Additional Book Information
Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781681370545
Pages: 112
Publication Date: November 15, 2016
Berlin-Hamlet
by Szilárd Borbély, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
Shortlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2017 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry
Before his tragic death, Szilárd Borbély had gained a name as one of Europe's most searching new poets. Berlin-Hamlet—one of his major works—evokes a stroll through the phantasmagoric shopping arcades described in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, but instead of the delirious image fragments of nineteenth-century European culture, we pass by disembodied scraps of written text, remnants as ghostly as their authors: primarily Franz Kafka but also Benjamin himself or the Hungarian poets Attila József or Erno Szép. Paraphrases and reworked quotations, drawing upon the vanished prewar legacy, particularly its German Jewish aspects, appear in sharp juxtaposition with images of post-1989 Berlin frantically rebuilding itself in the wake of German reunification.
Praise
A beautiful, authoritative book.
—George Szirtes, The New York Times
[Borbély’s] poetry is epoch-making.
—Péter Nádas
Berlin-Hamlet is a rich tapestry of "subjective", "pseudo-subjective" and "meditative" texts, all related to present-day Berlin, though tinged with memories of more sinister places like Wannsee, where the decision about the systematic extermination of European Jews was taken by Nazi bureaucrats in 1942.
—World Literature Today
[Borbély] is considered one of the most important figures in contemporary Hungarian literature, having had an immense impact on the transformation of Hungarian poetry in the last decade, strongly influencing the conceptualization of poetry’s social role and linguistic-thematic possibilities...Borbély’s poetry, prose, and essays try to bring the readers closer to the lives of those who cannot speak of their trauma or suffering. They can be uneducated and poor villagers, survivors of the Holocaust, women grieving after a miscarriage, or victims of terrible aggression. Through Borbély’s texts we readers become increasingly less cruel-hearted.
—László Bedecs, Asymptote