Liesl Ujvary - Good & Safe
Liesl Ujvary
Good & Safe
Translated from German by
ANN COTTEN and ANNA-ISABELLA DINWOODIE
October 2, 2025
BIOS
LIESL UJVARY (b. 1939) is an Austrian writer in the concrete tradition. Her oeuvre includes experimental electronic music and video. In the mid-1970s, after studying Slavic languages, ancient Hebrew literature and art history in Vienna and Zurich, she edited and translated an anthology of six Soviet poets whose manuscripts she smuggled out of Moscow. Her poetic debut, Good & Safe (Sicher & Gut) published in 1977 and reissued in 2017, combines conceptual rigor with slapstick and social satire. Later works such as Body & Tech (2024) explore existential questions through scenarios of cyborg combat.
ANN COTTEN is a writer and translator from Vienna, Austria. Translations from English to German include books by Isabel Waidner, Legacy Russell, Rosmarie Waldrop, Mary MacLane, Joe Wenderoth, and Adam Green. Cotten is co-editor of Triëdere, an Austrian journal for theoretical literature.
ANNA-ISABELLA DINWOODIE earned an MFA in translation from Queens College, CUNY, where she served as translations editor at Armstrong Literary. She makes visual poetry and performance art. A 2019 Bread Loaf Scholar, Dinwoodie works as a freelance translator and writer in Berlin.
Liesl Ujvary
Good & Safe
Translated from German by
ANN COTTEN and ANNA-ISABELLA DINWOODIE
Liesl Ujvary’s groundbreaking 1977 debut concocts a potent and volatile concrete poetry of structuralist social satire, disrupted by flares of poetic whimsy drawn from the depths of the subconscious.
A generation after H.C. Artmann and the Wiener Gruppe, alongside Ernst Jandl, Elfriede Jelinek, Elfriede Gerstl, and Friederike Mayröcker, Ujvary was a central force in shaping contemporary Austrian writing. In her ludic and rigorous poems, experimental techno music, photography and digital art, she combines austere formalism with the anarchy of the human body and mind. The first of Ujvary’s books to be translated into English, Good & Safe employs minimalist techniques in a raucous, empathetic takedown of 1970s Austrian society: the stuffy Umwelt of Tyrol at the height of ski-industry expansion, the proliferation of wurst and futurist furnishing, the chatter and violence of the Viennese bohème.
“I would even say it’s the book of the hour. Dialectic objects are listed out like in a grammar book or laboratory; we are shown language’s power and its divestment of power, as well as its function as a generator of ideology.” —Monika Rinck
“Reading these sardonically whimsical poems with their unsparing humor, it’s hard to believe they were written decades ago and not just this year, since they speak so directly to our current season of malaise. I laughed out loud with these fiercely translated takedowns of complacent bourgeois faith in our social institutions. Tautology rules, and Austria is everywhere.” —Susan Bernofsky
BIOS
LIESL UJVARY (b. 1939) is an Austrian writer in the concrete tradition. Her oeuvre includes experimental electronic music and video. In the mid-1970s, after studying Slavic languages, ancient Hebrew literature and art history in Vienna and Zurich, she edited and translated an anthology of six Soviet poets whose manuscripts she smuggled out of Moscow. Her poetic debut, Good & Safe (Sicher & Gut) published in 1977 and reissued in 2017, combines conceptual rigor with slapstick and social satire. Later works such as Body & Tech (2024) explore existential questions through scenarios of cyborg combat.
ANN COTTEN is a writer and translator from Vienna, Austria. Translations from English to German include books by Isabel Waidner, Legacy Russell, Rosmarie Waldrop, Mary MacLane, Joe Wenderoth, and Adam Green. Cotten is co-editor of Triëdere, an Austrian journal for theoretical literature.
ANNA-ISABELLA DINWOODIE earned an MFA in translation from Queens College, CUNY, where she served as translations editor at Armstrong Literary. She makes visual poetry and performance art. A 2019 Bread Loaf Scholar, Dinwoodie works as a freelance translator and writer in Berlin.
October 2, 2025
