Estranha Profecia e Outros Textos is an anthology of writings by Heinrich Von Kleist, some of which are well-known, such as The Beggar Woman of Locarno, On the Marionette Theatre, A Principle of Higher Critical Thinking, Letter to a Young Poet. These are small everyday episodes from 19th-century Berlin, police reports, strange occurrences, opinions, brief stories, anecdotes, critiques, and they can be read as the literary work of an unusual writer or as modern journalistic writings. The co-existence, in a limited space (a folding sheet – the newspaper), of hybrid and impure forms, questions “where a literary text begins, and what is it?”; the subversion that shapes a conflict between literary and non-literary, fictional and factual, poetic and historical; the parallel narrative as a counterpoint to the “official story”; the “immediacy” of writing and reception; the process of appropriation and transformation; the plausible, the implausible, the experience and the truth; lastly, an ostensible mixture of forms and registers aimed at “entertaining all population classes”, in the words of Kleist himself. The meeting of and the affinity between the artists in the project In Octavo fulfils a sensitive domain that is transmitted and survives through memory (inherited and present), creates a space for unique thinking and lends the current Portuguese culture with a moment of pathos – a sensitive singularity.
Based on writings by Heinrich Von Kleist, in Estranha Profecia e Outros Textos, published in Berliner Abendblätter, a daily newspaper edited and written by Kleist between 1 October 1810 and 30 March 1811.
