Poetry
The Sun Was a Green Egg
med ana schwoazzn dintn
Hans Carl Artmann · 1958
Synopsis
Poems written in the speech of the Viennese suburbs and coming from the Breitensee district. One meets a suburban Bluebeard who has already killed seven women, a gardener who mows down his flowers at night with a sickle, a stern uncle who has a hen's throat cut, a new poster on the street corner, a city after the flood, and death in the form of a black bird or an angel of snow.
Context
The collection appeared on 18 March 1958 from Otto Müller, in Salzburg, with an initial print run of four thousand copies, with a preface by Hans Sedlmayr and a glossary for readers unfamiliar with the Viennese dialect. Its success rested in part on a misunderstanding: the public read it as regional poetry, whereas its author regarded these texts as experiments with dialect, nourished by surrealism and black romanticism. The poems were set to music almost immediately, and recorded in the seventies.
Who it is for
About a hundred pages of short poems, difficult even for a German speaker, with a glossary. They are best read aloud.
Prizes and reception
Its author's best-known collection and a rare bookshop success for poetry, reprinted more than ten times since 1958.
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