Nicolas Born
Encyclopedia
Nicolas Born was a German
writer
.
Nicolas Born was - together with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann
- one of the most important and most innovative German poets of his generation. His two novels Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte and Die Fälschung have been translated into more than a dozen languages and count among the most important works of German literature of the seventies.
until he was able - with the help of a first literary prize, the Förderpreis Nordrhein-Westfalen, for his first novel "Der Zweite Tag", to go to Berlin and live from writing. He was an autodidact, and with his poems and novel scripts soon gathered enough attention from known writers and critics like Ernst Meister, Johannes Bobrowski
, Günter Grass
and Hans Bender
to get a scholarship for the renowned Berliner Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin in 1963/1964, where he met other young writers like Hans Christoph Buch, Hermann Peter Piwitt, Hubert Fichte
, Peter Bichsel and others, and was taught by Günter Grass
, Uwe Johnson
, Peter Rühmkorf
, Peter Weiss
and others.
In preparation for his stay at the Iowa International Writers Workshop in Iowa City in 1969/1970 Born read more and more contemporary American poets. In Iowa he met Charles Bukowski
, Anselm Hollo
, Ted Berrigan
, and many others, was friends with John Batki, Allen Ginsberg
, Eric Torgersen, Tom Raworth
and others.
In the renowned "red frame"-series "Das neue Buch" Born published in 1972 his third collection of poems "Das Auge des Entdeckers" (The eye of the explorer), largely influenced by contemporary American poetry, utopian literature and a more relaxed perspective on political effectiveness of literature than was commonly known among the politically left-oriented colleagues of his generation. The book was a great success, selling very well for a poetry-collection, and made Born together with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann one of the most important and innovative poets of his generation in Germany.
Back in Germany, Born started translating the poems of Kenneth Koch for Rowohlt Verlag, which was published only in 1973 in the same Rowohlt-series "Das neue Buch".
His novels "Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte" (1976, Rowohlt Verlag, translated in more than a dozen languages) and even more "Die Fälschung" (1979, "The deception"), which was published shortly before his early death in 1979 from cancer, were even bigger successes and made him one of the most important and well known left wing intellectuals of his time. His political engagements against nuclear power and what he called the "mad-system of reality" and the "world of the machine" were not only published in magazines but largely discussed in television shows of the time. His 1979 novel Die Fälschung was posthumously filmed as Die Fälschung
(1981); directed by Volker Schloendorff, it starred Bruno Ganz
, Hanna Schygulla
and Jerzy Skolimowski
.
Together with Peter Handke
and Michael Krüger
he was a jury member of the European literary Petrarca-Preis
from when the award was founded in 1975
and onto his death.
After the big success of the poetry collection and many positive reviews and reactions, a collection of Born's correspondence is planned for Spring 2007.
Eric Torgersen translated a collection of his poems from his first two Collections "Marktlage" (1967, Kiepenheuer and Witsch) and "Wo mir der Kopf steht" (1970, Kiepenheuer und Witsch), which so far has only been partly published. In "Dimension" his long "Feriengedicht" has been first published in German and English. Other translations are planned for 2007.
"Subscription," "Inheritance," Iowa Review 7, 2-3, Spring-Summer 1976 (reissued in book form as Writing from the World, University of Iowa Press, 1976).
"Finally There's Nothing More to Lose," "In the Morning on Monday," First Issue 9, Fall-Winter 1974-75.
"Bride and Groom," Kamadhenu II, 1-2, 1971.
"Case," "Bottles," "Self-Portrait," "Ethos," Doones I,4, 1971.
"Signs," Greenfield Review 1, Spring 1970.
"Infidelity," "Refrain," "For the Poor Devil Manfred Bock," "My God I Thought," "How Many Sons," "Washing Windows," "Confidence," "A Love," Modern Poetry in Translation, London, 6, 1970.
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
.
Nicolas Born was - together with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann
Rolf Dieter Brinkmann
Rolf Dieter Brinkmann was an important poet of German Pop-Literatur. He also wrote Keiner weiß mehr , a novel of modern family life. His early writing was inspired by Gottfried Benn and the French nouveau roman...
- one of the most important and most innovative German poets of his generation. His two novels Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte and Die Fälschung have been translated into more than a dozen languages and count among the most important works of German literature of the seventies.
