[11/12/26] Herbeck, Ernst: In His One Languages

World Poetry, paperback

Translated by Gary Sullivan & David Brazil

Publication Date: November 12, 2026

Publisher Marketing:

The first representative volume in English of Austrian outsider poet Ernst Herbeck (1920–1991) whose writing grappled with the interplay of language and experience, navigating inner turmoil and fragmented identity. Herbeck began writing poems in 1960 at a psychiatric clinic outside Vienna, where, since the end of World War II, he had been undergoing treatment following a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Head clinician Leo Navratil, a promoter of art brut and outsider writing, encouraged Herbeck to write poems in response to short prompts. These poems were subsequently collected into a series of books which became an unexpected sensation among avant-garde Austrian writers and the general public alike. Herbeck’s poetry was championed by the likes of Ernst Jandl and W.G. Sebald, for whom it seemed to “verge on the frontiers of a breathless, other world.” This edition collects poems from every period of Herbeck’s career, introducing English-language audiences to the work of this unique artist.

“The combinatory art of the bricoleur, creating diagrammatic word-relations between the life of the soul and the history unfolding above our heads, is also the technique by which Herbeck creates lyrical compositions of a beauty seldom found in literature.” —W. G. Sebald

“One thing that Plato, Aristotle, and Shakespeare agree on: poetry and madness are near allied. Schizophrenia, the syndrome of the shattered self, is the mental world where language returns to its foundations in babble and bursts of eloquence. Ernst Herbeck’s poetry, written in a psychiatric clinic, has been a beacon of verbal fascination in the German language for many years. Now it bursts forth in a brilliant English translation that doesn’t merely ‘capture’ the many senses of the original, but liberates them into the common language of the planet.” —W. J. T. Mitchell

“Welcome to the uncanny charms of Ernst Herbeck, whose poetry marries objects, concepts, colors, and language in a powerful, off-kilter embrace. This warm and awkward yet precise verbal choreography opens up a world in which all material phenomena and ungraspables move together in a dark forest of symbols and architectural abstractions that regard us with eerie, silently benevolent insight, both withholding and generous. Here, as Walter Benjamin observed about another marginal prodigy, Robert Walser, ‘we find ourselves confronted by a seemingly quite unintentional, but attractive, even fascinating linguistic wilderness.’ I’ll never forget this liminal encounter: ‘One learns poetry from beasts one finds in the woods.’” —Maria Damon

“Ernst Herbeck wrote from within a psychiatric clinic, in a German coming apart, in the shadow of the twentieth century's catastrophes. David Brazil and Gary Sullivan have remade these poems in English with daring, wit, and ingenuity, refusing to mend the breaks and slips—because the fracture is inseparable from the art.” —Ross Benjamin