Featured in the Special Editions of the current issue of Ezra, a forum for poetry and translation, is an excerpt from Rainer J. Hanshe's prose fugue, Beyond Sense.
In this work, the incendiary Carmelo Bene enacts the role of the Pythia invoking at the Temple of Apollo the lives of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud as they are in the grips of aphasiac disintegration. From Hölderlin’s cryptic utterance Pallaksch! to Baudelaire’s single blasphemous statement and mutism, to Nietzsche’s childish babbling and Artaud’s violent, borborygmic shrieks, after decades of bravura linguistic articulations, the logos in these damned men goes near-silent or berserk.
Of the work, poet Robert Kelly said that it "is one of the most powerful, mysterious prose fugues I have encountered in years. Though I read it a few months ago, it's still with me. ... [It] richly investigates, interrogates, the union of poetic vision with the historic actual. Luminous with clarity, rhythmically complex, [Hanshe's] writing grips us by how it says as much as by what it says."
Read the full excerpt here.