The Italian writer and scholar Claudio Magris (b. 1939) has been Professor
of German Studies in his home town of Trieste since 1978. As a writer
and translator, he is one of the leading cultural philosophers of Europe.
At the beginning of 2001, together with Poland's Adam Michnik, he received
the most prestigious cultural award of the Netherlands, Erasmus. In March,
he received the Leipzig Book Award - der Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen
Verständigung. Magris contributes regularly to Corriere della Sera
and numerous other European newspapers and periodicals. He has translated
works by Ibsen, Kleist, Schnitzler, Büchner and Grillparzer into
Italian and produced essays on Ibsen, Canetti, Rilke, Kafka, Musil and
Borges. Magris published his first work at the age of 24, on the Habsburg
myth in Austrian literature, Il mito absburgico nella letteratura austriaca
moderna (1963, The Habsburg Myth in Modern Austrian Literature). Since
his debut work, he has published dozens of non-fiction books, plays, collections
of essays and novels. His international breakthrough came with Danubio
(1986, Danube), which has been translated into almost thirty languages.
His work incorporating nine tales, entitled Microcosmi (1997, Microcosms)
is also one of his most critically acclaimed works; in Italy, it won him
the country's most prestigious prize for literature, the Premio Strega.
Both works lie in the borderland between an essay and a travel book. Danube
follows the course of the Danube River from itse origins in Schwarzwald
to the Black Sea. Microcosms is set largely in Italy and Trieste. Magris
probes into the cultural and historical strata of landscapes and localities.
The account starts off with micro-level observations, the trees in the
forest, movements of the water, individual people or cafe milieus. These
open up into broad views of time and memory, of society and the individual
human mind alike. Magris describes the crossing of many kinds of frontiers
- borders moulded by nature, the frontiers of identity, love and death,
and life in remote districts. He highlights the cultural diversity of
the Danube - in contrast to the Rhine, which guards a myth of purity.
Most recently, Magris released a collection of essays entitled Utopia
e disincanto (1999, "Utopia and disenchantment") |