Life and works
Nicolas Born grew up in a lower middle class family in the Ruhrgebiet. He worked making printing accessories in a chemical process for a large printing company in EssenEssen
- Origin of the name :In German-speaking countries, the name of the city Essen often causes confusion as to its origins, because it is commonly known as the German infinitive of the verb for the act of eating, and/or the German noun for food. Although scholars still dispute the interpretation of...
until he was able - with the help of a first literary prize, the Förderpreis Nordrhein-Westfalen, for his first novel "Der Zweite Tag", to go to Berlin and live from writing. He was an autodidact, and with his poems and novel scripts soon gathered enough attention from known writers and critics like Ernst Meister, Johannes Bobrowski
Johannes Bobrowski
Johannes Bobrowski was a German lyric poet, narrative writer, adaptor and essayist.-Life:Bobrowski was born in Tilsit in East Prussia. In 1925, he moved first to Rastenburg, then in 1928 on to Königsberg, where he attended the humanist Gymnasium. One of his teachers was Ernst Wiechert. In 1937, he...
, Günter Grass
Günter Grass
Günter Wilhelm Grass is a Nobel Prize-winning German author, poet, playwright, sculptor and artist.He was born in the Free City of Danzig...
and Hans Bender
Hans Bender
Hans Bender was a German lecturer on the subject of parapsychology, who was also responsible for establishing the parapsychological institute Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg. For many years his pipe smoking, contemplative figure was synonymous with German...
to get a scholarship for the renowned Berliner Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin in 1963/1964, where he met other young writers like Hans Christoph Buch, Hermann Peter Piwitt, Hubert Fichte
Hubert Fichte
Hubert Fichte was a German novelist.- Life :Hubert Fichte was born on March 21, 1935 in Perleberg Hospital. A few weeks after his birth his family moved to Hamburg-Lokstedt. Fichtes mother worked as stenotypist and he was mostly raised by his grandmother...
, Peter Bichsel and others, and was taught by Günter Grass
Günter Grass
Günter Wilhelm Grass is a Nobel Prize-winning German author, poet, playwright, sculptor and artist.He was born in the Free City of Danzig...
, Uwe Johnson
Uwe Johnson
Uwe Johnson was a German writer, editor, and scholar.- Life :Johnson was born in Kammin in Pomerania . His father was a Swedish-descent peasant from Mecklenburg and his mother was from Pommern...
, Peter Rühmkorf
Peter Rühmkorf
Peter Rühmkorf was a German writer who significantly influenced German post-war literature....
, Peter Weiss
Peter Weiss
Peter Ulrich Weiss was a German writer, painter, and artist of adopted Swedish nationality. He is particularly known for his plays Marat/Sade and The Investigation and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance....
and others.
In preparation for his stay at the Iowa International Writers Workshop in Iowa City in 1969/1970 Born read more and more contemporary American poets. In Iowa he met Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...
, Anselm Hollo
Anselm Hollo
Anselm Paul Alexis Hollo is a Finnish poet and translator. He has lived in the United States since 1967.-Life and work:...
, Ted Berrigan
Ted Berrigan
-Early life:Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army in 1954 to serve in the Korean War. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the University of Tulsa in...
, and many others, was friends with John Batki, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Eric Torgersen, Tom Raworth
Tom Raworth
Tom Raworth is a London-born poet and visual artist who has published over forty books of poetry and prose since 1966. His works has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth is a key figure in the British Poetry Revival. He lives in Brighton, England.-Early life and work:Raworth...
and others.
In the renowned "red frame"-series "Das neue Buch" Born published in 1972 his third collection of poems "Das Auge des Entdeckers" (The eye of the explorer), largely influenced by contemporary American poetry, utopian literature and a more relaxed perspective on political effectiveness of literature than was commonly known among the politically left-oriented colleagues of his generation. The book was a great success, selling very well for a poetry-collection, and made Born together with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann one of the most important and innovative poets of his generation in Germany.
Back in Germany, Born started translating the poems of Kenneth Koch for Rowohlt Verlag, which was published only in 1973 in the same Rowohlt-series "Das neue Buch".
His novels "Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte" (1976, Rowohlt Verlag, translated in more than a dozen languages) and even more "Die Fälschung" (1979, "The deception"), which was published shortly before his early death in 1979 from cancer, were even bigger successes and made him one of the most important and well known left wing intellectuals of his time. His political engagements against nuclear power and what he called the "mad-system of reality" and the "world of the machine" were not only published in magazines but largely discussed in television shows of the time. His 1979 novel Die Fälschung was posthumously filmed as Die Fälschung
Die Fälschung
Die Fälschung is an anti-war film directed by Volker Schlöndorff and internationally released in 1981. An international co-production, it was an adaptation of Nicolas Born's novel of the same name, which had appeared in 1979...
