The Ghosts of Ingeborg Bachmann

"For Wittgenstein, the tragedy of language was the product of neither faulty grammar nor impoverished vocabulary. Instead, it was a matter of some intrinsic truncation: Even at its most capacious, language could represent only a sliver of the world. In a radio essay summarizing Wittgenstein's argument, the Austrian novelist and poet Ingeborg Bachmann observed that "even if our language were perfect and were able to describe the world perfectly, not a single problem that concerns us would be solved.""

"Bachmann feared that her favorite philosopher might be right. Still, in her work as a poet and a novelist, she did what she could to resist his verdict, spending much of her writing career-from her first volume of poems, Borrowed Time, to her disheveled novel, Malina -trying to disprove his conclusions. She was determined to reach what she called, in yet another fragment on Wittgenstein, "the unsayable, the mystical, the limit"-and to do so with those blunt instruments, words."

"Bachmann's first attempt (at least in the medium of fiction) was The Honditsch Cross, a slim novella that she wrote when she was just 18. Now released for the first time in English in a characteristically lithe translation by Tess Lewis, it affords a rare glimpse into a usually meticulous writer's more unpolished efforts. Like most juvenilia, the novella is of interest primarily because its author went on to do greater things."

Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that language sets the boundary of the world humans can represent, implying that even perfect language cannot solve core human problems. Ingeborg Bachmann sought to resist that limit by attempting to reach "the unsayable, the mystical, the limit" through poetry and fiction. Her early novella, written at eighteen, is comparatively realist and unpolished next to later oneiric, cloudy work; it exhibits clear, crisp phrasing rather than dreamlike ambiguity. The novella introduces recurring preoccupations—sexual violence and emotional deflation—that persist throughout later, more mature explorations. An English translation by Tess Lewis makes these traces visible.

Read at The Nation