Berlin-Hamlet

<p><strong>Shortlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2017 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry</strong><br /><br />Before his tragic death, Szil&aacute;rd Borb&eacute;ly had gained a name as one of Europe's most searching new poets. Berlin-Hamlet&mdash;one of his major works&mdash;evokes a stroll through the phantasmagoric shopping arcades described in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, but instead of the delirious image fragments of nineteenth-century European culture, we pass by disembodied scraps of written text, remnants as ghostly as their authors: primarily Franz Kafka but also Benjamin himself or the Hungarian poets Attila J&oacute;zsef or Erno Sz&eacute;p. Paraphrases and reworked quotations, drawing upon the vanished prewar legacy, particularly its German Jewish aspects, appear in sharp juxtaposition with images of post-1989 Berlin frantically rebuilding itself in the wake of German reunification.</p>