Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Trafika Europe 11

spirits of Pajak’s life and age. His stark line drawings do not so much illustrate the text on the page as stand in uneasy relation with it, at time echoing or reinforcing the words, at others contradicting them. In contrast to Pajak’s encyclopedic gaze, we have Klaus Merz’s microscopic focus. He has been called a “master of the poetic miniature.” Both his prose and his poetry at first seem deceptively simple. Yet the more closely one reads his works, the deeper one is drawn into their complexity and richness. Laconic, razor sharp, and supremely concentrated, Merz’s poetic language captures a gamut of emotions in a minimum of words. He bores into each word and mines the multivalence within and between individual syllables. You could say his poems depict the world on little bits of ivory two centimeters wide. The most disrupted and disruptive text in our issue is Mariella Mehr’s fictionalized autobiography stoneage . Born into the nomadic Yenish people in 1947, Mehr was a victim of the ‘Relief Organization for Rural Street Children’, a government-sanctioned organization intended to forcedly assimilate the

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