Aimless wandering sets not only the body but, above all, the mind in motion – a literary topos that the essays in this volume explore anew as Peter Waterhouse sets out, step by step, to trace the ‘unmysterious’ or ‘hero-less’ words. Words such as ‘petrol station’, ‘corrugated-iron hut’ or ‘fence’, which point to places of concentrated aimlessness, to non-places and starting points, and which, in their inconspicuousness and discretion, stand ‘open in all directions, open to all reality’. With these in mind, the walk becomes a linguistic stroll not only through real landscapes, but also through memories, and in particular through the texts of those poets who have always accompanied Waterhouse’s own writing – Stifter, Goethe, Zanzotto, but above all Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the most significant British poets of the 19th century.
Literature
Peter Waterhouse, born in Berlin in 1956, lives in Vienna as a writer and translator. After studying German and English, Waterhouse was awarded a doctorate in 1984 with a thesis on Paul Celan. As an author, he writes poetry, essays, prose and plays, and also works as a translator from English and Italian. In 2025, his magnum opus, Z Ypsilon X, was published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin.
