Ernst Herbeck - In His One Languages

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  Bilingual Edition
  November 12, 2026
  
  Distributed by
  Asterism Books (US)
  Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)

Ernst Herbeck
In His One Languages

Translated from German by
DAVID BRAZIL and Gary Sullivan

The first full-length English-language selection of poems by the Austrian outsider poet Ernst Herbeck (1920–1991), championed by W. G. Sebald and Ernst Jandl.

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, later, the general public. W.G. Sebald described Herbeck’s work as seeming to “verge on the frontiers of a breathless, other world.” This edition collects poems from every period of Herbeck’s career, and introduces 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

“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. Letters and ideas dance with clumsy synesthetic grace in this dark wood where Herbeck’s psyche tries to sort out the world it’s been thrust into, responding to prompts like ‘father,’ ‘mother,’ ‘poem,’ ‘patient’ and ‘psychiatrist,’ ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ 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 wood.’” —Maria Damon

“Herbeck’s poems explode a simple circle into a disco-ball—multi-dimensional and full of mirrors reflecting a colorful cast of sometimes indecipherable images.” —Wendy Lotterman, BOMB Magazine

ERNST HERBECK (1920–1991) was a well-loved Austrian poet who was institutionalized at the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Institute on the outskirts of Vienna. He was encouraged to write poetry by Leo Navratil, Gugging’s Head Clinician and a champion of naive art who would later establish the institute’s Haus der Künstler, or Artists’ House. From 1960 until Herbeck’s death in 1991, Navratil prompted Herbeck to write some 1,200 poems. Navratil edited and published several books of Herbeck’s poetry. In 2020, literary scholar Gisela Steinlechner edited a collected volume, Der Hase!!!! (The Hare!!!!), published in Austria by Jung und Jung Verlag. In His One Languages is the first representative collection of Herbeck’s work to be available to English-language readers.

GARY SULLIVAN has published  half a dozen collections of comics, essays, plays, and poetry, including PPL in a Depot and a selection of his translations of Ernst Herbeck, the chapbook Everyone Has a Mouth (Ugly Duckling Presse). The coiner of “flarf” and the author of the influential movement’s first poems, His poetry comic strip “The New Life” has run in Rain Taxi Review of Books since 1997. He hosts “Bodega Pop” on WFMU’s Give the Drummer Radio.

DAVID BRAZIL is a poet, novelist, and translator.  His third volume of poetry, Holy Ghost (City Lights), was nominated for the California Book Award. His selected translations, profane hours, which includes versions from German and other ancient and modern languages, was published by Free Poetry in 2023.  He lives in Spain.

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