"A once in a century discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author's home and was put on trial. York-born Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called Hugerl."
"She showed Neundlinger 100 letters that Auden had sent to his lover, some of them also addressed to his spouse. It's a once in a century find, the kind of thing a literary historian can only dream of, says Sandra Mayer, a cultural historian at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who has spent the last two years digitising the letters with her colleague Timo Fruhwirth, and went public with the discovery last week."
A cache of about 100 letters documents an intimate correspondence between W.H. Auden and Hugo Kurka spanning the early 1960s to the 1970s. Kurka was a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic who burgled Auden's home and later stood trial. Auden developed a deep friendship and an unconventional sexual arrangement with Kurka, addressed affectionately as Hugerl and referenced in the poem Glad. The letters are written in colloquial, often misspelt and agrammatical German. A woman who grew close to Kurka and his wife inherited their belongings after the couple died in 2012 and 2013 and passed the letters to Helmut Neundlinger, prompting digitisation by Sandra Mayer and Timo Fruhwirth.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]