Margins
Berlin-Hamlet book cover
Berlin-Hamlet
2003
First Published
4.32
Average Rating
112
Number of Pages

Shortlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2017 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry Before his tragic death, Szilárd Borbély had gained a name as one of Europe's most searching new poets. Berlin-Hamlet—one of his major works—evokes a stroll through the phantasmagoric shopping arcades described in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, but instead of the delirious image fragments of nineteenth-century European culture, we pass by disembodied scraps of written text, remnants as ghostly as their primarily Franz Kafka but also Benjamin himself or the Hungarian poets Attila József or Erno Szép. Paraphrases and reworked quotations, drawing upon the vanished prewar legacy, particularly its German Jewish aspects, appear in sharp juxtaposition with images of post-1989 Berlin frantically rebuilding itself in the wake of German reunification.

Avg Rating
4.32
Number of Ratings
91
5 STARS
55%
4 STARS
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3 STARS
19%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
0%
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Author

Szilard Borbely
Szilard Borbely
Author · 6 books
Szilárd Borbély is widely acknowledged as one of the most important poets to emerge in post-1989 Hungary. He worked in a wide variety of genres, including essay, drama, and short fiction, usually dealing with issues of trauma, memory, and loss. His poems appeared in English translation in The American Reader, Asymptote, and Poetry. Borbély received many awards for his work, including the Attila József Prize. He died in 2014.
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