Val di Non

Val di Non / Val di Non
»I sing, therefore I am, I sing.«

 

Longlisted for the Austrian Book Prize 2017

Can you imagine a mountain without its corresponding valley? If you can imagine both God and the world, can you manage to imagine, for example, God without the world? That which hovers before your mind’s eye, from A to Z, often appears more real than what’s confusingly in front of you.

Once upon a time mountains were mountains and valleys were valleys. Once we know that there are more things in heaven and earth than we can dream of, mountains are no...
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Can you imagine a mountain without its corresponding valley? If you can imagine both God and the world, can you manage to imagine, for example, God without the world? That which hovers before your mind’s eye, from A to Z, often appears more real than what’s confusingly in front of you.

Once upon a time mountains were mountains and valleys were valleys. Once we know that there are more things in heaven and earth than we can dream of, mountains are no longer mountains nor chasms chasms: what’s bursting into bloom before you could also be a valley. Sounds call out to one another in secret, barely audible, from deep inside and below. Wide awake then the intervals swell in speech, over and over again a second voice joins the first, then another, and then another and: like an echo the possible feasts upon limitation through repetition, but encounters ever less reality.


One can take an extraordinary hike through Oswald Egger’s Val di Non or simply go for a walk. A richly illustrated book with innumerable doors, idiosyncrasies, and points that lead you to stumble into an incredible imaginary landscape of the marvelous: what it will be like to have lived without having been.   

»Oswald Egger moves comfortably between literature and the sciences, visual art and sound art.« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»With Val di Non Egger sets off on the search for the absolute void as a means of purification on the way to poetic enlightenment ... and thereby carries on his distinctive poetical programme with convincing consistency.« Deutschlandfunk

»Val di Non is a refined book of rejection, a topographical experiment with sight. Wandering through a landscape we are pulled into the massive rock face of words and into a literary botany, which can be even more real and detailed than reality itself.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Egger is a magician of the word.« Peter Pisa, Kurier

»In eloquent and detailed language Oswald Egger creates a landscape which at times seems even more real than reality itself.« ORF

»[Val di Non] is perhaps Egger’s most beautiful book yet, certainly the most personal.« ORF Ö1

»Egger’s stunning language on the one hand takes hold of describable nature in a very precise way, and on the other liquefies it in his current of archaic words. Great poetry for unnatural times.« Wiener Zeitung

»Oswald Egger moves comfortably between literature and the sciences, visual art and sound art.« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»With Val di Non Egger sets off on the search for the absolute void as a means of purification on the way to poetic enlightenment ... and thereby carries on his distinctive poetical programme with convincing consistency.« Deutschlandfunk

»Val di Non is a refined book of rejection, a...

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2017, 208 pages

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Nachricht
Oswald Egger has received Germany's highest literary honours in recognition of his innovative and experimental oeuvre.
 
Nachricht
Oswald Egger has received Germany's highest literary honours in recognition of his innovative and experimental oeuvre.
 

DISCOVER

Nachricht
Oswald Egger has received Germany's highest literary honours in recognition of his innovative and experimental oeuvre.
 

Persons

Born in Lana, South Tyrol, in 1963, Egger now lives in Vienna. He has been awarded several literary prizes, including the Peter Huchel Prize in 2007.

Born in Lana, South Tyrol, in 1963, Egger now lives in Vienna. He has been awarded several literary prizes, including the Peter Huchel Prize in...


OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Oskar Fiala and the Principle of the Smallest Effect
Year of Publication: 2025
Oswald EggerYear of Publication: 2025
When Oskar Fiala, a forgotten, unknown left-wing social-democrat author, died penniless and nameless on the outskirts of Leipzig in 1948, his death certificate listed his occupation as »worker, mining«. The young journalist and writer led a restless and aimless life, wandering peripatetically across Europe, until the Second World War put an end to his movement. Time and again, he suffered...
Either I Only Dreamt the Journey Along the Mississippi Or I’m Dreaming Now
Year of Publication: 2021
Oswald EggerYear of Publication: 2021

Does everything flow? Like a progressively osculating billowing jumble in the form of words and forms without words, swirlings, dispersions and clusters of waves of reveries breaking in on themselves, flowing past the riverbanks of an internal landscape.


As though they were relational lines in the »stream of consciousness«, lines that touch, liaise, intersect, overlap only to lose...

Discreet Continuity
Year of Publication: 2008
Oswald EggerYear of Publication: 2008
»A mathematician who is not also to some extent a poet will never be a perfect mathematician.« (Karl Weierstraß, mathematician)

Conversely, lyric poet Oswald Egger conducts basic research into the interaction between mathematics and poetry:


He grasps both as related manners of thinking, darts in his short articles »with cheerful seriousness« between...

Heard Herds
Year of Publication: 2003
Oswald EggerYear of Publication: 2003
»The world – hardly imaginable – is the interieur of speech.« And the hearths of speech aggregate in »preliminary stages of the fusion of processions of images that pass by before the resting eye« a poem of more than 1,000 nine-line stanzas, »stanzas of discreet continuity«. There sleeps Poemander, shepherd of the Hermetica, stoking the fire and...

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News
06.03.2023
On March 7, Oswald Egger celebrates his 60th birthday.