An autumn poem by Max Dauthendey

The ravens scream their wounded cry;
of night and need they prophecy.
Frost has surrounded every door;
hunger’s dog barks out there for more.
We hold each other ever more tightly;
for sake of kissing we’ve spoken only lightly.
The larks have sung themselves to death,
and clouds have shooed summer with their breath.
Your head, cradled here in my arm,
no longer knows this earth ... without alarm.

– Max Dauthendey (1867-1918)

Translated from German by Johannes Beilharz.
English translation © by Johannes Beilharz 2011.
The German original of 1905 is here.

Herbstliches von Max Dauthendey

Die Raben schreien wie verwundet
und prophezeien Nacht und Not.
Der Frost hat jede Tür umstellt
und der Hungerhund bellt.
Wir halten uns immer enger umschlungen,
im Küssen fanden wir noch kein Wort,
die Lerchen haben sich tot gesungen
und Wolken wälzten den Sommer fort.
Doch Dein Haupt, das in meinem Arm sich wiegt,
weiß nicht mehr, wo die Erde liegt.

– Max Dauthendey (1867-1918)

Entnommen der Anthologie Die Ernte aus acht Jahrhunderten deutscher Lyrik, gesammelt von Will Vesper, Langewiesche-Brandt, Ebenhausen bei München 1906. Dieses Gedicht entstammt dem Band Die ewige Hochzeit von 1905, war also zur Zeit der Herausgabe der Anthologie erst seit einem Jahr veröffentlicht.

Biografisches

In my backyard

In my backyard
I found a tart.

Says Jay, “Pray tell,
you might as well,

what will you do with it?”
“Whip cream, you nit,

put it on top
and eat the slop.”

– Felix Morgenstern (© 2011)

Written for Sunday Scribblings and My Backyard, this should easily compete with the silliest of Mother Goose.

Das Lied des Harfenmädchens

Frei nach Theodor Storm

Das Harfenmädchen ist heut nicht gut drauf.
Lustlos klimpert es auf den Saiten.
Noch ist ihm keiner in die Netze gegangen (gestern waren es drei,
und jetzt liegen sie alle tot auf Grund).
Und überhaupt: wieso immer auf Männerfang gehen
und dann doch keinen bekommen?
Und dann so eine unsinnige Flosse!
Manchmal hätte man viel lieber einen unbeschuppten Unterleib und zwei Beine.
Dann ein bisschen Shoppen in Rüdesheim oder Koblenz,
ein bisschen Schlendern, ein bisschen Unterhaltung.
Es ist schon ein schweres Schicksal so als Harfenmädchen.
Jeden Tag dasselbe Lied...

– Iself (© 2011)

Die Ersten, die Letzten und die Hunde

Ein bekanntes Sprichwort sagt:

Die Letzten beißen die Hunde.

Allerdings gibt es auch folgende Weisheit aus der Bibel:

Die Ersten werden die Letzten sein.*

Kombiniert man die beiden, ist völlig klar, dass keiner den Hunden entkommt – weder die Letzten noch die Ersten.

Allerdings kann dank deutscher Grammatik das erste Sprichwort auch so verstanden werden, dass die Hunde von den Letzten gebissen werden.

Das sind dann die sprichwörtlichen armen Hunde.

*Nur teilweise und ungenau zitiert. Kompletter Lutherscher Wortlaut: "Aber viele, die da sind die Ersten, werden die Letzten, und die Letzten werden die Ersten sein." (Matthäus 19)

Verified drygs

With a possibly Norwegian touch, spam is getting more clever than ever.

Read this message that has burst past my spam killer, and you too will be ready to order verified drygs that very instant:

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Explore whole list at http://ripiamb.belhamorz.net/

Isn't this the best news ever for your slawatycze?

You bet your wixll!

Überall und nirgendwo

Sie ist wie Gott – 
man sieht ihn nicht,
aber er ist immer da.

– Tanjetschka

Zur Erläuterung: Das sagte unsere russische Praktikantin, als sie vielleicht zum fünften Mal hintereinander ins Büro kam und die gesuchte Kollegin wieder nicht vorfand.

