The World of Mundartliteratur, Part 2
In this episode of the Asymptote Podcast we return to the world of Mundartliteratur in Switzerland in an exclusive interview with Pedro Lenz, one of the best known Swiss authors who writes in dialect. His engaging and immediate works of prose and poetry present life in modern Switzerland as it really is: a far cry from the idealized herders of Heidi. His 2010 novel Der Goalie bin ig has been translated out of the Bernese Swiss-German into 8 languages, including Glaswegian English, and adapted as a film.
Lenz talks about the relationship between language, sound, and story. He says that the highly deliberate but ultimately artificial way he constructs his texts paradoxically allows a work to connect to its audience with fewer boundaries. He also speaks about how his work was given a new life and context when it was translated into Glaswegian.
Originally released on Asymptote Jounrnal
Bio
The work of musician and linguist Dominick Boyle (1991) explores the fragmentation and recombination of place and memory through constructed soundscapes. Using his self-compiled collection of field recordings and interviews–memories collected around the word–as well as sounds from in and around the performance space, he aims to synthesize a sonic space surrounding the audience which fuses with the environment around them, augmenting rather than overtaking it. Using personally created software in the computer coding language ChucK, as well as violin, modular synthesizer and other effects he creates flexible spaces governed by his own input as well as chance.
Dominick holds an MA in Language and Communication from the University of Basel and a BA with a focus on Music from Sarah Lawrence College. He has also studied at the California Institute of the Arts. Performances in Switzerland include Snippet Festival (2022, 2020), Lust*Streifen Film Festival (2021), Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW, Bonjour Baby and SideEffects pop-up gallery. Podcast editor for Asymptote Journal of world literature and translation (2017-2019). Cooperation with dance, theater and filmmakers in New York, and performances at venues such as Experimental Intermedia, Danspace Project, Hudson River Museum and the NYC Summer Streets festival. He has lived in Basel since 2016.
