Telegrams of the Soul
Telegrams of the Soul
Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg
Selected, translated and
with an afterword by Peter Wortsman
archipelago books
Copyright © 2005 Archipelago Books
First Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
English Translation copyright © 2005 Peter Wortsman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Altenberg, Peter, 1859–1919.
[Prose works. Selections. English. 2005]
Telegrams of the soul : selected prose of Peter Altenberg / selected, translated, and with an afterword by Peter Wortsman.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-9749680-8-0 (pbk.)
I. Altenberg, Peter, 1859-1919—Translations into English.
I. Wortsman, Peter. II. Title.
PT2601.L78A6 2005
838'.91208—dc22 2004027895
Archipelago Books
232 Third Street #A111
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.archipelagobooks.org
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Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg
Translations of “Flower Allée,” “The Mouse” and “In the Stadtpark” were first published in Fiction. An earlier version of “P.S. (to P.A. from P.W.)” previously appeared under a different title in A Modern Way to Die, small stories and microtales, by Peter Wortsman, Fromm International Publishing Corporation, New York, 1991.
Cover art: Oskar Kokoschka, Peter Altenberg, 1909.
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zürich
All rights reserved
This publication is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
to my father’s wit and my mother’s soul
P. W.
Contents
Autobiography
Retrospective Introduction to my Book Märchen des Lebens
A Letter to Arthur Schnitzler
On Writing
The Koberer (Procurer)
Coffeehouse
I Drink Tea
Perfume
On Smells
Tulips
Flower Allée
Uncle Max
Uncle Emmerich
My Aunt
Career
The Bed
Celebrity
Poem
Love
Theater Evening
Poverty
The Little Silk Swatches
Day of Affluence
Traveling
In the Volksgarten
Marionette Theater
At Buffalo Bill’s
Saint Martin’s Island
The Kingfisher
The Drummer Belín
Twelve
Seventeen to Thirty
Schubert
Gramophone Record
A Real True Relationship
The Nature of Friendship
October Sunday
Fellow Man
The Reader
Modern Diogenes
Conversation
Albert
The Private Tutor
Conversation with Tíoko
The Automaton
Adultery
Philosophy
Akolé
Complications
The Novice Postal Clerk
Conversation with a Chambermaid
Afternoon Break
The Mouse
The Hotel Room
Elevator
Visit
Little Things
Idyll
My Ideals
Peter Altenberg as Collector
On the Street
The Walking Stick
A Walk
Psychology
Discovery
Persecution Complex
January, on the Semmering
The Steamboat Landing
In Munich
My Summer Trip, 1916
My Gmunden
An Experience
In a Viennese Puff
Putain
Human Relations
The New Romanticism
Cabaret Fledermaus
Newsky Roussotine Troop
The Interpretation
Subjectivity
Aphorisms
The People Don’t Always Feel Altogether Social-democratic
Big Prater Swing
Sunset in the Prater
The Night
Sanatorium for the Mentally Imbalanced (but not the one in which I wiled!)
Mood
July Sunday
In the Stadtpark
A Sunday (12.29.1918)
To Make a Long Story Short: The Prose of Peter Altenberg (an afterword)
P.S. (to P.A. from P.W.)
There are three idealists: God, mothers and poets!
They don’t seek the ideal in completed things—
they find it in the incomplete.
Peter Altenberg
Telegrams of the Soul
I was born in 1862, in Vienna. My father is a businessman. He has one distinguishing quality: He only reads French books. For the past 40 years. Above his bed hangs a wonderful likeness of his God “Victor Hugo.” Evenings he sits in a dark red armchair, reading the Revue des deux Mondes, dressed in a blue robe with a wide velvet collar à la Victor Hugo. There’s not another idealist like him in this world. He was once asked: “Aren’t you proud of your son?”
He replied: “I was not overly vexed that he remained an idler for 30 years. So I’m not overly honored that he’s a poet now! I gave him his freedom. I knew that it was a long shot. I counted on his soul!”
Yes, indeed, oh noblest, most remarkable of all fathers, for the longest time I squandered your godly gift of freedom, doted on noble and altogether ignoble women, loafed around in forests, was a lawyer without studying law, a doctor without studying medicine, a book dealer without selling books, a lover without ever marrying, and finally a poet without composing any poetry. Can these short things really be called poetry?! No way.They’re extracts! Extracts from life. The life of the soul and what the day may bring, reduced to two to three pages, cleansed of superfluities like a beef cow in a reduction pot! It’s up to the reader to re-dissolve these extracts with his own lust for life and stir them back into a palatable broth, to heat them up with his own zest, in short, to make them light, liquidy and digestible. But there are “soulful stomachs” that can’t tolerate extracts. Everything ingested remains heavy and caustic. Such constitutions require 90 percent broths, watered-down blends. What are they supposed to dilute the extracts with?! With their own “lust for life” maybe?
Consequently, I have many adversaries, “dyspeptics of the soul,” quite simply.
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