Tag: Gitta Honegger

“Darüber spricht man nicht” (One doesn’t talk about that)–Thomas Bernhard on Sexuality

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Sexuality was drastically restricted in my case, because the moment it began to stir, you see, and I noticed somehow, aha, these are pretty mysterious forces, which suddenly set you in motion and toward certain objects. [Laughs.] That’s when I became mortally ill somehow. And that’s why it was all quite bottled up and kept in check for years. Which is a pity, really, because just at the time when sexuality has its greatest appeal, that is when it awakens so to speak, when that little weenie starts to stir, to put it plainly, you see, that’s when I was in the hospital. Everything was limp, more or less, and one lies there and is kept down, simple as that. When I finally got out, I was rather tired and a little weak. But, between twenty-two and thirty, everything was in place and normal, I believe, you see. With all the pleasure and all the ups and downs, literally and metaphorically–don’t be embarrassed now.

Krista Fleischmann, Thomas Bernhard: Eine Begegnung. (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1991), 53-4. Quoted in Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian, Gitta Honegger. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 62. Trans. Gitta Honegger.

An Extract From Thomas Bernhard’s Correction on Death and Taxidermy

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… [But] one day I too shall no longer find a way out, everyone is destined, one day at some moment which is the crucial moment, to find no further way out, that’s how a man is made. … As I ‘d heard something that was different from what I’d been hearing till then, I’d gotten up and gone to post myself at the window, to look outside. The darkness was kept at bay by the workshop lights, Hoeller was busy stuffing a huge bird, I couldn’t see what kind of bird. It was a huge black bird which Hoeller held on his knees, cramming polyurethane into it with a stick. It was eleven o’clock, and inasmuch as Hoeller always got up at four in the morning, all his life, even as a child, he’d always gotten up at four in the morning, because his father also had always been up by four in the morning, everybody in the Aurach valley got up between four and five o’clock in the morning, and so because Hoeller is always up at four in the morning, keeping such late hours, such very long late hours as these in these circumstances, will undermine his health, I thought. From my window up in the garret I kept watching Hoeller down there in his workshop stuffing that huge black bird, how he kept cramming it with more and more stuffing, I thought I’ll watch him from this excellent vantage point until he’s finished stuffing that bird, and so I stood there motionless for a good half hour until I saw that Hoeller had finished stuffing the bird. Suddenly Hoeller had thown the stuffed bird down to the floor, he’d jumped up and run off into the back room where I couldn’t see him anymore, but I waited, looking into the workshop, until I could see Hoeller again, he came back and sat down on his chair again and went back to stuffing the bird, now I noticed a huge heap of polyurethane on the floor beside Hoeller’s chair and I thought this huge heap of polyurethane is now going to be crammed into thi bird which I’d supposed had already been crammed full long since. By stuffing this bird he is making the night bearable for himself, I thought (122-3).

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“Translations are always disgusting / But they brought me a lot of money” (Thomas Bernhard)

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From Thomas Bernhard’s play Der Weltverbesserer (The World-Fixer). The translation here is by Gitta Honegger and appears as an illustrating example in her fantastic essay “Language Speaks. Anglo-Bernhard: Thomas Bernhard in Translation,” collected in A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard (ed. Matthias Konzett). At the time of Companion’s first publication, Der Weltverbesserer had yet to be released in an English edition; Ariadne released one in 2005.