Raymond Federman

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Raymond Federman (born May 15, 1928 in Montrouge , France ; died October 6, 2009 in San Diego , California ) was a French - American writer and scholar.

Raymond Federman, Cologne 2008
At a reading in the Bittner bookstore in Cologne, June 20, 2008

Life

Raymond Federman was of Jewish origin and grew up in France. When the French police arrested almost 13,000 Jewish citizens in Paris on July 16 and 17, 1942, during the large-scale raid known as the “ Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver ”, police officers also entered Paris the Federman family home. Federman's mother spontaneously hid her 14-year-old son in a closet. While Federman's parents and his two sisters were murdered in Auschwitz , Raymond Federman survived. After emigrating to the USA in 1947, he initially lived there as a casual worker and jazz saxophonist. In 1951, because of the prospect of receiving a scholarship to study, he enlisted for military service in the US Army and was supposed to be used as a paratrooper in the Korean War . This did not happen, however, as he stayed with an army translation company in Tokyo because of his knowledge of French. He became an American citizen in 1953 and began studying comparative literature at Columbia University in 1954 . He graduated in 1958 with a Master of Arts and taught in the following years (1959 to 1964) at the University of Santa Barbara . In 1963 he received his doctorate from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) with a dissertation on Samuel Beckett , with whom he was on friendly terms. From 1964 on, Federman worked as a lecturer at the State University of New York in Buffalo . Even when he was later able to live as a freelance writer, he held several visiting professorships and gave lectures at American and European universities.

Raymond Federman died on October 6, 2009 after suffering from cancer for a long time.

plant

For Raymond Federman, Holocaust survival remained a central impetus for his literary practice. In particular in his novel La voix dans le cabinet de débarras (German: The voice in the closet ) he addressed his “real birth” (Federman). But the multitude of his other works also revolve around the life theme of guilt and abandonment - why he of all people (and not his sisters) was hidden by his mother and therefore he survived the Holocaust, but also his lust for life, which he as his answer to understood German fascism, which wanted to destroy him like his family in the context of the deportations of Jews in Paris in 1942. Raymond Federman wrote his works (novels, stories, poems and essays) in French as well as English and occasionally translated them himself. Raymond Federman, who only learned English at the age of 20, found his bilingualism an enrichment for his literary work. Although he initially preferred English as the literary language, as part of his attempts to gain a foothold as a poet and gain recognition in France, he wrote some of his texts initially in French and then translated some into English: Amer Eldorado (1974, novel, inspired an Double or Nothing , without English translation), Amer Eldorado, 2001 (2001, without English translation), La Fourrure de ma tante Rachel (1996, Roman, English: Aunt Rachel's Fur ), Mon corps en neuf parties (2002 , Short prose). On the translation of La Fourrure de ma tante Rachel , he worked closely with translator Patricia Privat-Standley for two years, as he explained in an interview with Alyson Waters in 2001. Federman has also published bilingual works such as The Voice in the Closet / La voix dans le cabinet de débarras (1979), of which there is also a trilingual edition in English, French and German, or 99 hand-written poems (2001) with English and French Poems. In his poetic bilingualism, he was based on his friend Samuel Beckett.

Federman received the 1986 American Book Award for his work Smiles on Washington Square . Immediately with his first novel Double or Nothing (German: All or Nothing ), Federman became internationally known. In this work the author combined concrete poetry and prose. In the 1970s, Federman created the term “surfiction”, which he also used as a basis for his poetry lectures in 1990 in Hamburg . He used this term to refer to literature that addresses the question of constructed or imagined reality. With lyrics that Federman was one of this genre, he worked from 1993 for many years closely with the Aachener Jazz - Ensemble ART DE FACT together.

