The Ego and Its Own

Author: Michalis Pichler 

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2015)

Michalis Pichler’s appropriation/erasure of Max Stirner’s 1844 manifesto of individual anarchism, The Ego and Its Own, explores issues of translatability/in-translatability of poetry. The chapter titles and headers have been maintained, while the main text has been almost completely cut out save for the first-person-signifiers. Layout, typeset and dimensions follow the German version, which has been in print almost unchanged for the last 37 years by Reclam Universal-Bibliothek. Pichler’s erasure is followed with an afterword by Annette Gilbert and an epilogue by Craig Dworkin. By adding a slipcover with bilingual glossary and a newly commissioned essay by Patrick Greaney, UDP’s American edition, co-published with “greatest hits,” attempts to make the book accessible to an English readership.