipendium” for Literature, an award he was again awarded in 2001.

     The following year, upon the publication of Blauberts Treue, he received a stipend for the Stuttgart School of Solitude. Juli, Steptember, August was published in 1997. And with the publication of Herde de Rede in 1999, he was awarded the Mondsee Poetry Award. To Observe the Obverse won him a George Saiko Award and the Brentano Award.

     In 2000 he was Artist in Residence at the Chinati-Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and the following year he was Writer in Residence at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. Nichts, das ist, followed in 2001, and over the past few years Egger has continued to publish new volumes of poetry and prose collections, including -broich (2003), Tag und Nacht sind zwei (2006), nihilum album (2007), Lustrationen (2008), Diskrete Stetigkeit (2008), Alinea (2009), and Die gance Zeit (2010). A collection of prose work, Pros, Proserpina, Prosa appeared in 2005 and Your Lenz in 2013. Green Integer published an English-language translation of Nichts, das ist as Room of Rumor: Tunings in 2004. He also recently published a collection of poetry speeches published by the Poetry Cabinet Foundation in Munich.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Die Erde Rede (Münster: Kleinheinrich, 1993); Gleich und gleich (Zürich: Howeg, 1995); Juli, Steptember, August (Stuttgart: Edition Soliture, 1997); Herde de Rede (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999); Poemanderm Schlaf (De Rede Dreh) (Züurch: Edition Howeg, 1999); Nichts, das is (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001); -broich: Homotopien eines Gedichts (Wien: Edition Korrespondenzen, 2003); Tag un Nacht sind swei Jahre (Warmbronn: Ulrich Keicher, 2006); nihilum album (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007); Lustrationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008); Diskrete Stetigkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008); Alinea. Vom Zersingen der Lieder in Babel: Für Werner Hamacher (Basel: Urs Engeler, 2009); Die ganze Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010); Gnomes und Amben (Berlin: Brueterich, 2015); Harlekinsmäntel und andere Bewandtnisse (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2017); Val di Non (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017);"Entweder ich habe die Fahrt am Mississippi nur geträumt, oder ich träume jetzt" (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021, with watercolors by the author)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Room of Rumor:Tunings, trans. by Michael Pisaro (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004); selection in The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century, Volume 7: At Villa Aurora—Nine Contemporary Poets Writing in German (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006)

from Room of Rumor

I would not dream of going away from the coast in

the desert, past rotor petals wind saddle
things, in the calm stream valley, from passing rage pole-
heap flat-felloes into gravel—these, stalks.
 
Again I want to pull in the rain strings, rain-
sword, rill-crinkle over prick-apple palms fair-fields-
intervals transfer lines, a channel
of bypass wings from power plantations
 
in the track wind out of breath, flock creatures perhaps
from etch-wind pore-cyclets, from hatch-
fleets and automats finger-trees, hand-
straights reaching through slope-sand, grasping at the air.

 

 

 

 

In the creeping darkness, epicure-animals, who bloom in the glimmer-walls and calibrate first floors, scan-bridge-gauge pump-baths, where leafless plants thrive and the overflow keeps to rotation, Bakelite-houses rafters, informer wing-creatures, air tumbler tunnels whirring alarms, fluttering, pixels in the x-arbitrary (an bury themselves under hollows).

 

(from Nichts, das is, 2001)

—Translated from the German by Michael Pissaro

 

I am saluted, fields, as non-foamed

deserts, crumble-piles pointed wool-lines, pebble rifts
and, blurring, moss-posts of the fore-spaced
the bloom-spatula up

on hill-flagelliforms with their stick-palm-

ferns moon-bristles corollary and cilia-muzzles,
new world-hood-plait like these so-called ornimals and
gazellepedes, lash-tassels and

stiff-spikelets from blue lilies, shift-seaweed in the

whirlpool wrist of nostril whales snort-funnels and the
split pin lapping glow-green and grind-teeth of the
eye-animals, white nesting and

 

 

 

Sometimes, when the sun is sunken under ground, gleam-lights, one round the other, is themselves self-capsizing inflaming, fields, huff-bow, and falling rustle-leaf deception, garrison gangways of fore-wall fortifications, holy-grain screen instantaneous incomprehensible glug-images appeared the trickle flarings, hard shadows shimmer in the bare bared wire (land). I am astounded sighting a thousand corrugated iron waves, the rivers of traffic in the fortress network of freeway-lines viaduct-stumps—and unto the traffic-tide I shall return.—

(from Nichts, das is, 2001)

—Translated from the German by Michael Pissaro