The Iron Age. Poems 1973-2023 is a project in over 30 languages at the time of the Leipzig Book Fair. Contexts include the linguistic work on translations by Jura Soyfer into over 50 languages (partial list) and scientific publications in over 40 languages (in November 2023 only available in German).
In this context, three installations were realized in 2023 in the context of book fairs: Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main and Vienna.
The project began in 1973 with the publication of the poetry collection „von großen städten“. The poems were written in the context of translations from English (Sylvia Plath, Leonard Cohen), French (Paul Eluard) and Latin (Ovid, The Golden Age). And a theatre performance at the lighthouse in Bregenz on the coup d’état in Chile.
The presentation of the volume in the auditorium of the Gymnasium Bregenz, the reading of poems from this volume by Traute Foresti on the radio, the inclusion of the leading poem in the anthology of Vorarlberger Lyriker brought the first publicity.
A lot has changed since then. Leonard Cohen, who stood in the tradition of Garcia Lorca (a poet for whom Max Haller was committed, who did a lot for Bregenz, Vorarlberg), I began to perceive as a political singer of resistance, of democracy.
A new world opened up in 1978 with Jura Soyfer, the authors of the „proletarian alternative“, Elfriede Jelinek, through Tschingis Aitmatov, Umberto Eco. Hundreds could be listed here, but above all the conversations with thousands from over 120 countries were important.
The use of media in this context has been documented.
Since 1978, I have also been studying the problems of machine translation of languages, designing an alternative to digital constructs based on quantum technology.
Now it is a matter of working with many people to become aware of languages anew in the face of the „iron age“, to overcome this age linguistically, technologically and politically.