Christian Morgenstern, Humorist

This is a post I should have written in March 2014 to mark the 100th anniversary of Christian Morgenstern's death. But I missed the opportunity and must be content with this belated homage. Morgenstern (1871-1914) was a German humorist (yes, such creatures exist!) attuned to the oddities of life. Especially the idiosyncrasies of German and its use inspired many of his poems: For example, he deliberately used bad rhymes for comic effect or to gently mock the rhyming conventions of poetry1; he spun funny stories from figures of speech taken literally; he described invented creatures with names he got by fooling around with the names of existing ones; and in the introduction to a collection of his poems, he skewered the impenetrability of German academic prose. Since all of this is so tightly bound to a particular language, it's basically untranslatable. One may have better luck with poems that simply tell a story without linguistic tricks, and that's what I tried with my translation of Morgenstern's poem Der Hecht (The Pike), which can be read as poking fun at vegetarians, or religious orthodoxy, or both (see illustration on the right). The link below will lead you to the German original together with a literal translation and a rhyming Nachdichtung. Der Hecht: Original and Translations _______________ 1He shares this predilection with Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908), another master of German comic verse.

St. Anthony preaching to the pike family

Addendum (one day later): Since I posted this, I discovered a poem that (a) illustrates Morgenstern's penchant for taking figures of speech literally; and (b) uses a phrase that has an almost exact equivalent in English, a happy coincidence that motivated me to attempt a translation. And so I added Die beiden Esel to the first poem: Die beiden Esel (The Two Asses): Original and Translations Addendum 2 (Nov. 25, 2015): I tried my hand at a third poem, Der Lattenzaun, dear to me because an architect plays a leading role: Der Lattenzaun (The Picket Fence): Original and Translations Addendum 3 (Dec. 3, 2015): It seems I'm on a roll: Das aesthetische Wiesel (The Aesthetic Weasel): Original and Translations

The moon calf talking to Morgenstern about the aesthetic weasel

Word of the Month: Die Sternstunde

Word of the Month: Index

Stern means “star” and Stunde “hour.” A Sternstunde (plural Sternstunden) is a “dramatically compressed, fateful” event in which a “lasting development is being condensed into a single day, a single hour, or even a single minute” as it occurs only “rarely in the life of an individual or in the course of history.” These are the words of Stefan Zweig, who published between 1927 and 1943 fourteen historical “miniatures” under the title Sternstunden der Menschheit (Sternstunden of Humankind). He called the events he described Sternstunden because they “outshine the night of transience brilliantly and lastingly like stars.” [Source]

What Zweig had in mind becomes clear when we look at some of the Sternstunden he chose to describe: Händel composes the Messiah in a state of creative intoxication after a near-fatal illness (1741); the Janissaries enter Constantinople through a secret gate during the Turkish siege and conquer the city for the Turks (1453); Lenin returns to Russia in a sealed train to lead the Bolshevik revolution (1917). What unifies these events is their momentousness—in Zweig’s depiction, they changed the course of political or cultural history almost over night. If it was for the better or worse is not a concern of his.*

In present-day usage, however, the term Sternstunde has a distinctly positive connotation—it designates a highpoint or a pivotal moment that turns things around in the course of history. For example, Einstein’s publication of his paper on special relativity could be called a Sternstunde in the history of physics, and Germany’s unexpected victory in the 1954 World Cup a Sternstunde for German soccer.


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*Historians have also questioned the accuracy of Zweig’s narratives or the importance he assigns to certain events; for example, his account of the creation of the Messiah appears to be entirely fictitious. But this does not diminish the usefulness of the term he coined.

Word of the Month: Der Platzhirsch

Word of the Month: Index

Platz means "place" in a very broad sense—it can be a location, a position (like in a hierarchy), a space occupied by or reserved for someone, or a (city) square. A Hirsch is a male deer, i.e., a stag. Platzhirsch in the original sense is a hunting or forestry term that refers to the dominant stag in an area who lays claim to the resident hinds when they are in heat and fights off all competitors. It's used figuratively to indicate the leader of a group who claims all the rights and privileges such a position entails. In English, we would say he is the "alpha dog."

Word of the Month: Amtsschimmel

Word of the Month: Index

A Schimmel is a white horse, and Amt denotes, in this context, a government office. In combination, they refer not to a bureaucrat as a person, but to bureaucracy as a sometimes baffling phenomenon. When you are confronted with some bureaucratic absurdity, you may say, "Der Amtsschimmel wiehert (whinnies)." A fine example is given by the foreign student who tried to enroll at the University of Vienna, but could not do it because he did not have a residence permit and could not get a residence permit because he was not enrolled at the university. [Beikircher p. 314]

Now, what does a beautiful animal like a white horse have to do with bureaucratic excess? Nothing, it turns out! Schimmel derives, by way of folk etymology, from Simile (Latin for "similar"), a term used in Austrian offices to refer to a boilerplate form from which other forms could be generated. It came to stand for the enthusiasm with which forms are embraced by some bureaucracies and for their sometimes unfathomable ways in general. [Source]

[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle version | iBooks version]