Ágnes Nemes Nagy: My brain: A lake

"My Brain: A Lake". Four words and a punctuation mark that mean so much when you think about them. How are they related? The brain says that it just recognizes a lake. Or the brain says about itself that it is a lake. Or are there two irreconcilable opposites here? The meaningful world of Ágnes Nemes Nagy opens up as soon as you read the title.

"Nevertheless  looking,  look / look (she said, you know / like a scar on a tree". They look at us, the metals, monsters, lakes, trees and scars in the poems of Ágnes Nemes Nagy, who would be 100 years old in January 2022. Franz Fühmann called the Hungarian poetess a "Queen of Magyar poetry" and demanded for the first German-language edition of her poems: "The bookshops and libraries should fly flags, with banners and pennants and standards, in the dream colors of poetry." If one looks at the entire work, a whole cosmology of ways of speaking becomes apparent. Organic and inorganic objects become actors. The lyrical I of these texts is not the center of interpretation, but a pain-sensitive membrane, "memory of the Earth", random crossing point, echo or mirror reflection. Many of these poems read like lessons for unlearning Western subjectivity, like instructions for a different view, a view from the other, the non-human one.