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Berlin-Hamlet
[Paperback - 2016]
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Category: Literature
Sub-category: Poetry
Publisher: Nyrb Poets | ISBN: 9781681370545 | Pages: 112
Shipping Weight: .104 | Dimensions: 4.5 x .3 x 7 inches

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 authors: 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.

Szilárd Borbély (1963–2014) was born in Fehérgyarmat in northeastern Hungary and studied Hungarian philology and literature at the University of Debrecen, where he later taught. An authority on Hungarian literature of the late-Baroque period as well as a writer, Borbély was awarded several literary prizes, including the prestigious Palladium Prize in 2005. Widely considered to be one of the most important European poets of the post-Communist period, Borbély’s poetic concerns were broad but generally encompassed the marginalized in Hungarian society.

Ottilie Mulzet is a translator of poetry and prose, as well as a literary critic. She was awarded the Tibor Déry Prize in 2020 and the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 for her translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. In addition to In a Bucolic Land, she has translated Borbély’s novel The Dispossessed and his verse collections Berlin-Hamlet (NYRB Poets) and Final Matters: Selected Poems, 2004–2010. She is based in Prague.

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