#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews BAD WORDS: SELECTED SHORT PROSE and SQUANDERED ADVICE by Ilse Aichinger

There is no doubt that Ilse Aichinger is one of the most important Austrian writers since the Second World War. She is also one of those writers who has been neglected in English, despite several books published in English translation over the years. Seagull Books is attempting to make amends, with the publication of Aichinger’s only collection of poetry as well as her volume of short prose pieces.

Ilse Aichinger was born in 1921 in Vienna to a Jewish mother and a Christian father. She was brought up Catholic which surely helped her survive the war. However, she was not spared Nazi persecution as a ‘half-Jew’. She was forbidden to study and forced to work as slave labour in a button factory. Her twin sister Helga escaped Austria with one of the last Kindertransporte in 1938 and settled in England. Later Aichinger wrote extensively about her wartime experiences.

Aichinger is a versatile writer, stretching her output across many genres. Her prose has been compared to that of Kafka and Daniil Kharms. She writes about loss, displacement and estrangement. Having written a novel, several short story collections and radio plays, in 1976 she published Bad Words, a declaration of her deep scepticism toward language itself and an attempt to construct a language free of preconceptions, misleading certainties, rules and ideologies; her foray into stripping language down to its bare bones. With this book her writing becomes playful and poetic, wittily sparse and experimental. The book reviewed here is its first translation into English, with several other short stories from the same period added to the original set. Aichinger’s struggle with language, her subversiveness and her writing ‘against’ language, makes it difficult not to read these short prose pieces as poetry. And indeed, the same lack of trust towards language is clearly visible in her only poetry collection.

Poems from Squandered Advice were written between the 1950s and 70s and combined – or rather, carefully composed together – by the author in 1978, following a poetic and thematic, rather than chronological, order. In 1991 the second and final edition of this volume of poetry came out, which had some later poems also added to the original set. The poet’s voice is consistent, easily recognisable, concise and to the point, built around repetitions and alliterations, always very structured. The seemingly everyday images at times take a surreal turn, shaking readers out of their comfort zone, asking questions. Aichinger’s estrangement from her own language results in language becoming more and more alien; the inevitable conclusion being a new language:

And
we were told something
about periods of time.
Was this about periods, certain times,
about period times, about time, period,
or none of the above?

Reviewed by Anna Blasiak

BAD WORDS: SELECTED SHORT PROSE and SQUANDERED ADVICE

By Ilse Aichinger

Translated by Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey; and Steph Morris

Published by Seagull Books (2022)

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Anna Blasiak is a poet, writer, translator, journalist and Managing Editor of the European Literature Network. Recently she translated According to Her by Maciej Hen, published a bilingual poetry and photography book with Lisa Kalloo Café by Wren’s St-James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime, and a book-length interview with a Holocaust survivor, Lili: Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation with Anna Blasiak.

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