In four separate texts, Adan Kovacsics analyses the role of the press during wars, the impact of war on literature, its influence on language, and how modernity affects the ways in which people express themselves.No writer is unaffected by the impact of war on language, as demonstrated in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Elfriede Jelinek and Ingeborg Bachmann.Kovacsics examines how wars are born and bred in the power of words and discusses the interesting case of Colin Powell s presentation before the United Nations justifying his country s attack on Iraq and thereby exemplifying Karl Krauss s early alert about language propaganda in the United States.As Kovacsics puts it, «War consists not only of actions and sufferings, but also of a stream of words».

Adan Kovasics (Santiago de Chile, 1953) is the author of Guerra y lenguaje (War and Language) as well as being a translator from Hungarian and German. He has received several awards from the Austrian Ministry of Education and Culture for his translations of works by Karl Kraus, Heimito von Doderer, Hans Lebert, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Ingeborg Bachmann and Ilse Aichinger. He was also awarded the Ángel Crespo Prize for his translation of Ádám Bodor s El distrito de Sinistra (Sinistra District), the Second Imre Kertész Translation Prize and the National Prize for Translation.