The Iron Age | Das eherne Zeitalter | L’âge du fer
A project in over 30 languages
Installations 2023
File Book
English Deutsch French Arabic Bosnian Bulgarian Hindi Italian
Kyrgyz Croatian Norwegian Russian Spanish Czech Turkish
Ukrainian Hungarian
The project develops in the context of Arlt’s language uses since the 1970s (first volume of poetry in 1973: about the big cities), the publication of (scientific) texts in over 40 languages, but also in the context of Soyfer’s translations into over 50 languages.
Arlt had studied German, Latin, English, French at a modern language grammar school in Bregenz and Italian in the evenings at the adult education centre. At the University of Salzburg, he continued his Italian studies and added Russian. In practice, Spanish was added later. Latin, German provided access to many languages (including Japanese and Russian, since the modernization of these societies was done in German), but not, for example, to Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Hungarian. Here, own approaches were sought and found. The daily language practice is German, English. The poems were written in these languages or had their own (edited) translations. As early as the 1970s, however, French also played an important role, as Arlt translated poems from English and French. The title of the project Poems 1973 to 2023 „The Iron Age“ is based on translations from Latin (Ovid: „The Iron Age“). The opening verses to the „Golden Age“ of Ovid had accompanied Arlt since the 1970s: Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae vindice nullo, sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colebat. (The history of mankind is by no means determined by archaism, a succession of wars: violence and oppression arise from concrete social contexts, to which there were also historical alternatives.)
Based on the limitation of the knowledge of an individual (see Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities: The Possibilities of Access to the National Library), Arlt organized 32 Soyfer Symposia (together sometimes with others), 8 world conferences, a large number of other conferences and platforms with currently around 10,000 participants from around 120 countries.
In the beginning, there was the recording of diversity. Among them, in the TRANS numbers 1-4, the European Linguistics and Literary Studies: TRANS – TRANS Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften | Internet journal for cultural studies | Revue électronique de recherches sur la culture.
Special projects were dedicated to the translation of Jura Soyfer’s vagabond song into around 40 (book documentation: 34) as well as the translations of Soyfer’s play „Der Lechner Edi“ into a variety of languages.
Important aspects of the world conferences (beginning in 1999 at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris), which were documented in TRANS, were the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, the arts in social processes, the unifying aspects of cultures, innovations and reproductions in societies – especially from the linguistic point of view, which made it possible to open up different approaches to the world – the transformations of societies. In this context, among other projects, a multilingual dictionary was drafted: Encyclopedia of Multilingual Cultural Studies. The reflection of the cultural studies work was also a reflection on language: INST: Cultural Studies – transdisciplinary, transnational, online. Through the historicization, the social significance was evaluated: TRANS: Documentation Neologisms such as polylogue were used. There were innovations also in the context of the digital public sphere: Documentaries: homepages – about the difference between signs and numeric.
These are a few keywords in the context of tens of thousands of pages that have been written or edited. Among them are thousands of pages of applications in half a century, which was often marked by anti-pluralism, administrative violence, which led to illness and early death for many. The social upheavals caused by thinking in terms of friend and foe (especially used as a tool of terror during the National Socialist dictatorship), the narration (narrative) as a method of exclusion, of subjugation, the legal construction in this context as a means of preparing for war or waging war, the loss of reality in the context of this method is evident. A change in societies is on the way.