Old Rendering Plant - Couverture souple

Hilbig, Wolfgang

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 193188367X ISBN 13 : 9781931883672

Editeur : Two Lines Press, 2017

Synopsis

What falsehoods do we believe as children? And what happens when we realize they are lies—possibly heinous ones? In Old Rendering Plant Wolfgang Hilbig turns his febrile, hypnotic prose to the intersection of identity, language, and history’s darkest chapters, immersing readers in the odors and oozings of a butchery that has for years dumped biological waste into a river. It starts when a young boy becomes obsessed with an empty and decayed coal plant, coming to believe that it is tied to mysterious disappearances throughout the countryside. But as a young man, with the building now turned into an abattoir processing dead animals, he revisits this place and his memories of it, realizing just how much he has missed. Plumbing memory’s mysteries while evoking historic horrors, Hilbig gives us a gothic testament for the silenced and the speechless. With a tone worthy of Poe and a syntax descended from Joyce, this suggestive, menacing tale refracts the lost innocence of youth through the heavy burdens of maturity.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Wolfgang Hilbig was born in 1941 in the coal-mining region of Meuselwitz, Saxony; his father fell in the battle of Stalingrad. Hilbig worked as a stoker in East Germany’s industrial wasteland, and his densely poetic texts literally emerged from the boiler-room. But he was too independent and his work too dark to fit in with the new breed of working-class poets fostered by the German Democratic Republic. An autodidact, he read voraciously, and was influenced by German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Bob Dylan. In 1985, Hilbig moved to West Germany, but remained a profoundly East German writer, addressing the conflicts of his Eastern-Western existence with an intensity that made him one of Germany’s most important postwar writers. In 2002 Hilbig was awarded the Büchner Prize, Germany’s most prestigious literary award, for his life’s work. He died in 2007 after a long struggle with cancer, leaving a substantial oeuvre of poetry, short prose, novellas, and novels.

Isabel Fargo Cole is a U.S.-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations include five books of Wolfgang Hilbig’s, including Old Rendering Plant, for which she received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. She has also been the recipient of a prestigious PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and her novel Die grüne Grenze was a finalist for the 2018 Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Two Lines Press
• Date d'édition: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 193188367X
• ISBN 13: 9781931883672
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 120
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible