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| “Full of verbal horseplay, fabulous animals and a host of inventions that would make the Smithsonian Institution drool in envy.”
—The New York Times Christian Morgenstern
Translated by Max Knight
Introduction by Samuel TitanChristian Morgenstern’s The Gallows Songs are some of the most delightful and imaginative creations of twentieth-century German poetry. Composed originally after an outing Morgenstern took with his friends to Gallows Hill near Potsdam, these lively, puckish poems envision Gallows Hill as a fantastical world populated with marvelous animals, bizarre mechanisms, and some truly unruly punctuation.Morgenstern felt that people often used their familiar language unthinkingly, without ever pausing to marvel at the glorious arbitrariness of words. Through poems chock-full of irresistible wordplay and unabashedly exuberant rhymes, he invites us to meditate—but also to med-it-nine and med-i-ten—on all the incidents and accidents of language that make the world of words so vibrant.
True to the spirit of Morgenstern’s linguistic mischief, Max Knight’s translation sparkles with uncommon wit and is itself a feat of poetic genius. This bilingual edition features Morgenstern’s original text and Knight’s English renderings en face. For three days only, The Gallows Songs is available at 25% off. Read a selection of poems from The Gallows SongsThe Knee On earth there roams a lonely knee.
It’s just a knee, that’s all.
It’s not a tent, it’s not a tree,
it’s just a knee, that’s all.
In battle, long ago, a man
was riddled through and through.
The knee alone escaped unhurt
as if it were taboo.
Since then there roams a lonely knee,
it’s just a knee, that’s all.
It’s not a tent, it’s not a tree,
it’s just a knee, that’s all.
The Birth of Philosophy
The heath sheep stares at me with frightened awe
as though I were the first of men it saw.
Contagious glare! We stand as though asleep;
it seems the first time that I see a sheep.
Fingoor
The nightalp chicken chuckles,
the windhorn ganders toot;
the swarthy swain unbuckles
his flute.
A he-owl, dove-like, turtles
to woo his owlish she;
a little Six Nix hurtles
along from tree to tree . . .
And spooks their spooks are wreaking,
and crows are cawing “croak”;
and from the ponds are peeking
the Fingoor and her folk. |
