Poetry
Laut und Luise
Not translated into English
Ernst Jandl · 1966
Synopsis
A collection in which language is taken as material: swapped letters, dismantled words, poems that exist only once spoken aloud, poems to be seen, and a few prose pieces. The best known consists of a single word stripped of its vowels and repeated until it makes a trench under fire audible; another turns a square in Vienna into the din of a crowd.
Context
The poems, written for the most part between 1956 and 1958, had appeared in journals as early as 1957 and had been dismissed there as clowning. The collection waited two years for a place in a series directed at the publisher by Walter Helmut Heißenbüttel and Otto F. Walter, and appeared in October 1966, in a print run of 1,220 copies, with an afterword by Heißenbüttel. Its publication cost Otto F. Walter his position, as he was dismissed by the house's conservative owners; Jandl followed him to Luchterhand, which took over the book in 1971.
Who it is for
A short book that cannot be read with the eyes alone: it has to be spoken aloud. The author recorded his own reading of it as early as 1968.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author known, regarded today as one of the best-known German-language poetry collections of the post-war period.
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