Happy Mother's Day/ Pentacost
Moms are awesome, go hug yours. Or, someone else's! But don't pull an Oedipus, cause then she has to kill herself and you have to gouge out your own eyes. Not cool.
( Oedipus Rex by Tom Lehrer )
In other news: I've been reading Karl Kraus's Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The last days of mankind), which is a truly massive and untranslatable Austrian anti-war play. It's got over 100 scenes. It's impressive, just let us say.
The untranslatable bit strikes me a lot as I'm reading it. Here is a very short snippet from Act 5, Scene 55, and it's English translation.
Ein süßer Ton Erklingt. Meerestille nach dem Untergang der Lusitania. Auf einem schwimmenden Brett zwei Kinderleichen.
DIE LUSITANIA-KINDER:
Wir schaukeln auf der Welle-
wir sind nun irgendwo-
wie ist das Leben helle-
Wie sind die Kinder froh-
(Der Erscheinung verschwindet)
My translation fails utterly to convey how creepy and still the poem above sounds, how much it rings likes something out of Mother Goose written in blood. (Those of you who don't speak German, the lines above rhyme abab, which I cannot preserve, and sounds utterly brutally simple.)
A sweet tone rings. The ocean lies still after the sinking of the Lusitania. On a swimming plank, the corpses of two children
THE LUSITANIA-CHILDREN:
We are rocking on the waves-
We are someplace now-
How is living bright-
How are the children glad-
(The scene changes)
Those of you bilingual people out there, this is an utterly fantastic and difficult play to read- much of it is written in the Viennese dialect, which is roughly as hard to understand as Mark Twain's dialectial passages, but it is just utterly wonderfully perfect on levels that I can't quite begin to even broach. I would honestly tell you to learn German to read this play, because the English translation cannot possibly work as well. Though now I have to go and try to find one and compare.
( Oedipus Rex by Tom Lehrer )
In other news: I've been reading Karl Kraus's Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The last days of mankind), which is a truly massive and untranslatable Austrian anti-war play. It's got over 100 scenes. It's impressive, just let us say.
The untranslatable bit strikes me a lot as I'm reading it. Here is a very short snippet from Act 5, Scene 55, and it's English translation.
Ein süßer Ton Erklingt. Meerestille nach dem Untergang der Lusitania. Auf einem schwimmenden Brett zwei Kinderleichen.
DIE LUSITANIA-KINDER:
Wir schaukeln auf der Welle-
wir sind nun irgendwo-
wie ist das Leben helle-
Wie sind die Kinder froh-
(Der Erscheinung verschwindet)
My translation fails utterly to convey how creepy and still the poem above sounds, how much it rings likes something out of Mother Goose written in blood. (Those of you who don't speak German, the lines above rhyme abab, which I cannot preserve, and sounds utterly brutally simple.)
A sweet tone rings. The ocean lies still after the sinking of the Lusitania. On a swimming plank, the corpses of two children
THE LUSITANIA-CHILDREN:
We are rocking on the waves-
We are someplace now-
How is living bright-
How are the children glad-
(The scene changes)
Those of you bilingual people out there, this is an utterly fantastic and difficult play to read- much of it is written in the Viennese dialect, which is roughly as hard to understand as Mark Twain's dialectial passages, but it is just utterly wonderfully perfect on levels that I can't quite begin to even broach. I would honestly tell you to learn German to read this play, because the English translation cannot possibly work as well. Though now I have to go and try to find one and compare.