Erika Mitterer is the dean of Austrian women writers. Born on 30 March 1906 in Vienna to Rudolf and Antonie Loeb Mitterer, she has spent practically all her life in Austria. From her father, an architect and civil servant whose passion was hunting, she inherited a love of nature and an inclination for sport. She is one of the few poets who has written verse on deerstalking, skiing, swimming (not until age sixtyfive did she stop swimming across the Danube), and above all, hiking in the Vienna Woods and in the Austrian Alps. From Mitterer's mother, a painter, perhaps comes her fervent love of classical beauty in art.

Mitterer began at an early age to read the poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Hölderlin, Anton Wildgans, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan George. She also began to write verse as a child. When she was eighteen...