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German writing
author events:
about the translator:
Mark Kanak's work and translations have appeared in journals throughout the world, and a collection of
poetry in German, absturze, was recently published by Frohliche Wohnzimmer Verlag in Vienna.
He has also translated into German Jeff Tweedy's adult head (kopf erwachesen). The recipient
of the 2006 Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry, he is the translator of Aquamarine by Peter Pessl.
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last loosening: a handbook for con men
and those who wish to be one
by Walter Serner
translated from the German by Mark Kanak
Co-founder of Dada and its enfant terrible, Walter Serner was a brilliant observer of society — his activities in the 1920s have been called "a dance on the rim of a volcano."
His Last Loosening: A Dada Manifesto was written in 1918 and published in 1920. Slightly revised later as Serner became disgusted with Dada, it forms
the first part of this volume, its philosophical foundation. A playful "moral codex" to subvert the illusions and stereotypes underpinning society's
views on morality and decency, it attacks the contradictions between appearance and reality: "Surely the world wants to be
deceived, and is enraged when you do not oblige."
The volume's second part, the Handbook, was written in Geneva in 1927 and offers a practical guide in gnomic prose for the modern amoralist, the con man.
A cynical vision to be sure, Serner has set out a list of precepts to arm us in a world where boredom prevails and nothing but self-interest is a motivator, a shameless,
bigoted world wallowing in an orgy of narcissism, where it is either fool or be fooled. His smugness and indifference, his "Jesuit snobbery" as one
critic called it, gave his work an explosive force that was unsurpassed by his contemporaries. In today's world, which has witnessed an unabated proliferation of swindlers
from business to politics to the media to academia to the arts, Serner's Handbook might prove very useful indeed.
Praise:
No one brings the intellectual perspective of Serner's ... he is at once nihilistic and utterly tranquil and serene,
encountering nothingness with cold, dispassionate, playful lines. Not to be forgotten: "Whoever speaks a word of comfort is a traitor." |
— Jörg Drews, Süddeutsche Zeitung
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Serner's manifesto is written in a provocative, new, highly suggestive style that has been quickly imitated.
With its appearance Dada, which before this manifesto was a rather amorphous grouping of modern artists having an original name, was
given a mode and way of speaking. |
— Hamburger Correspondent (September 1920)
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ISBN 978 80 86264 43 1
approx. 160 pp.
14 x 20 cm
softcover with flaps
non-fiction : avant-garde
forthcoming 2012
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