Letters to Felician

by Ingeborg Bachmann, Damion Searls (Translator)

A Bilingual Edition (German / English)

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) was one of the major writers of the 20th century in both poetry and fiction. Letters to Felician was written, chronologically and conceptually, just before Bachmann shifted from poetry to prose, making it an important document for reading her later work. Passionate declarations of love to a male figure, Felician, these fictional letters—written when Bachmann was only 18 and 19 years of age—are also a hymn to the beauty of southern Austria, underlying Bachmann’s utopian visions of her later work.

Among Bachmann’s important other writings are, in English translation, Last Living The Ingeborg Bachmann Reader , Songs in Flight (collected poems), The Thirtieth Year , The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldman , Malina , and Three Paths to the Lake .

Translator Damion Searls lives in Oakland, California.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

95 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2004

About the author

“What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness.” This sentence from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics (1959-60) can also be applied to her own self-consciousness as an author, and to the history of her reception. Whether in the form of lyric poetry, short prose, radio plays, libretti, lectures and essays or longer fiction, Bachmann’s œuvre had as its goal and effect “to draw people into the experiences of the writers,” into “new experiences of suffering.” (GuI 139-140). But it was especially her penetrating and artistically original representation of female subjectivity within male-dominated society that unleashed a new wave in the reception of her works.

Although Bachmann’s spectacular early fame derived from her lyric poetry (she received the prestigious Prize of the Gruppe 47 in 1954), she turned more and more towards prose during the 1950’s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language. The stories in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year; 1961) typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its “orders” (e.g. of language, law, politics, or gender roles) and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order. The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha” (“A Step towards Gomorrah”) and “Undine geht” (“Undine Goes/Leaves”), are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German-language literature. Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general: “You monsters named Hans!” In her later prose (Malina 1971; Simultan 1972; and the posthumously published Der Fall Franza und Requiem für Fanny Goldmann) Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna. Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann’s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age: “I’ve reflected about this question already: where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped…. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”(GuI 144)

As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn’t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents; after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. She wrote her doctoral dissertation (1950) on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as “a seduction … to German irrationality of thought” (GuI 137). From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself” (GuI 144).

From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome. Despite her precarious health—she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure—she traveled to Poland in 1973. She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire.

Joey Horsley

Reviews

[Trane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve just finished reading Damion Searls’s translation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Letters to Felician, a series of poems that were unpublished during Bachmann’s lifetime. Like Emily Dickinson’s The Master Letters, these poems are dedicated to an unknown (fictionalized) lover-figure. These are poems of intense longing and imaginative emotionality, at once utopian, erotic, and scored through with the traces of Hitler’s advance into Austria (an advance which Bachmann claims instigated an insuperable sense of “Todesangst” or “fear of death”). The intensity of the longing in Bachmann’s poems reminds me of Andrew Schelling’s translations of Mirabai in For Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai, though of course Bachmann’s fictionalized lover is worlds apart from Mirabai’s devotional eroticism. Here’s one of my favorite bits from Letters to Felician:

(excerpt from a letter-poem dated “Vellach, 6/3”)

"In the morning the sun was already high and bright, an early summer day. Everything lives, hunts, there is great joy all over the world. I feel it, I lay my hands idly in the sun and bliss pours into me.

I think of you, of the lake, of the city, of the burning days on the shore, in the sand, of the shadowy paths, of the musical breath of the air, the shrilling of the frogs when we look up into the night sky. The water is quiet, blue, I’d like to lie in a boat in the reeds, I don’t want to speak, everything around me will tell you what I’m sensing."

A truly wonderful book, and highly recommended.

[Dorsa🏳️‍🌈 · Rating 4 out of 5]

آرزوهایم تاریکند و خون، سرخ
باید کاری کنم

[Kamel Gholami · Rating 1 out of 5]

خوشم نیومد از این کتاب و واقعن نمیدونم چرا باید این کتاب با این شمایل و این حجم قیمتی اینچنینی داشه باشه.

[Ðayana · Rating 5 out of 5]

چطور ممکن بود، چند دهه قبل نامه هایی بی مقصد بنویسی و چنددهه بعد، حسهام رو موقع خوندنشون بازیابی کنم زن؟!

[Ffiamma · Rating 3 out of 5]

innsbruck, 19 settembre 1945
ora dovrei lasciarti. per molto tempo. questo è il nostro destino. non riuscire mai a raggiungerci. ma dopo alcuni giorni di tregua, proprio ora ricomincio a pensare a te. da lontano, ma anche consapevole di quello che ha significato per me questo tempo dell'amore, solo così e mai in altro modo voglio chiamare questo sentimento.
mio dio, parlo come dopo una fine. non c'è mai stata una fine, anzi penso che forse questa è l'unica cosa che vorrei portare nella mia nuova vita, perché è stata la migliore e la più preziosa.

[EGe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bu kitap çift dilli olarak hem İngilizce hem de Almanca'ydı, o yüzden hoşuma gitti. Sadece yazarın kendi yarattığı hayali kahramana yazdığı bu mektuplar beni biraz ürküttü. Bir nevi ruhsal problemler yaşıyor gibi geldi ve bunu okurken çok net hissettim.

[Christiane Alsop · Rating 3 out of 5]

The very young Ingeborg Bachmann.

[Annie]