Telegrams of the Soul

If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first syllable,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose.” So wrote Thomas Mann of the work of Peter Altenberg. A virtuoso Fin de Siecle Viennese innovator of what he called the “telegram style” of writing, Altenberg’s signature short prose straddles the line between the lyrical and the narrative, fiction and observation, harsh verity and whimsical vignette. Inspired by the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Viennese Feuilleton, a light journalistic reflection current in his day, Altenberg carved out a spare, strikingly modern aesthetic that speaks with an eerie prescience to our own impatient time. Peter Wortsman’s new selection and translation reads like a sly lyrical wink from the turn-of-the-century of the telegram to the turn-of-the-millennium of e-mail. Peter Altenberg, also known as Richard Engländer, 1859–1919, was born into a well-to-do Viennese J...

Author: Altenberg Peter

ISBN: 9780974968087

Year of publication: 2005

Translator: Wortsman Peter

Genre: Classical prose

Number of pages: 121

Reading time: 2 h. 1 min.

Formats: FB2, EPUB, PDF

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