Aris Fioretos

Aris Fioretos Poems

Aris Fioretos Biography

Aris Fioretos, born 6 February 1960 in Gothenburg, is a Swedish writer of Greek and Austrian extraction. Aris Fioretos was born in Gothenburg. His Greek father was a professor of medicine, his Austrian mother ran a gallery. At home, German and Swedish were spoken. He grew up in Lund. He studied with Jacques Derrida in Paris, later at Stockholm and Yale Universities. In 1991, Fioretos published his first book, a collection of prose poetry entitled Delandets bok (The Book of Imparting). Since then he has published several works of fiction, including Vanitasrutinerna (The Vanity Routines) (1998), Stockholm Noir (2000), Sanningen om Sascha Knisch (The Truth about Sascha Knisch) (2002), and Den sista greken (The Last Greek) (2009). The latter novel was shortlisted for Sweden's most prestigious literary award, the August Prize. In the winter of 2009 it was awarded the Gleerups Literary Prize, in the spring of 2010 the Novel Prize of Sveriges Radio. Between 2003 and 2007, Fioretos was Cultural Counsellor at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin. Fioretos's contribution to Sweden's most popular radio show, Sommar ("Summer"), a series of self-portraits by Swedes famous and unknown, was aired on 16 July 2010. In 1991, Fioretos earned his PhD in Comparative Literature with The Critical Moment, a deconstructivist analysis of works by Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, and Paul Celan. He has held academic appointments at the Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, and Free University in Berlin. Since 2010, he is a professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University College in Stockholm. Fioretos has received numerous grants and awards both in Sweden and abroad, including from The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Swedish Academy, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, the DAAD Künstlerprogramm Berlin, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund, the American Academy in Berlin, and All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm. 2011–2014 he was the Dag-Hammarskjöld-Gastprofessor at the Nordeuropa-Institut at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Fioretos is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt, where, in 2011, he was elected vice president. Fioretos has translated books by Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Walter Serner, among others, into Swedish. He writes regularly for Sweden's largest daily, Dagens Nyheter. His fiction has been translated into several languages – including English, French, German, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian, Romanian, and Serbian.)

The Best Poem Of Aris Fioretos

Phantom Poem No. 16

The first thing you will forget
Is the voice, a form
And not a substance.
The soul
Remains a jumble,
Some errant
Experience. (Each is tortured
In his separate hell,
For we are crowded
In our solitudes — many —
But all divided
By a wall.)
Scarcely a fiftieth
Of what you take in
Will be assimilated.
The rest will vanish
Through breathing,
Evaporation,
Or some such.

Prove
That I was here.

English translation by Jenny Jochens

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