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[ excerpt ]
book view
also by the author:
cake & prostheses
I My Feet
interview with the translator here
events:
Wednesday, Nov. 26, 7:30 p.m.
Café Club Míšenská [downstairs]
Míšenská 71/3
Malá Strana
Publication supported by a grant from the Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport of the Republic of Austria
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the folded clock
100 number poems
by Gerhard Rühm
translated from the German by Alexander Booth
Like Kurt Schwitters before him, Gerhard Rühm has incorporated numerals and digits into his visual and aural poetry since the early days of Wiener Gruppe in the 1950s.
The Folded Clock brings together these number poems, comprising typewriter ideograms, typed concrete poetry, collages of everyday paper ephemera and scraps, and a
wide variety of literary forms where the visual pattern created on the page underpins the thematic meaning. Blurring the
distinction between “counting” and “recounting,” his "recitations" imaginatively translate arithmetic vocabulary into the
mundane, the existential, or the cosmic, such as a history of the universe narrated as a solar year, from the Big Bang on January 1
to the moon landing in the last seconds of New Year’s Eve. Rühm's images and texts unleash the sensual qualities
of numerals to subvert our digit-filled environment with its pervasive intensification of seamless control.
Recipient of the Austrian State Prize in 1991 and the America Award in Literature in 2022
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Like Cake and Prostheses, the pieces in The Folded Clock defy easy categorization — Is it a script or a poem or art? is probably the wrong question.
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— Biblioklept
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[...] the first number poem you encounter in Gerhard Rühm’s The Folded Clock, opens with a lengthy note explaining exactly
how the piece should be recited—volume and intensity directed and measured—before erupting across the following five pages as numbers, spelled out,
descend, rise, and repeat. Finding the flow and riding it (guided with a few more directives along the way) is not difficult, especially if you allow
yourself to read aloud and, there you are, from the very beginning, not simply reading but actively engaging with the poem.
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— Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts
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Poetry is difficult to translate at the best of times, and when the
sounds are so significant (as they are here) it must make it even harder. To get rhymes
and sense rendered in a different language and still conveying the message the poet wants
is a real achievement, and Booth appears to have done wonderfully in translating this book.
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— Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings
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Rühm has remained a radical experimenter, a restless explorer of traditions and genres, atomizing
their elements in order to recompose them with conceptual precision and a multiplicity of compositional techniques.
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— Rosmarie Waldrop
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ISBN 9788088628118
173 pp., 140 x 200 mm
smyth-sewn softcover with flaps
52 b/w images
poetry : art
publication:
UK : November 2025
US : December 2025
available for preorder
will ship in October 2025
airmail postage & handling incl.
also available from:
Bookshops
Bookshop.org
Blackwell's
Waterstones
Wordery
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Central Books
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