LADY LIVES IN LOCK OF HAIR, PALE GENTLEMEN ARE DRINKING MOKKO
The review analyzes two bilingual publications of Herta Müller (b. 1953), Nobel Prizewinner in Literature (2009), a writer of Romanian origin, writing in German and Romanian. Her books “Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame” (2000, transl. from German by A. Prokopyev) and “Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen” (2005, transl. from German by B. Shapiro) were published by “Literature without Borders” and included into the “Poetry Without Borders” series (Latvia, Ozolnieki, 2018). The genre and stylistic originality of the collage poems by Herta Müller is observed in their reference to the avant-garde experiments of the twentieth century. The review displays the author’s rethinking of the principle of randomness and the “childish” language of Dadaists, as well as developing of the surrealistic montage of everyday and dreamy. The transformation of German language becomes a means of experiencing and overcoming of personal and collective trauma (Nazism, socialist totalitarianism). The space is represented as a specific heterotopy, and the body reveals itself as the fragmented and estranged one. Apart from this the contamination of visual and verbal codes, as well as the stylistic, rhythmic and syntactic features of the Russian translation are demonstrated.