Kramlovsky writes short stories and novels and is also a painter, and her language is correspondingly rich in images. Her (female) figures are always precisely aware of the power of the erotic.
This power has its destructive side, too; fearful things happen when desire is rejected, when love is betrayed.
When the man in her crime novel Das Risiko (The Risk) leaves his wife for a younger woman, the former mutates into a veritable goddess of revenge. In the surreal novella Das Chamäleon (The Chameleon), two women and a man share a strange and disturbing bond that leads to an unholy union. [Kramlovsky's] female characters are not plagued by a guilty conscience.
The reader is captivated by that easy self-evidence of response, that matter-of-factness in difficult situations that is otherwise purely the province of men: It really can be that simple!
Sylvia Treudl in Wienerin, Summer 1998
Most of my publications in English have been translated by Mary Tannert, with whom I enjoy a wonderfully satisfying literary work of interpretation and translation. Mary has developed a great feeling for the Austrian details and melody in my language and knows how to transfer my personal voice of fiction into her mother language.
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Mary W. Tannert was born in 1957 and grew up in pre-Microsoft Seattle, Washington. She completed an M.A. in German and a Ph.D. in German Literature at the University of Tennessee/Knoxville, where she taught German and German Literature for several years and simultaneously began to translate. In 2000, Tannert moved to Germany to work for Siemens as a translation project manager. Now, ten years later, she has returned to full-time freelance translation of marketing, legal, and financial texts. Tannert translates and edits German-language crime fiction and has a research interest in the history of German crime fiction. She has published twenty short story translations in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and several articles on early German crime fiction writers Auguste Groner, Balduin Groller and Luise Westkirch (in Lexikon der Kriminalliteratur). Together with mentor and colleague Henry Kratz, she translated and edited a volume of historic German crime fiction (Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction: An Anthology) that was published in 1999 and reprinted in 2007. Most recently she contributed the chapter on the history of German-language crime fiction to a volume on German crime fictions for the European crime fictions series of the University of Wales. |
