From Embracing the Sparrow-Wall, or 1 Schumann-madness

Originally written in German by one of Austria’s most important experimental poets, From Embracing the Sparrow-Wall, or 1 Schumann-madness, is a “revisionary incantation” of the lives of 19th-Century composer Robert Schumann and pianist Clara Schumann, alongside that of the poet herself, Friederike Mayröcker, and her “heart-and-hand companion,” Ernst Jandl. Initially conceived as a musical performance and published as a textual record of a radio play, this book showcases Mayröcker’s wild, innovative use of language, as well as her unique mode of textual production, in which details and lines from lives and letters are interwoven with her own. In the words of the translator, Jonathan Larson: “Robert Schumann’s diary entries set up the source motif, their relations of sexual experience, personal medical history, and artistic musing are all flush sampling materials for Mayröcker to recompose a new text from an old one, as if it were written as a reinterpretation of Robert Schumann’s diaries (‘1 has to feel it, 1 has to feel language, to lay on or take off 1 weight here and there like pharmacist scale, so it must sound, so tuned’).”