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Lädt ... Gesammelte Gedichtevon Thomas Bernhard
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Bernhard's Collected Poem is a key to understanding Bernhard's irascible black comedy found in virtually all of his writings--even down to his last will and testament. Beloved Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) began his career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titles as On Earth and in Hell, In Hora Mortis, and Under the Iron of the Moon. Bernhard's early poetry, bearing the influence of Georg Trakl, begins with a deep connection to his Austrian homeland. As his poems saw publication and recognition, Bernhard seemed always on the verge of joining the ranks of Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, and other young post-war poets writing in German. During this time, however, his poems became increasingly more obsessive, filled with undulant self-pity, counterpointed by a defamatory, bardic voice utterly estranged from his country, all of which resulted in a magisterial work of anti-poetry--one that represents Bernhard's own harrowing experience with his leitmotif of success and failure, which makes his fiction such a pleasure. There is much to be found in these pages for Bernhard fans of every stripe. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)831.914Literature German literature and literatures of related languages German poetry 1900- 1900-1990 1945-1990Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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As we would expect, Bernhard's verse is uniformly pessimistic in its view of the world. I think I counted eight poems that didn't make any obvious reference to death (four of them were from an anomalous early set of sonnets about Salzburg). There are signs of his bleak sense of humour, but the jokes, if they are jokes, are less obvious than in the later work.
What I did find surprising is the way Bernhard adopts quite a different persona in his poetry from the I-narrator of most of his fiction. The lyric narrator seems to be a complete Austrian countryman, drawing most of his metaphors from cowsheds, fields, and woods. Where the real Bernhard at this time had no idea who his father was, the poet has a father who has farmed these hills for many generations and has suffered in the war (in various different ways in different poems). And in a couple of poems he even gives himself some rather unconvincing children. Of course, he doesn't adopt this Heimat-persona for patriotic reasons: he wants to force us to contrast the comfortable world of nineteenth century romantic lyrics with the real darkness of a world where recent history has blasted away any thought we might have had of taking comfort in religion, human company (something which is almost always absent in these poems), or the eternal cycles of nature.
In the collection In hora mortis (talk about a redundant title..!), he largely replaces countryside imagery with language borrowed from the Psalms, to create a sequence focussing on the failures of religion to comfort us. This is about as bleak as it gets.
Another interesting thing about the lyrics when you see a lot of them together like this is the way they seem to foreshadow the "variation form" Bernhard uses in his prose — very often, later poems in a collection will pick up images from earlier poems, twist them around in different permutations, and add some unexpected depth to something that looked straightforward the first time around.
Die Irren Die Häftlinge is the only really obviously political work here, two long poems printed on facing pages so that we read them in parallel, the lines on the left pages celebrating the (illusory) freedom of the mad, those on the right pages showing us how we are all the prisoners of an oppressive state.
Ave Vergil is an oddity: a long poem in the style of "The Waste Land," mostly written whilst Bernhard was studying in England. In a note he added when it was published in 1981, Bernhard effectively dismisses it as juvenilia, but says he's allowing it to be published because of the way it illustrates how much he was influenced by Eliot, Pound & co. — that's certainly not something you could easily deduce from his prose work. ( )