Friederike Mayröcker

Friederike Mayröcker (20 December 1924 – 4 June 2021) was an Austrian writer of poetry and prose, radio plays, children's books and dramatic texts. She experimented with language, and was regarded as an avant-garde poet, and as one of the leading authors in German. Her work, inspired by art, music, literature and everyday life, appeared as "novel and also dense text formations, often described as 'magical'." According to The New York Times, her work was "formally inventive, much of it exploiting the imaginative potential of language to capture the minutiae of daily life, the natural world, love and grief."

Life Mayröcker was born in Vienna, the daughter of a teacher and a milliner. Until age 11, she spent the summers regularly in the village Deinzendorf. In World War II, she was drafted as an air force aide, working as a secretary. From 1946 to 1969 Mayröcker was an English teacher at several public schools in Vienna.

She started writing poetry at age 15. In 1946, she met Otto Basil who published some of her first works in his avant-garde journal . Mayröcker's poems were published a few years later by renowned literary critic Hans Weigel. She was eventually introduced to the Wiener Gruppe, a group of mostly surrealist and expressionist Austrian authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann. Her first book, a collection of prose miniatures, Larifari – Ein konfuses Buch (Airy-fairy. A confused book), appeared in 1956. It remained the only book for ten years, but then the poem collection Death by Muses, meant her breakthrough and recognition as "a leading lyrical voice of her generation". Many more collections followed, published from 1979 by Suhrkamp.

Mayröcker is recognized as one of the most important contemporary Austrian poets. She also had success with her prose and radio plays. Four of them she wrote together with Ernst Jandl, her partner from 1954 until his death in 2000. While they shared a love of writing, they did not share a house or have any children. She once reflected in a poem that they stood together in the kitchen with poems in their heads, "but not the same one". Even so, after Jandl's death, she was so stricken with grief that she was initially unable to write. She eventually addressed this grief in her work, Requiem for Ernst Jandl, and resumed writing well into her nineties. Her prose is often described as autofictional, since Mayröcker uses quotes of private conversations and excerpts from letters and diaries in her work. She described her working process: "I live in pictures. I see everything in pictures, my complete past, memories are pictures. I transform pictures into language by climbing into the picture. I walk into it until it becomes language."In: Heimspiel (Journal of ORF – public Austrian radio station) March 2007, p. 5

She sometimes included her drawings in books, and exhibited her art. She was also inspired by music, and literature of Samuel Beckett and Friedrich Hölderlin, among many others. Her montages are also fed from everyday life observations, correspondence and newspapers. She produced "novel and also dense text formations, often described as "magical".

Mayröcker earned numerous German-language literary prizes and was frequently mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate.

A German-produced documentary chronicling Mayröcker's life and work was released in 2008. Her last lyric collection, da ich morgens und moosgrün. Ans Fenster trete (as mornings and mossgreen I. Step to the window), was short-listed for the prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2021, with the jury saying that she "fuses poetry and prose into 'proems' full of infatuations, futilities, fantasies, daydreams".

She saw life, "like a surprise - you never know how it ends, it's an adventure that you create yourself".

Mayröcker died on 4 June 2021, in Vienna, aged 96.

Awards

1963: Theodor Körner Prize 1969: Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden for Fünf Mann Menschen (with Ernst Jandl) 1975: Austrian Prize for Literature 1976: 1977: 1981: Anton Wildgans Prize 1982: Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature 1982: Roswitha Prize 1985: Literature Prize of Southwest Radio Baden-Baden 1985: Gold Medal of Vienna 1987: Austrian Decoration for Science and Art 1989: Hans-Erich-Nossack-Preis 1993: Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis of Bad Homburg 1994: Manuscripts Award 1996: Else Lasker-Schüler Poetry Prize 1996: Grand Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts 1997: America Award 1997: Droste-Preis (Meersburg) 2000: Christian-Wagner-Preis 2001: Karl Sczuka Prize for the radio play The envelope of the birds 2001: Georg Büchner Prize 2001: Honorary doctorate, Bielefeld University 2003: Premio Internazionale 2004: Honorary Ring of the Vienna 2009: Hermann-Lenz-Preis for poem Scardanelli 2010: Peter Huchel Prize for This jacket (namely) the griffin 2010: Horst-Bienek-Preis für Lyrik of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts 2011: Bremen Literature Prize for ich bin in der Anstalt. Fusznoten zu einem nichtgeschriebenen Werk 2016: Austrian Book Prize 2017: 2017: Hörbuch des Jahres

Works Source: Gesammelte Prosa 1949–2001 (Collected Prose 1949–2001) ed. by Klaus Reichert, 5 volumes, Frankfurt/Main 2001 Magische Blätter I-V (Magic Pages I–V), Frankfurt/Main 2001 Requiem für Ernst Jandl (Requiem for Ernst Jandl), Frankfurt/Main 2001 Mein Arbeitstirol – Gedichte 1996–2001 (My Working Tyrol – Poems 1996–2001), Frankfurt/Main 2003 Die kommunizierenden Gefäße (The Communicating Vessels) Frankfurt/Main 2003 Sinclair Sofokles der Baby-Saurier (Sinclair Sofokles the Baby Dinosaur) with coloured illustrations by Angelika Kaufmann, St. Pölten 2004 Gesammelte Gedichte 1939–2003 (Collected Poems) ed. by Marcel Beyer, Frankfurt/Main 2005 Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling (And I Shook a Darling), Frankfurt/Main 2005 fleurs, Suhrkamp, Berlin 2016, Pathos und Schwalbe, Suhrkamp, Berlin 2018,

Audio plays Audio plays by Mayröcker, some written jointly with Jandl, include:Hörspiele von Friederike Mayröcker ARD

Die Umarmung, nach Picasso (The Embrace, After Picasso) Repetitionen, nach Max Ernst (Repetitions, After Max Ernst) Schubertnotizen oder das unbestechliche Muster der Ekstase (Schubert-Notes or the Incorrupt Model of Ecstasy) Arie auf tönernen Füßen (Aria on Feet of Clay) Das zu Sehende, das zu Hörende (The to Be Seen, the to Be Heard) Die Kantate oder, Gottes Augenstern bist Du (The Cantata or, Gods Eye-star You Are), music by Wolfgang von Schweinitz (2003) with Ernst Jandl: Der Gigant (The Giant) Gemeinsame Kindheit (Childhood Together) Fünf Mann Menschen,Hörspiel / Fünf Mann Menschen (in German) Deutschlandfunk translated as Five Man Humanity Spaltungen (Partitions)

Libretto Stretta, music by Wolfram Wagner. World premiere at Sirene Opera, Vienna 2004Wolfram Wagner / Stretta (in German) Doblinger Musikverlag

Translations Several of Mayröcker’s collections have been translated into English, including Night Train (1992, trans. Beth Bjorklund); Heiligenanstalt (1994, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop); with each clouded peak (1998, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop and Harriett Watts); peck me up, my wing (2000, trans. Mary Burns); Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946–2006 (2007, trans. Richard Dove); and brütt, or The Sighing Gardens (2008, trans. Roslyn Theobald).

Friederike Mayröcker

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