A 30 Year-After Near-Posthumous Note on Peter Handke’s “Public Insult”
The Translation Journal, (2000)Abstract
In the late 60s, flying high, I talked my colleagues at Farrar, Straus & Giroux into taking on a pack of work by the Austrian sensation Peter Handke. The package included a set of his early Sprechstücke 1 as Handke called these musically arranged word series to distinguish them from texts that need acting out and his second novel Der Hausierer2 The Panhandler—the full-length play Kaspar added itself during the translation work, providing the title Kaspar & Other Plays those others being Self-Accusation and Offending the Audience, which I now call Public Insult.