Good & Safe

A generation after H.C. Artmann and the Wiener Gruppe, alongside Ernst Jandl, Elfriede Jelinek, Elfriede Gerstl, and Friederike Mayröcker, Liesl Ujvary was a central force in shaping contemporary Austrian writing. In her ludic and rigorous poems, experimental techno music, photography and digital art, she combines austere formalism with the anarchy of the human body and mind. Good & Safe employs minimalist techniques in a raucous, empathetic takedown of 1970s Austrian society: the stuffy Umwelt of Tyrol at the height of ski-industry expansion, the proliferation of wurst and futurist furnishing, the chatter and violence of the Viennese bohème. Translated from German by Ann Cotten & Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie, with an introduction by Fatima Naqvi.

LIESL UJVARY, born 1939 in Bratislava is an Austrian writer in the concrete tradition. Her oeuvre includes experimental electronic music and video. In the mid-1970s, after studying Slavic languages, ancient Hebrew literature and art history in Vienna and Zurich. She edited and translated an anthology of six Soviet poets whose manuscripts she smuggled out of Moscow. Her poetic debut, Good & Safe (Sicher & Gut) published in 1977 and reissued in 2017, combines conceptual rigor with slapstick and social satire. Later works such as Body & Tech (2024) explore existential questions through scenarios of cyborg combat. Liesl Ujvary lives in Vienna. ANN COTTEN is a writer and translator from Vienna, with roots in Iowa. She finished university there in 2006 with a work about Concrete Poetry. Ann first emerged as a poet at poetry slams. Her work has been published in anthologies and poetry journals. Some of her poems have been translated into English and published in journals like burning deck (USA). Translations from English to German include books by Isabel Waidner, Legacy Russell, Rosmarie Waldrop, Mary MacLane, Joe Wenderoth, and Adam Green. She is co-editor of Triëdere, an Austrian journal for theoretical literature. Ann lives in Vienna and Berlin. ANNA-ISABELLA DINWOODIE earned an MFA in translation from Queens College, CUNY, where she served as translations editor at Armstrong Literary. She makes visual poetry and performance art. A 2019 Bread Loaf Scholar, Dinwoodie works as a freelance translator and writer in Berlin. FATIMA NAQVI is Leavenworth Professor of German and Film & Media Studies at Yale University. She writes on Austrian authors and filmmakers such as Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Friederike Mayröcker and Michael Haneke.