John Knowles is a Faculty Librarian at the Queen's University of Belfast.
“The fate of the emigrant: a foreign country cannot become a homeland. Yet the homeland becomes a foreign country.” Born in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century, the critic and essayist Alfred Polgar died in a Zurich hotel room in 1955. Exiled by Hitler’s rise to power, and only relatively recently returned…
In his comparatively brief life, Christian Morgenstern, born 1871, was a writer of sketches and short pieces (feuilleton) for newspapers, an editor, among others, of Robert Walser, and a translator of Ibsen’s poems and lyric dramas. He also published a series of collections of lyric poems which formed the centrepiece of his serious literary…
In the early 1950s, the American poet James Wright, wandered by mistake into the wrong classroom while studying at the University of Vienna and joined a seminar on the poet Georg Trakl. He describes how the professor leading the seminar read Trakl’s poems slowly, with enormous patience, in the twilit room. The only other…
