Transcript by Heimrad Bäcker and translated by Patrick Greaney, Vincent Kling

This is poetry from Austria.

Transcript by Heimrad Bäcker translated by Patrick Greaney, Vincent Kling is published by Dalkey Archive Press. This is a Book originally written in German. This was published in 2010.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781564785657E12.

Transcript, by Heimrad Bäcker and translated by Patrick Greaney, Vincent Kling from German, brings Austrian German-language poetry into English through Bäcker’s transcript method, archival witness, and the unsettling transformation of historical document into poetic form. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem begins making its own weather. I would read it for transcript, evidence, atrocity, and the cold force of language placed under pressure, not as a fixed lesson about a nation, period, or school. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Transcript belongs in the translated poetry library because it belongs as a difficult but essential work of documentary poetry after fascism.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.