… In an octopus’s garden.
I wanted a translation of Lenau’s short (7 stanza, 4 lines per stanza) poem “Die drei Zigeuner” (The Three Gypsies), so I searched 4M, which houses the German literature collection (see the PT area, in particular PT2000-ish), and in addition to Winthrop Root’s Poems and Letters of Nikolaus Lenau (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964) I ran across a few Goethe translations that caught my eye (due to an interest in his poem “Zigeunerlied” [Gypsy Song]):
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Erotic Poems. The World’s Classics. Translated by David Luke. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
Or should the series title come after the translator? I’ll look in my MLA handbook later.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Poems of the West and East. Translated by John Whaley. Frankfurt a/M: Peter Lang, 1998.
Taken from this volume one finds the lines: “But Goethe only absorbed from the Oriental world what he found congenial; he omitted everything which was discordant to his own nature.” (viii)
More interesting to/for me is J.E. Spingarn’s Goethe’s Literary Essays (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964), a reprint of a 1919 volume (the library has two copies of the second edition and one of the first). It divides the essays into four sections: the theory of art, the theory of literature, on Shakespeare, and other writings. Miscellaneous is always the largest category, they say (here it’s the size of the others, mostly). I like to recommend “Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style” … it’s a great short read, but like most of Goethe’s non-fiction a bit more difficult to come by in English.
Today I present the following short poem by Georg Trakl (1887-1914), who is perhaps most famous for his poem “Grodek” (based upon a horrible battle in what is now the Ukraine).
“Zigeuner”
Die Sehnsucht glüht in ihrem nächtigen Blick
Nach jener Heimat, die sie niemals finden.
So treibt sie ein unseliges Geschick,
Das nur Melancholie mag ganz ergründen.Die Wolken wandeln ihren Wegen vor,
Ein Vogelzug mag manchmal sie geleiten,
Bis er am Abend ihre Spur verlor,
Und manchmal trägt der Wind ein AveläutenIn ihres Lagers Sterneneinsamkeit,
Daß sehnsuchtsvoller ihre Lieder schwellen
Und schluchzen von ererbtem Fluch und Leid,
Das keiner Hoffnung Sterne sanft erhellen.
I got this particular poem from textlog.de, a “collection of historical texts and dictionaries with an emphasis on philosophy, art, and aesthetics.” The German “Wörterbuch” can mean encyclopedia as well as dictionary, although literally translated it is “word book” or “book of words.”
The Freiburger Anthologie (1720-1900) consists of about 1300 poems from about 1720-1890; evidently they picked their 1300 from a list of about 4000 pooled from a variety of old anthologies.
There is a “Folk Ball Festial” (January 26-28) coming up in Madison. I suppose if I danced I would be interested. I only know about this because I am still on Michael Kuharski’s f**king mail list, which I tried to get off of years ago.
No folk music for me today, though I should be getting to Besh o droM soon enough; today I finished Badly Drawn Boy (The Shining sounds as if it belonged on the soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums) and my meager collection of pieces by Balkan Beat Box … no disaffected melancholy “pop” … just remixed rhythms you want to dance to, preferably in a club setting.
In the realm of pop-culture Marvel has put out another volume in their marketing-heavy series “Marvel Spotlight” (used to be an anthology book of sorts way back when) — this time on Ghost Rider, which makes sense because 1) they relaunched the comic half a year ago and 2) there is a crappy (really crappy) looking movie coming out in a month or two with Nicholas Cage. Clue/Hint: if an action/adventure or comic book movie comes out anytime but between May and August, it’s because it’s crap. DC is 35 weeks into their 52-week-long gimmick “52” (one issue a week for a year). I got hold of the first few episodes of Noein, a relatively recent anime series. I haven’t had a chance to get into it, but the production values seem decent enough, rather standard but toward the low end with limited detail, rather stock backgrounds, and some higher quality CGI work to supplement the regular animation. I picked it up because it is supposed to contain nifty musings on physics/metaphysiccs (time, quantum mechanics) … usually these devolve into incomprehensible mysticism, but one can hope.
A the NY Times there is a review of Barry Glassner’s The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food is Wrong (Harper Collins, $25.95). In short: Glassner is on the right track (we need such a book), but his own book is sloppy, too full of mistakes or half-truths, and short-sighted. What that makes me think though, is, why would I pay $25.95 for it? Even in paperback it will be nearly $10 (mass market) or closer to to $15 (trade). If it weren’t for the fact that I’ll forget about it within a day or two I’d check it out of the library once we have a copy.
