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Antonio Fian [Austria] |
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Are there any exciting trends, movement, or schools in contemporary Austrian fiction? Who do you feel are the overlooked contemporary authors in Austria who should be more widely read and translated? Austrian literature has always been characterized by its affinity for experimentation, its plays on language, and its penchant for satire – and that's true today as well. However, since the literary market cries out for novels, for realism, it has difficulty with many Austrian authors, or, perhaps better put, Austrian authors have difficulty making it in the market. For although Josef Winkler and the recently deceased Gert Jonke have been translated and are taken seriously, at least to some extent, the work of Werner Kofler, who is just as outstanding, has hardly been translated at all. Even the idiosycratic Elfriede Gerstl (who, unfortunately, also passed away recently), the master of the short narrative, is hardly known within Germany itself. (At the same time, the Nobel Prize gave Elfriede Jelinek, whose work exemplifies the aforementioned Austrian tradition, national acclaim.) For a glimpse into the active and thoroughly heterogeneous young scene, which has numerous talents, I would recommend the Anthology Zeichensetzung. Zeilensprünge – Junge Literatur in Österreich (Punctuation. Enjambment – Young Literature in Austria) (Edition Luftschacht). Who are the contemporary European writers from other countries that are writing compelling fiction? Since I'm no literary critic and don’t read enough to paint a representative picture of European literature, I really can’t say. However, a book that I recently read and that I think is brilliant is The Notebook by the Hungarian author Agota Kristof, who currently lives in Switzerland. Are there enough publishing outlets in Austria for contemporary fiction? Is there a market for literary fiction in Austria? There are a few publishers in Austria, but they’re small and can’t really compete with the larger, mainly German publishing houses. Austria is also too small to have its own independent market. That means that anyone who wants to subsist on book sales has to write for the whole German-speaking world – and that’s not always a good thing when you’re talking about the autonomy of Austrian literature. Do you want your work to be translated? Why or why not? Naturally, I’d like to see it translated. Given a choice, would you prefer a faithful, literal translation of your work or an interpretive re-imagining of it? Why? That depends on the text that’s being translated. For example, a lot of my work uses Austrian dialect, plays with its quirks and could therefore be translated rather freely. Ultimately, however, I believe that each translation is a balancing act whose success depends upon the translator’s ability and feel for language. |
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