Harry Mathews

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Harry Mathews (2004)

Harry Mathews (born February 14, 1930 in New York City ; died January 25, 2017 in Key West ) was an American author .

Life

Harry Mathews was a child of an American upper-class family. He attended private school, studied music at Princeton University from 1947 and graduated from Harvard University in 1952, after a year hiatus from military service . In 1949 he married Niki de Saint Phalle , who came from the same milieu and rebelled against her family with her early marriage, in 1951 and 1955 the children Laura and Philip were born. Mathews and his wife moved to Europe in 1952, where he broke off his conducting training in Paris and began to write. He wrote the first novel The Conversions between 1958 and 1960. Niki left him in 1960, he supported her in the following years by buying works of art from her.

In the 1950s and 1960s he was associated with the New York School of Poets and made an artistic friendship with John Ashbery . In 1970 Mathews became acquainted with the French writer Georges Perec , their collaboration did not end until Perec's death in 1982. In 1972, Perec ensured Mathews' acceptance into the Oulipo group, which was founded in 1960 and which included Italo Calvino , Oskar Pastior and Raymond Queneau . Mathews published an English-language compendium on the group at Atlas Press in 1998 . Mathews' experiments with the potential literature found few readers.

In 1982 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and in 1991 a literary award from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters . In 1991 he received a scholarship for the DAAD's Berlin artist program and brushed up on his German. Mathews married Marie Chaix in 1992 , for whom he not only translated her first novel Les lauriers du lac de Constance into English.

Mathews lived in France for most of his life. He has published six novels: The Conversions , Tlooth , The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium , Cigarettes , The Journalist , My Life in CIA ; various volumes of poetry, the first of which was The Ring in 1960; Short stories and a large number of essays and journal articles. Mathews also worked on the intersection between literature and music. He is represented in the Oxford Book of American Poetry with the poem Histoire (1982). The novel My Life in CIA refers to the fact that he was a CIA agent in his circle of acquaintances at the beginning of the 1970s - at the time he was in the "front city" West Berlin - and his "autobiographical novel" clarifies that does not arise, he remains in the balance between memoir and fiction .

Mathews translated a number of writings from French into English, he himself also wrote in the French language.

In Peter Schamoni's 1995 documentary Niki de Saint Phalle: Who is the monster - you or me? the ten-year marriage between de Saint Phalle and Mathews, in which Mathews had the role of breadwinner, child educator and nurse, is not addressed.

Works in German translation

  • The pleasure in itself . From the American. by Werner Schmitz . Diaphanes, Zurich 2018.
  • The orchard - memories of Georges Perec . From the American. by Uli Becker . Diaphanes, Zurich 2018.
  • My Life as the CIA: A 1973 Chronicle . Autobiographical novel . From the American. by Michael Mundhenk . Engeler, Basel 2006.
  • Minima moralia. The Bratislava spiccato . From the American. by Werner Schmitz and Max Looser. Edition Plasma, Berlin 1996.
  • Autobiography . From the American. by Michael Mundhenk. Maro-Verlag, Augsburg 1995.
  • Conversions . From the American. by Werner Schmitz. Photo part: Renate von Mangoldt . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1993.
  • The orchard - memories of Georges Perec . From the American. by Uli Becker. Edition Plasma, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-926867-14-0 .
  • Roussel and Venice: draft for a melancholy geography . With Georges Perec . From the Franz. By Hanns Grössel . Edition Plasma, Berlin 1991; zero sharp, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-945421-07-9 .
  • Cigarettes: Roman . From the American. by Werner Schmitz. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991.
  • The pleasure in itself . From the American. by Werner Schmitz. Edition Plasma, Berlin 1990.
  • Zlahn . From the American. by Marc Adrian . March publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1970

literature

  • Niki de Saint Phalle: Harry and me - The family years 1950–1960 . Translated by Angelika Franz. Benteli, Bern and Zurich, 2006 ISBN 3-7165-1457-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harry Mathews & Alastair Brotchie (eds.): Oulipo Compendium. With additional sections devoted to Oulipopo, Oupeinpo . Atlas Press, London 1998
  2. ↑ Harry Mathews , at DAAD
  3. ↑ a b Harry Mathews: Mein Leben als CIA , 2006, p. 279
  4. ^ David Lehman : The Oxford Book of American Poetry . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2006, pp. 879ff
personal data
SURNAME Mathews, Harry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and translator
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH January 25, 2017
Place of death Key West , Florida