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Peter Altenberg (akaRichard Engländer, 1859-1919) born into a well-to-do, assimilated Viennese Jewish family, took advantage of a medical diagnosis of "over-excitation of the nervous system" and a consequent "incapacity for gainful employment" to devote himself heart and soul to the life of the Bohemian poet. Author of eleven books published during his lifetime and two more after his death, Altenberg also pioneered the verynotion of loose-fitting leisure attire, designed a line of necklaces, favored sandals, walking sticks and slivovitz. His long list of literary admirers included Karl Kraus, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler and George Bernard Shaw.
Recipient of the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year, Peter Wortsman is the author of A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales, the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words, the recent memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, and the forthcoming novel Cold Earth Wanderers. His translations from the German include Robert Musil¢s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Heinrich Heine¢s Travel Pictures, Peter Altenberg¢s Telegrams of the Soul, and Tales of the German Imagination: From The Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, an anthology published by Penguin Classics.
Telegrams of the Soul
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ISBN-13:
9780981955773
- Publisher: Steerforth Press
- Publication date: 04/04/2005
- Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 147
- File size: 3 MB
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"If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first sound,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose." So said Thomas Mann of the work of PeterAltenberg. A virtuoso Fin-de-Siècle Viennese innovator of what he called the "telegram style" of writing, Altenberg’s signature short prose straddles the line between the poetic and the prosaic, fiction and observation, harsh verity and whimsical vignette. Inspired by the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire and the Feuilleton—a light journalistic reflection of his day—Altenberg carved out a spare, strikingly modern aesthetic that speaks with an eerie prescience to our own impatient time. Peter Wortsman’s new selection and translation reads like a sly lyrical wink from the turnof-the-century of the telegram to the turn-of-the-millennium of email.
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Kirkus Reviews
Short prose pieces by a Viennese eccentric gifted with the lost art of high sentimentality. These tales and essays, some only a few lines long, convey the fleeting intoxications of a fin-de-siecle idler. A dedicated admirer of the fair sex-especially, and no doubt disturbingly for many modern readers, as represented by 13-year-old charmers-Altenberg (1859-1919) passed his life in the coffee shops and brothels of Vienna. The pieces he wrote about his experiences there were admired by, among others, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Kafka. A perennial enthusiast, the author cannot write four sentences running without resorting to the exclamation point. Rapture is triggered by the mundane: a dock in the sun, artificial flowers, a turn of phrase. His passion for women and young girls is exalted by attentive and unfailing compassion. In one piece, learning of a working-class nymphet's passion for silk swatches, he obtains a box of them from the manufacturer. His ensuing description of the party she creates for her fellow urchins, presiding over their admiration of the rags like a queen, ends with the child's peremptory dismissal of her benefactor. Another series recounts the everyday life of the Ashanti inhabitants of an African village transported to serve as a tourist attraction in the Viennese zoo. Altenberg developed close friendships with many of the Ashanti; his portraits of them are as sensitive as his renderings of family members, literary and professional acquaintances, and prostitutes. While the prose here is often overblown, it proceeds from genuine excesses of feeling; the writer has been carried away, and in almost every case, he takes the reader with him. Winningexpressions of pleasure, at once lyrical, incisive and funny.
From the Publisher
The freest soul of the epoch. —Karl Kraus In his small stories his whole life is mirrored. And every step, every movement he makes confirms the truth of his words. Peter Altenberg is a genius of nullifications, a singular idealist who discovers the splendors of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffeehouses. —Franz Kafka
If it be permitted to speak of "love at first sound," then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose. —Thomas Mann
Some [of Altenberg’s pieces] are like steel projectiles, so tightly enclosed in themselves, so complete and precise in their form; and like projectiles, they pierce the breast; you are struck and you bleed. Some are like crystals and diamonds, sparkling in the multicolored reflections of the light of life, gleaming with captured rays of sunlight and glittering with a hidden inner fire. Some are like ripe fruits, warm with the waft of summer, swollen and sweet. —Felix Salten
Altenberg seems singular even when compared to his nearest literary kin: less austere and allegorical than Baudelaire, and more involved with society than Robert Walser, his short prose approaches form in ways that are uncannily relevant now. —James Guida, The New Yorker