Two Poems

Friederike Mayröcker
Translated from the German by Alexander Booth

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Photo of Friederike Mayröcker

Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021) who was among the most influential and decorated German-language poets of the postwar period. The recipient of numerous awards, including the renowned Georg Büchner Prize, during her lifetime she published over eighty works, including poetry, prose, radio plays, and children’s books. She spent her entire life in Vienna.

Photo of Alexander Booth

Alexander Booth is a poet and translator who lives in Berlin. Other translations from the German include work by Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Rühm, Lutz Seiler and a new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His poetry collection Triptych was published in 2021 and Kantor in 2023.

Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The last book of hers to be published during her lifetime, as mornings and mossgreen I. Step to the window is an elliptical and, if at times cryptic, deeply personal, playful, and highly poetic collection of experiences, memories, dreams, desires, fears, visions, observations, and peregrinations through landscapes both real and imagined. The volume bears witness to her unique late lyrical style of pyrotechnical cut-up. Among many others, her beloved Derrida, Duchamp, Hölderlin, and Jean-Paul all appear, almost like guides, as Mayröcker bravely makes her way through infirmity, old age, and loneliness, prolonging her time as a prolific writer as much as possible.

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