Fonts

  • Journey into Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction (1965)
  • Among the Beasts / Parmi Les Monsters (1967)
  • Samuel Beckett, His Works and His Critics: An Essay in Bibliography (1970) with John Fletcher
  • Double or Nothing (1971), German all or nothing: Roman , Nördlingen: Greno, 1986, series Die Other Bibliothek , German by Peter Torberg
  • Amer Eldorado (1974)
  • Me Too (1975)
  • Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow (1975) editor
  • Take It Or Leave It (1976), German Take it or leave it: an exaggerated second-hand story, to be read aloud while standing or sitting - Frankfurt am Main: Rogner and Bernhard bei Zweiausendeins, 1998. German by Peter Torberg
  • The Voice in the Closet / La voix dans le cabinet de débarras (1979), bilingual work - self-translation, a trilingual edition was published in Germany: The Voice in the Closet , Hamburg: Kellner, 1989- German by Peter Torberg and Sylvia Morawetz
  • The Twofold Vibration (1982), German The night of the 21st century or from the life of an old man: Roman , Nördlingen: Greno, 1988, new edition: Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1991.
  • To Whom It May Concern: (1990), German subject : Sarah's cousin: Roman , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1991. German by Peter Torberg
  • Now Then / Nun denn (1992) poems. German by Peter Torberg
  • Critifiction: Postmodern Essays (1993)
  • Smiles on Washington Square (1995), German A love story or something: Roman, Nördlingen: Greno, 1987, [2. Ed.]. - [Frankfurt (Main)]: Suhrkamp, ​​1995. German by Peter Torberg
  • The Supreme Indecision of the Writer  : The 1994 Lectures in Turkey. (1995)
  • A voice within a voice . Federman translating / Translating Federman (1996)
  • La Fourrue de ma aunt Rachel (1996)
  • Loose Shoes (2001), Open shoes: a kind of life story, Berlin: Weidler, 2002.
  • Aunt Rachel's Fur (2001), self-translation of La Fourrure de ma tante Rachel, Ger. The fur of my aunt Rachel: an improvised novel ..., from the Franz. By Thomas Hartl. - 1st edition. - Leipzig: Faber and Faber, 1997.
  • Mon corps en neuf parties (2002)
  • The Song of the Sparrow (2002)
  • Here and Elsewhere: Poetic Cul de Sac (2003)
  • The Precipice and Other Catastrophes (2003)
  • My Body in Nine Parts (2005), self-translation by Mon corps en neuf parties / Raymond Federman. Photos by Steve Murez. - Berlin: Weidler, 2002.
  • My body in nine parts . From the americ. English by Peter Torberg. Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2008, ISBN 978-3-88221-706-3 .
  • Game texts = Playtexts / Raymond Federman. From the American. by Peter Torberg. Photo part: Renate von Mangoldt. Literary Colloquium Berlin; Berlin artist program of the DAAD . - Berlin: LCB, 1990
  • Surfiction: The way of literature  : Hamburg poetics lessons, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1992. German by Peter Torberg
  • A version of my life: the early years , - Augsburg: Maro-Verl., 1993. German by Peter Torberg
  • The Twilight of the Bums with George Chambers, German Penner-Rap , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1998. German by Peter Torberg
  • 99 hand-written poems = 99 poèmes faits-à-la-main - Berlin: Weidler, 2001
  • Amer Eldorado 2/001: récit exagéré à lire à haute voix assis debout ou couché , Berlin: Weidler, 2001.
  • "On the Road Again." In: Homo Narrans: Texts and Essays in Honor of Jerome Klinkowitz . Eds. Zygmunt Mazur and Richard Utz. Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2004. pp. 24-40.
  • Pssst! - story of a childhood . From the Franz. By Andrea Spingler. Bonn: Weidle, 2008
  • A love story or something . From the americ. English in a revised translation by Peter Torberg. Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2010, ISBN 978-3-88221-682-0 .

Radio plays

literature

  • Larry McCaffery, Thomas Hartl u. Doug Rice (Ed.): Federman A to XXXX. A Recyclopedic Narrative . San Diego: San Diego UP, 1998.
  • Waters, Alyson / Federman, Raymond: Interview with Raymond Federman. Pour commencer parlons d'autre chose . In: Sites 5: 2, 2001 pp. 242-248.
  • Eckhard Gerdes (Ed.): The Laugh that Laughs at the Laugh: Writing from and about the Pen Man, Raymond Federman. Journal of Experimental Fiction Vol. 2, 2002.3

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Article in "The Buffalo News" ( Memento from October 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Soundtracks : I have no history. The story is my life. , A homage by Wolfgang Ritschl on the 80th birthday of Raymond Federman, May 2, 2008
  3. ^ BR radio play Pool - Federman, Playtextplay I ( Memento from April 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ BR radio play Pool - Federman, Die Kadaver .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Federman, Raymond
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and critic
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Montrouge
DATE OF DEATH October 6, 2009
Place of death San Diego , California