Franz Josef Czernin
Franz Josef Czernin, Vienna, 29 April 2026
“When poetry carries, it can be of use to many.”
The recent literary work of the Austrian writer and linguistic thinker Franz Josef Czernin has been dominated by a project that is actually quite impossible. In his volume “Gute Unterhaltung, Herr Adorno!”—just published when this conversation took place—he writes: “For a few years, now, I’ve been transforming cantos from Dante’s ‘Divina Commedia.’ I didn’t begin these transformations with ‘Canto I’ of the ‘Inferno,’ nor will I conclude them with the final canto of ‘Paradiso’—so the plan is to publish each transformation as its own chapbook. I recently published a collection of ‘16 Chapbooks.’ The notion of transformation I’m after is generalizable, I think, and it suggests ideas for dealing with literary or even societal traditions at large.” That’s the overall theme of this conversation at Czernin’s Vienna apartment. And once again, it becomes evident that highly specialized endeavors have an extremely great deal to do with human beings’ basic dispositions—like a tendency to wrestle with pain and language. And that this can sometimes have highly comedic consequences.
“When poetry carries, it can be of use to many.”
The recent literary work of the Austrian writer and linguistic thinker Franz Josef Czernin has been dominated by a project that is actually quite impossible. In his volume “Gute Unterhaltung, Herr Adorno!”—just published when this conversation took place—he writes: “For a few years, now, I’ve been transforming cantos from Dante’s ‘Divina Commedia.’ I didn’t begin these transformations with ‘Canto I’ of the ‘Inferno,’ nor will I conclude them with the final canto of ‘Paradiso’—so the plan is to publish each transformation as its own chapbook. I recently published a collection of ‘16 Chapbooks.’ The notion of transformation I’m after is generalizable, I think, and it suggests ideas for dealing with literary or even societal traditions at large.” That’s the overall theme of this conversation at Czernin’s Vienna apartment. And once again, it becomes evident that highly specialized endeavors have an extremely great deal to do with human beings’ basic dispositions—like a tendency to wrestle with pain and language. And that this can sometimes have highly comedic consequences.