Integrity

I have come to know and appreciate the voice of Sibylle Lewitscharoff posthumously, intrigued by obituaries published after her death on 13 May this year. A writer of virtuosity, she was also a woman of wit – and a wonderful reader. In a terrific lecture given in Vienna in 2016, she considered the lasting impact of Dante by discussing not so much the merit as the fundamental options taken by various translators, to great effect. She remarked how Dante haunts Samuel Beckett and his ‘aesthetics of negativity’, representative of much modern fiction: ‘The essence of the modern novel is brokenness. That’s what it lives on. Happiness has become a subject for kitsch.’ Dante might teach us to dare to envisage happiness, to rediscover hope. Lewitscharoff gave this aspiration voice in her writing. It also informed her life. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2010 she knew hardship. Not long before her death, she said with a characteristic mixture of earnestness and irony: ‘In the next world I imagine a differently constituted spiritual-embodied, simultaneously glorious beauty. I hope for a new connection with the body – I’m not so keen on the old one.’

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