Medical portrait

Now there's doctor L. the anthroposoph, (in)sincere and mature,
who'll ask what you are willing to suffer for cure.
And if you say 'not much'
he'll presribe allopathic stuff with a proven sledge hammer touch.
Whereas, if you're willing to endure,
he'll give you aurum or cuprum for good enure.

– Felix Morgenstern (© 2011)

Written upon inspiration by 'endure' from One Single Impression.

Gianmaria Testa & Paolo Fresu in Ludwigsburg

Gestern Abend besuchte ich ein wunderbares Konzert von Gianmaria Testa und Paolo Fresu im Ordenssaal von Schloss Ludwigsburg.

Das Zusammenspiel der beiden hat Geschichte. Hier ein Youtube-Video von 2009 mit einem Lied, das die beiden auch in Ludwigsburg spielten:

9 a.m., Universe

It’s a crowded place and lots of stuff’s been happening
– Badger T. Bones

Australia kills 17 sex row riots
Bolivian microphones start up for couple
Colombia landmines title race court over arrest
Damage freed lawyer in well-wishers crowd pledge
Egyptian fuel drives bride in ferry
First glimpse of the Aston Martin tragedy
Germany charged herbal medicine regulations truce
Hot wedding auction treatment
India balcony kisses pick wedding
Jakarta streets still alive
Kult evening dress raid leader guilty
London loves Kate and William
Mexico cartel boss arrests
Nuevo Leon restaurant says welcome
Obama shocked by Chinese human rights
Rafah border clash to permanently seal to open European tornado fighters
Sai Baba cadets extradited
Tripoli witness dying for first kiss as husband and rebels wife
Uganda breaks al-Qaeda suspects
Vile crowd edge up Thai-Cambodia palace
Warsaw show time foundations
Xavier my French red headed OC is ftw
Yukon Territory, Canada error reported
Zealand's Sarah Palin is back

A cocktail from various Internet sources including BBC and Twitter tweets. Confounded, mixed, stylized, rearranged, censored, enhanced, expanded, invented in typical press fashion for day 30 of NaPoWriMo.

Today's task would have been “to write a poem based on a headline – it doesn’t have to be big news – it can be any news at all, from the girl in your town who won a contest for growing a potato that looks like Queen Victoria to the tabloid offering definitive proof that aliens are designing celebrity Oscar gowns.”

Didn't go for the cutesy news stuff so much as for more or less normal random picks from the news chaos in this universe.

Translated from the Hittite

A baby girl was born to Hulsa and Amani
The third year after the barley dearth
A baby girl was born to Hulsa and Amani
And she was preferred by the birds

Amani was so proud of her baby girl
But Hulsa wanted a boy and begrudged her food
Amani gave the baby girl to a sage
And she was still preferred by the birds

A baby boy was born to Hulsa and Amani
The fifth year after the barley dearth
The birds circled above and the liver
Told of things ominous in the future

Hattalippi the sage took good care
Of the girl and taught her many things
How to read the birds’ flight
How to make balms and vanishing creme

The boy fell ill in his eleventh year
The girl knew it from the birds’ flight
The sage sent her off to her family
And she cured her brother with a balm

But then the Assyrians came one year
And no-one in the village was spared
Except the girl and her brother
Because they’d applied her vanishing creme

And the girl and her brother lived alone
In the village for many many years
And they were known all over Hatti lands
For their balms and vanishing creme

Reconstituted and translated from an anonymous Hittite fragment and rendered by L. Blumfeld in condensed form in modern English.

Posted for NaPoWriMo day 29. Today’s task would have been “an act of homophonic translation. In other words, ‘translate’ a poem from a language you don’t know into English, based on how the words look or sound.” This post is different, of course, in that it is not a homophonic but a more or less accurate (i.e. semantically based) translation. However, Hittite is definitely a language I don’t know.

– Iself

The words I don’t like poem

Why can’t I think of
any? It’s not that
they’re all the same
to me. But ever
since yesterday, when
I started thinking
the matter over,
I haven’t come up
with a single one.
Ok, so I don’t tend
to use four-letter
words that often
in poetic mode. (Real
life is different. I do
resort to expletives
regularly where
warranted. And those
warranted situations,
as you know, occur
all too often in
real life.) But now
I’m down here
in what has become
a much longer
poem than I’d
intended, and still
have not thought
of a single word
I hate. Let’s say
I’m like the
benevolent creator –
they’re all my
children – I must
love them all
democratically,
whether they be
English, German,
Turkish, Malayalam,
Chinese or Urdu.

