Christoph Wilhelm Aigner

Christoph Wilhelm Aigner (born November 18, 1954 in Wels , Upper Austria ) is an Austrian writer and translator . Aigner is counted among the most important contemporary poets .

Life

After elementary school, Christoph Wilhelm Aigner attended the modern language grammar school. He spent long periods of his childhood in Grödig . His father was employed by a company that produced baby food. In 1973, after graduating from high school, he went to Salzburg and studied German , communication and sports science , and initially also philosophy .

He embarked on a journalistic career and worked for ORF and as an editor for the Salzburger Tagblatt . He financed his studies as a footballer: He played in the Upper Austrian national team and trained for one and a half years at Austria Salzburg under the coach Günter Praschak at the time .

Since 1985 he has been a freelance writer and publisher of the Salzburg AV Edition . According to World Literature Today, Aigner is considered one of the most internationally important contemporary poets. Christoph Wilhelm Aigner lives alternately in a secluded mountain house in eastern Tuscany , in Rome and in Salzburg.

plant

Aigner's poems mostly offer laconic observations of nature, without rhymes, often arrhythmic, verse and rhythm of speech rarely congruent.

An important sponsor of Aigner was Erich Fried (“Almost none of these poems that did not deserve the highest attention”). Another important sponsor was Sarah Kirsch , whose work as a visual artist Aigner wrote about. She praised his style: "We encounter texts with an unparalleled linguistic power and terrifying truthfulness." His book Mensch. She named Metamorphoses in a feature series in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit as one of her books of the century.

Quotes

From Aigner

“It seems very convincing to me that it all began with the word. Without a word we would not have God . That doesn't mean we have him with the word. By naming we suggest that we can grasp something, and understanding suggests that we can hold onto it. But we cannot hold onto anything, no matter how much we imagine we can grasp. Anyone who deals with words and words (does not act), i.e. who takes responsibility, has scruples about responding to a question that is perceptibly too big for the reflective mind. We have no words and no knowledge for anything. I am always amazed when I hear equations set up like: God is the cause and a hundred others more. As if he who says that knows what is and, as an effect, raises himself, as it were, over what he is talking about. Such rhetorical games lack humility, without which it is impossible to imagine for the blink of an eye how immeasurably, incomprehensibly small we are. It seems that even believers believe that they can know without having to believe. "

- Christoph Wilhelm Aigner

About Aigner

“Originality, openness, coherence. From this point of view, Christoph Wilhelm Aigner's books should have been on the first shelf of Austrian literary criticism for a long time. The Anton Wildgans Prize is an award that his work has long earned; The now awarded work deserves even more: increased attention, contradiction, affection. "

- Jury member Johann Holzner in his laudation for the Anton Wildgans Prize.

“If poetry doesn't strike the reader right between the eyes, if content and form don't immediately become a sensory experience, if you have to think and puzzle what he might have meant, the poet, then the effect fizzles out, then the poem hovers , unabsorbed, in time and space and circles the planet as an eternal question mark. Could the town clerk Aigner have wanted that? Can he only have himself, his own sense gratification in mind? Unfortunately, and this may be a lyrical educational gap, I know too little about Mr. Aigner, but the poems presented here do not lead me to him, but away from him, but perhaps it is a good thing not to meet this poet closer, because he won't see me, he just sees himself, autistic and egomaniacal, as I now imagine him. What a shame!"

- Klaus Funke

Awards

• 1982: Georg Trakl Prize Promotion Prize
• 1993: Promotion Prize for the Merano Poetry Prize
• 1993: Science Award of the Rotarians Salzburg
• 1996: Else Lasker Schüler Award
• 1993: Residence grant in Wiepersdorf Castle
• 1995: Residence grant in Wiepersdorf Castle
• 1998: Visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck ( poetics lectures)
• 2003: Anton Wildgans Prize
• 2004: Dresden city clerk
• 2004: Scholarship from the Heinrich Heine House of the City of Lüneburg
• 2006: Austrian Prize for Literature

Works

Poetry

• Cat track . Aigner, Salzburg 1985.
• Live on . Müller, Salzburg 1988.
• Three sentences . Müller, Salzburg 1991.
• Country solo . Müller, Salzburg and Vienna 1993.
• The negative of the pendulum clock . DVA, Stuttgart 1996.
• The touch . DVA, Stuttgart 1998.
• About swimming in happiness . DVA, Stuttgart 2001.
• Brief story of first falling in love . 2005.

prose

• Anti cupid . Narrative. DVA, Stuttgart 1994.
• Human. Transformations . DVA, Stuttgart 1999.
• Angel of poetry. A reading tour . DVA, Stuttgart 2000.
• Logic of clouds . DVA, Munich 2004.
• The beautiful bitter weeks of Johann Nepomuk . Novel. DVA, Munich 2006.
• A life of its own or how to write a novella. Novella. edition laurin, Innsbruck 2011.

Editions

• Not a beautiful country ... 50 Austrian authors on the city and state of Salzburg . Graphia-Druck- und Verlag-Anstalt, Salzburg 1981.
• I stepped away while painting. Watercolors, pictures, drawings by Sarah Kirsch . With an essay by Christoph Wilhelm Aigner. DVA, Stuttgart and Munich 2000.

Translations

• The monk of Salzburg : The secular poetry . Müller, Salzburg 1995.
• Federigo Tozzi : animals, things, people / beast, cose, persone . dtv, Munich 1997.
• Giuseppe Ungaretti : Tracking time . 2003.

literature

• Erich Fried : Strange . London, Salzburg 1988.
• Albrecht Holschuh: In the middle of the country . In: Literature in Science and Education . Indiana, USA, 1996.
• Johann Holzner: The superfluousness of the lawsuit is wonderful . Studien Verlag, Innsbruck 2000.
• Evelyne Polt-Heinzl : But the poems are there . In: literature and criticism . No. 349.Salzburg 2000.
• Sarah Kirsch discovers Christoph Wilhelm Aigner . Europa Verlag, Hamburg, Vienna 2001.
• Riccarda Novello: La costanza del mutamento . In: Poesia . No. 154. Milan 2001.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ vorarlberg.at  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Table of contents  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ literaturhaus.at ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ biblio.at
5. ↑ Sarah Kirsch : “Human. Metamorphoses ” . In: Die Zeit , No. 12/1999; "My Century Book" series
6. ↑ iv-net.at
7. ↑ lyrikwelt.de ( Memento of the original from October 8, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Web links

• “Practice in the simple” Christoph Wilhelm Aigner in conversation with Sarah Kraushaar about his diaries
• Literature by and about Christoph Wilhelm Aigner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Christoph Wilhelm Aigner by Christa Gürtler for the Upper Austrian literary history of the StifterHaus
• Biography of Christoph Wilhelm Aigner at the international literature festival berlin