Berlin-Hamlet

Description

Berlin-Hamlet evokes a stroll through one of the phantasmagoric shopping arcades described in Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk - 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 Jozsef or Ern Szep. 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 unification.

Szilard Jozsef Borbely (1963 - 2014) was a recognized authority on Hungarian literature of the late Baroque period and an author who was awarded several literary prizes in Hungary, culminating in the highly prestigious Palladium Prize in 2005. Berlin-Hamlet is his first full work to be published in English. Ottilie Mulzet is a translator of poetry and prose, as well as a literary critic, based in Prague.

"[Borbely's] poetry is epoch-making." -Peter Nadas "Berlin-Hamlet is a rich tapestry of 'subjective', 'pseudo-subjective' and 'meditative' texts, all related to present-day Berlin, though tinged with memories of more sinister places like Wannsee, where the decision about the systematic extermination of European Jews was taken by Nazi bureaucrats in 1942." -World Literature Today "[Borbely] is considered one of the most important figures in contemporary Hungarian literature, having had an immense impact on the transformation of Hungarian poetry in the last decade, strongly influencing the conceptualization of poetry's social role and linguistic-thematic possibilities...Borbely's poetry, prose, and essays try to bring the readers closer to the lives of those who cannot speak of their trauma or suffering. They can be uneducated and poor villagers, survivors of the Holocaust, women grieving after a miscarriage, or victims of terrible aggression. Through Borbely's texts we readers become increasingly less cruel-hearted." -Laszlo Bedecs, Asymptote