Berlin-Hamlet

by Szilárd Borbély

Book Overview

Shortlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2017 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry

Before his tragic death, Szil rd Borb ly 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 J zsef or Erno Sz p. 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.

This English-only edition does not include the poems in their original language.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1681370549
• ISBN13: 9781681370545
• Release Date: November 2016
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.6" x 7.0"