Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti (left). Photo: Elsa Dorfman

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born March 24, 1919 in Yonkers , New York ) is an American writer and poet of the Beat Generation .

Life

Ferlinghetti grew up in France. He studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , where he graduated from journalism with a BA in 1941 . In the Second World War he went to the Navy . He was later active in the movement against the Vietnam War and received his doctorate from the Sorbonne with a thesis on the symbol of the city in modern poetry. He opened the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco , which became a meeting place for avant-garde authors, some of whom he published. The bookstore was expanded to include City Books publishing house in 1954 . With his City Lights Press he published contemporary avant-garde poetry. In 1956 he published Allen Ginsberg's book of poems Howl .

His own poems are also examples of the beat lyric, which he promoted, which aims to change American society in an anti-capitalist way and to build a counterculture . He had literary influence on the beat lyricist Harold Norse, among others . In Ferlinghetti's publications it becomes clear that he considers a political statement by the artists and authors to be necessary. He himself described his political and social commitment in his volume of poetry Starting from San Francisco (1961). In the 1960s he participated in two magazines dealing with beat literature, Beatitude and the Journal For The Protection Of All Beings . He also edited the City Lights Journal .

The Italian band Timoria worked with him to create the title Ferlinghetti Blues ( to be found on the El Topo Grand Hotel album ), in which the poet reads one of his poems.

In 2003 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In October 2012 it became known that Ferlinghetti had rejected the Janus Pannonius Prize awarded by the Hungarian section of the PEN Association . He justified this with the changes in Hungary, which he perceived as authoritarian and anti-democratic, since Viktor Orbán's re-election in 2010.

Works (selection)

Editions in German translation

  • A Coney Island of the inner carousel , poems, German by Erika Gütermann, Limes, Wiesbaden 1962, without ISBN.
  • You , Roman, German by Walter Schmiele, Limes, Wiesbaden 1963, without ISBN.
  • Selected poems , translated and with an afterword by Alexander Schmitz, Diogenes, Zurich 1972, ISBN 3-257-20060-9 .
  • Poems , selected and translated by Wulf Teichmann, Hanser, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-446-12834-4 .
  • Rough notes from the northwest: ecological bearings and bucolic ecologists ( Northwest Ecolog , City Lights 1978), translated by Michael Mundhenk , Orte, Zurich 1988, ISBN 978-3-85830-042-3 .
  • A Coney Island of Consciousness , poems (bilingual, translated and with annotations and an afterword by Alexander Schmitz), Stadtlichter Presse, Wenzendorf 2001, ISBN 978-3-936271-01-0 .
  • A Coney Island of the Mind. A Far Rockaway of the Heart. Poems , German by Klaus Berr, Luchterhand, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-630-62058-2 .
  • The light of Big Sur and other poems , translated by Ingrid and Reinhard Harbaum, altaQuito, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-923588-69-5 .
  • Little boy . Roman, German by Ron Winkler , Schöffling & Co. , Frankfurt am Main 2019, ISBN 978-3-89561-441-5 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [1] , accessed April 7, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet of the Beat Generation
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Yonkers , New York