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WATCH OUT

WATCH OUT

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9968584-2-7

Pub Date: Sept. 2016

Pages: 104


By Kuno Raeber

Stuart Friebert, translator


These translations of a wide range of the poems of the Swiss poet, Kuno Raeber (1922-1992), come from a life of many interests in matters theological, philosophical, and cultural—he was a lecturer in history at German universities. The poems’ settings are often timeless in nature; their subjects and objects, as Christiana Wyrwa writes in the comprehensive introduction, often “move from real situations into magical surroundings,” and readers are advised not to look “for rationally understandable connections” as they make their way through real land- and seascapes to interiors where the world is powered by uncertainty but on the cusp of righting itself again. The translator, Stuart Friebert, produces, as closely as possible, Raeber’s lineations and rhythmic patterns, right down to individual word choices.


    Stuart Friebert’s long friendship with Raeber and close reading of these poems make him a superb translator. Using the poet’s vocabulary and rhythmic patterns, he brings Raeber to life, introducing us to a different kind of mystic—a realist whose aesthetically gorgeous spiritual investigations refuse to overreach.


    …Raeber’s work is a window into a singular mind in the process of becoming conscious. His poems do not comfort, but they do provide challenging companionship. That alone is valuable, but in Raeber we also get word art of the highest order. Like Caravaggio, he understood that even in darkness and shadow, beauty persists.

    —Deborah Bogen, World Literature Today


    Born in 1922 in Klingau (Aargau), Kuno Raeber grew up in Lucerne, Switzerland, went on to study philosophy, literature, and history in Basel, Zurich, Geneva, and Paris, and received a PhD in history in 1950. Along the way, he studied for the priesthood, but lost his path after a “spiritual crisis.” In 1958, he settled as a freelance writer in Munich, where he spent most of his life, aside from trips abroad to Oberlin as Max Kade Writer-in-Residence and to the Swiss Institute in Rome. An early member of the Gruppe 47, he survived malicious attacks by the group at first, but prevailed with the support of a few sympathetic writers. By the time he died in 1992, he had won a number of prestigious literary prizes and produced a commanding body of poems, stories, novels, plays, essays, reviews, and translations, which have recently been collected in a definitive seven-volume edition, edited by Christiane Wyrwa and Matthias Klein. Many critics now count him among the most significant writers of the second half of the twentieth century.


    Christiane Wyrwa studied German and English Literature at Göttingen, Durham GB and Berlin where she took a Ph.D. in 1981. With her husband Matthias Klein, she edited Kuno Raeber’s Collected Works in seven volumes from 2002 to 2010.


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