– Iself (© 2011)

Written for NaPoWriMo day 28. The task, you guessed it, was “to try writing poems using our least favorite words.”

Oh Jack! Oh Colleen!

Rhenew yr mazn poewr quickly,
theyz wrogte, &
Leet us to improvze u ultimate poewr & hardinegs.

Finagl bonzuses is uh fine bragain
toh buyy outstanding pharzm
at uh thje glowest pirce.

No zmore prescripzhion ise needved
tojh mke shozging fovr amazn poewr withe gus.

(Rearranged and beautified by Iself from original spam)

Posted for day 27 of NaPoWriMo. U quessed it – thje tusk was to yuse spwam & turnh hit inta pwoeteri.

May the amazn poewr be withe all of gus.

I’m white

I’m bulky
and white
and up in a tree

I’m half-open,
but should
normally
be closed

I’m not as cool
as I used to be

I normally
need juice
to keep my
motor running,
but up here
there’s none

I’ve been
reduced
to failure

– Felix Morgenstern (© 2011)

Written for NaPoWriMo day 26. The task was to do a “riddle poem – one in which you write from the point of view of an object or person (or about an object and person), and the poem itself forms a giant riddle.” Well, giant it’s not exactly, but a riddle it is. Let’s see if anyone can guess what I’m impersonating here.

As the end of NaPoWriMo is drawing nearer, I’m getting close to feeling poetically exhausted. It’s not that easy to produce poetry on demand. And the demands (the prompts) are often different from what I would normally write on my own. For example, I would not normally write riddles. I might write cryptic or eclectic or enigmatic stuff, but not riddles. Oh well, it’s really my very own decision to take on a prompt or do something else. And some of the prompts have been a lot of fun, and it’s actually been good to venture out and do something I would normally not do.

One thing’s for sure, though: April is definitely not the cruellest month (happy to contradict you, T.S., as always). In fact, it’s one of the cooellest months. Period and amen.

In myself

As usual, I enter the apartment at night. Everything is sepia, as in old sepia photographs, with that old-fashioned, dusty feel. Things are dusty and old-fashioned in the apartment, from the whiskey glass with the dry residue at the bottom to the face-down paperback mystery next to it, the floor lamp with its thin bronze stalk and faded cylindrical shade, the small framed photos on the wall. Who is that? Looks a bit like Hedy Lamarr. And the man with her, smirk on face, hat at rakish angle and cigarette elegantly held in gloved hand? Is that me in a different incarnation?

I find that there’s nothing to do here, nothing that can be done in the short time I have for this apartment. Cleaning it up would take days, so let’s not even get started. I could go on reading the mystery. It’s The Root of his Evil by James M. Cain, and I’m on page sixty apparently. Or is it open to that page only because the spine is broken there? I have no recollection of what the book is about, none whatsoever.

Now’s the time something would happen in a book by Cain or Chandler or Hammett. A car would drive up outside, the phone would ring, or I would discover a set of toes underneath a floor-length curtain, something blunt would hit the back of my head and I’d pass out.

Nothing of the sort. I will remember the visit when I wake up. I will remember having gone back there repeatedly. I will remember that I’ll have to return there. I will remember the apartment with some feeling of guilt, as something I neglect, something I tend to forget, even though I shouldn’t. Only to remember and have to go back, with nothing ever changing in this dusty brown apartment.

– Iself (© 2011)

Written for NaPoWriMo day 25. The task was to “write an autobiographical poem.” I would call the above an autobiographical prose poem. Autobiographical because it is about a recurrent dream I used to have. A poem because it's more poetic than prose usually is.
I haven't returned to that apartment in a long time. I’ve turned it into reality – I’ve rented a space in a place downtown, nominally to work there, but I’m hardly ever there.

James M. Cain, The Root of his Evil, first published in 1951.