11/12/2006 Thomas Bernhard for life In an interview from 1986, the late Austrian author Thomas Bernhard discusses the musicality of language, the eroticism of old men and the incurability of stupidity. By Werner Wögerbauer

Vienna, Cafe Bräunerhof, early on the morning of July 15, 1986. Thomas Bernhard had set a rather vague rendezvous for an interview. He was having his apartment redecorated, he said, "naturally" in white. He could not stand the presence of the workers in his home, causing him to flee to the coffeehouse in the early morning. When I arrive, he has already settled down, near the entrance, "where the air is better." He is walled in by mounds of newspapers whose pages he skims hastily, almost tearing them as he flips through. An interview? Yes,into English, English and Italian, I'm not so sure if French would work. It's from 1960. 26 years ago.



In the passage chosen by the translators, one theme is Verona.



Oh right, "Schauplätze in Verona" (Scenes in Verona) is in there too, is it? That was actually a separate poem. It came from a book called "Einladung nach Verona" (Invitation to Verona) edited by Wieland Schmied, and at the time I was a big fan of Ezra Pound, so I wrote a kind of Pound poem about Verona. And that was probably, somewhere around then, yes, it was around the same time. It must have been before 1960. Thirty years ago.



Is the love spoken of in this poem not linked with the figure of the sister, not in a biographical