Discover Top Posts Tagged with #thomas stangl

Was wären wir ohne das, was uns immer gefehlt hat?

Thomas Stangl

#Thomas Stangl #Quote #Literatur #Schreiben #Fehlen #Menschliches

"Es geht nicht oder nur am Rand um etwas, das man Bildung nennt, und die Bücher - völlig unterschiedliche Bücher, von Nazi-Mist über Karl May bis hin zu Dostojewski und Musil - waren für uns in Wahrheit ohne Inhalt, hatten ihren Wert nur als die Spur einer anderen Existenz. Etwas, das andockt an eine andere Existenz, man kann nicht darüber reden und muss es auch nicht, es genügt, dass die Bücher da sind und da bleiben. Ich habe immer gedacht, die anderen Menschen wissen, wie man sich bewegt, wie man redet, wie man in Gesellschaft lebt, nur ich weiß das nicht. Aber auch die anderen Menschen wissen das nur in einem eng begrenzten Raum; sobald man herausgerät, beginnt die Ungeschicklichkeit, die Angst, das Scheitern, aber auch die Freiheit."

Thomas Stangl, Quecksilberlicht

#thomas stangl

Greift man nach dem Realen, greift man immer auch ins Nichts. Jeder vergisst den Großteil seines Lebens.

Thomas Stangl, "Wo die Texte herkommen", in: Der Standard, 10.04.2016

#literatur #worte #schreiben #thomas stangl #literature #writing #words #ausstellung #exhibition

October 2015 issue of Asymptote is out. Among other great things, a translation of part of Thomas Stangl’s novel Der einzige Ort.

After the destruction one can let the picture return, at a safe distance, on the other side of the border from which the open palm turns one away with the stop signal. Skin that is tightened around the round of the eyeball, visible behind the names, the legends, the cultural garbage, the ghosts of those cave dwellers who are buried under strata of time, with no firm hold, no chains and no outlook, as is the way of things with ghosts. In the imagination of the German Africanist, impostor, lover and madman Leo Frobenius, the Garamantes emerge from the darkness after centuries, now wandered to West Africa, to where they, founding empires, transpose their culture and make sure that nothing legible to the Europeans and, as they think, part of their heritage, has wholly disappeared from reality. Perhaps in somewhat direct fashion we are pursuing a similar objective to that German professor, less gullible than he, more modestly remaining in the world of letters. Yet there is the moment when the sentences close up; any analogy becomes impossible because one searches for connections in vain and the hands grasp after nothing; the ground beneath the feet is one thing, another is the sentences that are passed between writers and readers, the letters on paper, in stone. A sudden last connection, then, a last thought in his severed head (he, the person who emerges at last, feels his way out of the emptiness, indeterminate and always in the wrong time, who sets out on his way and is already at the end of his way), the place is established, scarcely anything besides, it has to be a thought, a sentence, that is appropriate at this border, belongs to a history that is to take form at the border between the real and the illusory, between the own and the alien; a vanishing sentence: here definitions arise and vanish. A hopeless endeavour, trained on what was never experienced, keeps the game in progress; an attempt to get closer that never succeeds because the yearning always revolves and proliferates within itself, almost without a bearer.

---From: Thomas Stangl, Der einzige Ort. Roman © Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien 2004

translated from the German by Tom Morrison

#thomas stangl #asymptote journal

Zaman ile Bellek: Algı Oyunu / Time and Memory: the Play of Perception

Bellek kusurlu ve başına buyruk belki ama elimizde başka ne var? Yazmak belgelemeye yarayabilir fakat kalem de tıpkı kamera gibi dokunduğunu kurguya dönüştürmez mi? Bellek zihinle oyun oynar ve edebiyat hep kayıp zamanın izindedir. Avusturyalı yazar Thomas Stangl ve Avrupa Birliği Edebiyat Ödülü sahibi Çiler İlhan, çaya batırılmış madlen kurabiyeler ve esasen, Albertine’in yüzünde dolaşıp duran ben üzerine konuşuyorlar.

Memory is deemed to be inaccurate and arbitrary, but isn’t it all we have? Writing may serve the purpose of documenting things but doesn’t pen just as the camera turns everything into fiction? Memory plays games with the mind, and literature is a Remembrance of Things Past. Austrian author Thomas Stangl and EU Literature Prize Laureate Çiler İlhan come together for tea-soaked madeleins and the Albertine's wandering beauty spot.