travelling, even in winter

»I moved in as a stranger, and as a stranger, I move out …« Don’t all poems say the same thing, if in different ways? At least that is true of poems about the fundamental things in life – transience, love, abandonment, loneliness, dying and death? Old poems that see life as a journey or a trek, through snow and ice, through the frozenness of winter, are as touching today as ever. Franz Josef Czernin has re-read Wilhelm Müller’s famous Winterreise, set to music by Franz Schubert in an even more famous song cycle, has played the verses off and against each other, and this has resulted in their transformation. And he asks aloud: Can what was said two hundred years ago be said again, here and now, through new poems? »I am a stranger on my journey … here, too.«