The Critical Writings of Ingeborg Bachmann ed. by Karen R. Achberger and Karl Ivan Solibakke (review)

Ingeborg Bachmann, the celebrated Austrian poet and writer, has become better known to non-specialist Anglophone audiences in recent years due to the publication of accessible translations of her poetry and prose into English (most recently, Philip Boehm’s 2019 translation of Malina, published by Penguin Modern Classics in the U.K. and New Directions in the United States). However, her wide-ranging critical writings (essays, lectures, speeches, and theoretical texts) have not, prior to the publication of The Critical Writings of Ingeborg Bachmann, been translated into English. The publication of this scholarly translation by Karen R. Achberger and Karl Ivan Solibakke, two eminent Bachmann scholars, is therefore very welcome.

As the translators state in the “Notes on Translation” prefacing the volume, their translation has as its source text Monika Albrecht and Dirk Göttsche’s edition of Bachmann’s Kritische Schriften (2005), which, in addition to the critical writings contained in Volume 4 of Bachmann’s Werke (1978, edited by Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, and Clemens Münster), also included previously unpublished texts from the author. Achberger and Solibakke, however, do not include all of the texts that make up Albrecht and Göttsche’s Kritische Schriften and also do not follow the same structure. Rather, as they note in the introduction, their selection is “organised according to topics” (21). This means, for example, that Bachmann’s essays on the writers Giuseppe Ungaretti and Witold Gombrowicz are included under “Autobiographical Writings and Intimate Reflections,” rather than “Modern Literature,” as might be expected. In addition to the two sections already mentioned, Bachmann’s critical writing is grouped into four further chapters or sections: “Philosophy,” “Visual Rhetoric and Poetics,” “Music,” and “The Frankfurt Lectures and Other Speeches.”

The introduction to the volume contextualizes Bachmann as a European intellectual and critic and also provides an overview of her life and works. It also sets out Achberger and Solibakke’s rationale for editing and translating the author’s critical writings into English. That is, to rectify the fact that “in contrast to her acclaimed literary works, Bachmann’s critical writings have remained largely unknown outside the German-speaking world” (1). The editors’ stated aim is to allow “Bachmann the critic, philosopher, and public intellectual” (1) to come to the fore for a broader readership, with the critical writings not only illuminating Bachmann’s works of fiction but also giving the reader insight into Bachmann’s understanding of herself as a writer as well as the times that she lived through and wrote about.

In addition to the general introduction to the volume, each of the chapters, bar the first one, opens with a detailed commentary that contextualizes and offers interpretations of the writings that follow. Moreover, the editors’ footnotes throughout the volume provide further contextualization, as do the translators’ notes for the innumerable quotations and allusions that Bachmann seamlessly weaves into her essays and speeches (as can also be gleaned from the comprehensive and very helpful index). This will be especially useful for non-specialists, given the wide range of intertextual allusions to German-language literature and philosophy (not to mention world literature and philosophy) characterizing Bachmann’s writing. For the Bachmann scholar, this translation is a very welcome opportunity to revisit Bachmann’s critical writings and to be reminded of her incredible range of interests and passions. Bachmann was just as at home discussing the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and logical positivism as she was writing about her literary contemporaries (Plath, Brecht, Bernhard, Ungaretti, Gombrowicz) and antecedents (Proust, Kafka, Musil). In her essays on music, Bachmann praised the medium’s possibilities, which she saw as far exceeding those offered by literature and which she strived to incorporate into a new poetic language, as she elucidates in the essay “Music and Poetry.” Additionally, in essays such as “Genesis of a Libretto,” she reflects on her own experience of writing libretti, including adapting Kleist’s The Prince of...