– The event will take place in German and English. –

Liesl Ujvary’s 1977 debut sicher & gut almost immediately disappeared with the publisher, but remained an influential underground classic. How does it work? What is the specific relation of avantgarde writing and the unofficial side? Does failing to deliver certain things to the market help to make lasting literature, and if so why would that be? Does avantgarde even work in the same way in English and German?

Ann Cotten is a bilingual author and translator based in Austria and Germany whose work deploys standards from avantgarde traditions inside of other, partly more traditional domains such as essays or sonnets. Tom McCarthy radically disconcerted concepts of English language prose with Remainder – a book of excellent narrative fiction experimental on the plot level which was initially hard to publish, but then became legendary. Anna Dinwoodie has been writing, editing and translating between New York and Berlin.

The three poets and translators with very different backgrounds discuss these questions and others with reference to Dinwoodie and Cotten’s fresh translation of Ujvary as well McCarthy’s recent essay on Ingeborg Bachmann.