(1981); directed by Volker Schloendorff, it starred Bruno Ganz
Bruno Ganz
Bruno Ganz is a Swiss actor, known for his roles as Damiel in Wings of Desire and Adolf Hitler in Downfall.- Early life :Bruno Ganz was born in Zürich to a Swiss mechanic father and a northern Italian mother. He had decided to pursue an acting career by the time he entered university...
, Hanna Schygulla
Hanna Schygulla
Hanna Schygulla is a German actress and chanson singer. She is generally considered the most prominent German actress of the New German Cinema.-Life and career:Schygulla was born in Königshütte, Upper Silesia,...
and Jerzy Skolimowski
Jerzy Skolimowski
Jerzy Skolimowski is a Polish film director, screenwriter, dramatist and actor. A graduate of the prestigious National Film School in Łódź, Skolimowski has directed more than twenty films since his 1960 début Oko wykol...
.
Together with Peter Handke
Peter Handke
Peter Handke is an avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright.-Early life:Handke and his mother lived in the Soviet-occupied Pankow district of Berlin from 1944 to 1948 before resettling in Griffen...
and Michael Krüger
Michael Krüger (writer)
Michael Krüger is a German writer, publisher and translator.Michael Krüger grew up in Berlin. After the graduating he was apprenticed to a publisher and later studied philosophy and literature...
he was a jury member of the European literary Petrarca-Preis
Petrarca-Preis
Petrarca-Preis is a European literary award named after the Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch. It was founded in 1975 by German art historian and publisher Hubert Burda, and is primarily designed for contemporary European poets, but also epicists appear in the list of...
from when the award was founded in 1975
1975 in literature
The year 1975 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* August 12 — with the 20-year time limit stipulated by Thomas Mann at his death having expired, sealed packets containing 32 of the author's notebooks were opened in Zurich, Switzerland.* Writing under the...
and onto his death.
Nicolas Born revival in 2004
Twenty five years after his death his youngest daughter Katharina Born reedited an almost complete and critical collection of his poems including several unpublished works: "Nicolas Born- Gedichte" (Wallstein 2004). For the book Born received (for the first time posthumously) the renowned Peter-Huchel-Preis (2005).After the big success of the poetry collection and many positive reviews and reactions, a collection of Born's correspondence is planned for Spring 2007.
Selected works in German
- Das Auge des Entdeckers; Gedichte (1972)
- Entsorgt : für Bariton solo, 1989; music by Aribert Reimann (1989)
- Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte : Roman (1976) ISBN 3-498-00444-1
- Die Fälschung : Roman (1979) ISBN 3-498-00455-7
- Gedichte : 1967-1978 (1978) ISBN 3-498-00449-2
- Marktlage. Gedichte (1967)
- Metsi'ut medumah; translated by Avraham Ḳadimah (1982) ISBN 965-19-0118-7
- Täterskizzen : Erzählungen (1983) ISBN 3-498-00481-6
- Die Welt der Maschine : Aufsätze und Reden; edited by Rolf Haufs (1980) ISBN 3-498-00462-X (pbk.)
- Wo mir der Kopf steht. Gedichte (1970)
- Der zweite Tag. Roman (1965)
- Gedichte. (2004)
Works in English
- The deception; translated by Leila Vennewitz (1983) ISBN 0-316-10273-3
Eric Torgersen translated a collection of his poems from his first two Collections "Marktlage" (1967, Kiepenheuer and Witsch) and "Wo mir der Kopf steht" (1970, Kiepenheuer und Witsch), which so far has only been partly published. In "Dimension" his long "Feriengedicht" has been first published in German and English. Other translations are planned for 2007.
Translated poems in English
by Eric Torgersen (more planned)"Subscription," "Inheritance," Iowa Review 7, 2-3, Spring-Summer 1976 (reissued in book form as Writing from the World, University of Iowa Press, 1976).
"Finally There's Nothing More to Lose," "In the Morning on Monday," First Issue 9, Fall-Winter 1974-75.
"Bride and Groom," Kamadhenu II, 1-2, 1971.
"Case," "Bottles," "Self-Portrait," "Ethos," Doones I,4, 1971.
"Signs," Greenfield Review 1, Spring 1970.
"Infidelity," "Refrain," "For the Poor Devil Manfred Bock," "My God I Thought," "How Many Sons," "Washing Windows," "Confidence," "A Love," Modern Poetry in Translation, London, 6, 1970.