Alfred Marnau

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Alfred Marnau (born April 24, 1918 in Pressburg (then Austria-Hungary, now the capital of Slovakia Bratislava ), † June 15, 1999 in London ) was a novelist, poet and translator.

Life

Marnau wrote his first poems at the age of 17. In 1935 he was "banned from his hometown because his precise descriptions of the coming war were considered too realistic." He went to Prague, worked there as an actor, translator and journalist, and emigrated to London in 1939 and was interned until 1941. In London he worked as an editor for the magazine “Poetry Quarterly” and from 1945 to 1946 published the magazine “New Road”. Since 1944 he was close friends with Oskar Kokoschka , who contributed a drawing to Marnau's second novel.

Marnau wrote novels and poems and was active as a translator of the works of Christopher Marlowe , John Webster (e.g. The Duchess of Malfi ), and Endre Ady . After the volumes of poetry The Wounds of the Apostles (1944) and Death of the Cathedral (1946), his first novel Der Steinerne Gang , written in 1948, was published , which was the prelude to the three-volume trilogy The Contributors . ZEIT wrote about Volume 2, The Desire for Hell , which was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1952 :

“His novel is neither a self-biographical episode nor a report from the Second World War. It is a symbolic-allegorical, surrealist-existentialist, neorealist-neoromantic structure, whose strictly composed structure (in three times seven scenes) contrasts strangely with the intangibility of the often encrypted people. The ascetic abbot and “hunter” is a Danish count, a figure from the world of the Mystery Games and a man who anticipated the fate of Cardinal Stepinac. Illaria is a noble partisan and at the same time the hieroglyph of the eternal feminine that overcomes death. Hard to find a firm hold in this shimmer of meanings. The sense of the "longing for hell" all too often gets out of sight in the labyrinth of the plot. Nevertheless, it cannot be overlooked that there is a strong narrative force at work here, which does not talk about the raw material of experience in front of the reader, but rather tries to subjugate it to inner forms. The not uncommon banalities are just falls from the dimension in which a novel as a work of art must be located. "

On the occasion of the intended inclusion of his poems Mein Vetter Maccabeus and Chestnut Roaster Villanelle in the anthology Gegenpiel. Marnau wrote German poetry since 1945 to the editor Hans Bender:

“The poet is not classified at all, his only purpose is to surprise himself. The poem does not have to be understood, the language in which a poem is written does not have to be understood, for the poem works through its existence. Mills turn. A tree rustles. There is a poem. "

Marnau administered the estate of the German-Austrian poet Jesse Thoor , whose sonnets and songs he published in 1956. He was also the editor of Reports from an Imaginary World. Memories and stories by Oskar Kokoschka . Alfred Marnau died in 1999 at the age of 81 in his adopted home London.

Works (selection)

  • Vogelfrei, early poems 1935–1940. Selection and epilogue: Hans Albrecht. Greno, Nördlingen 1988, ISBN 3-89190-884-9 .
  • Robber Reqiem. Selection of poems. Otto Müller Verlag, Salzburg 1961, without ISBN.
  • Contributors I to III.
The stone corridor. Nest Verlag, Nuremberg 1948. (New edition: Greno, Nördlingen 1989, ISBN 3-89190-809-1 .)
The desire for hell. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1952. (New edition: Greno, Nördlingen 1987, ISBN 3-89190-821-0 .)
Polycarp and Chirpelin Imperator. Greno, Nördlingen, 1987, ISBN 3-89190-830-X .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alfred Marnau. Short biography of Alfred Marnau. (No longer available online.) Enitharmon, archived from the original on March 29, 2016 ; accessed on June 12, 2013 .
  2. ^ Biography from the literature archive of the Austrian National Library. March 2009, accessed June 12, 2013 .
  3. ↑ Ingeborg Hartmann: Hell exist. The time , accessed June 12, 2013 .
  4. ↑ From the letter Alfred Marnaus to the editor of June 23, 1961. In: counterplay. German poetry since 1945. Hans Bender (Ed.), Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1962, p. 30

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Marnau, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian novelist, poet and translator
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Pressburg
DATE OF DEATH June 15, 1999
Place of death London