tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post114768828122322910..comments2024-03-07T12:57:35.296-05:00Comments on Varieties of Unreligious Experience: Morgenstern, Nein!Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-39314940199055211972007-09-25T04:47:00.000-04:002007-09-25T04:47:00.000-04:00Thanks for the contribution!Thanks for the contribution!Conrad H. Rothhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-86382570908203375612007-09-24T19:52:00.000-04:002007-09-24T19:52:00.000-04:00An excellent attempt at translating the untranslat...An excellent attempt at translating the untranslatable genius of Morgenstern. May I propose my own attempt, though it suffers from having been slapped together haphazardly at 2am:<BR/><BR/>Do storms whistle?<BR/>Do worms bristle?<BR/>Are the owl's<BR/>howls<BR/>Heard from steeples?<BR/><BR/>Nay! <BR/><BR/>It is the hangman's rig's<BR/>thickest<BR/>end that groans, constricts<BR/>like the wallop<BR/>in full gallop<BR/>of the worn-out, knackered mare<BR/>that chafing for the water licks<BR/>(still, maybe, far-off from there).Dead Hippohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03563727337887812372noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-1148616485599902112006-05-26T00:08:00.000-04:002006-05-26T00:08:00.000-04:00Oh, thanks for the tips. These all sound fascinati...Oh, thanks for the tips. These all sound fascinating. Are there (good) English translations of these various works? I can't think of anything quite the same in English, although perhaps "A Clockwork Orange" is in the same ballpark to the latter. I'm going to write a post on the amazing Hisperica Famina at some point: 7th-century Hiberno-Latin poems in the bizarrest forms you can imagine.Conrad H. Rothhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-1148569354605876932006-05-25T11:02:00.000-04:002006-05-25T11:02:00.000-04:00GolubiewGolubiewSir Ghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07953581535133000686noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-1148567789129759272006-05-25T10:36:00.000-04:002006-05-25T10:36:00.000-04:00Two Polish poets of the period between the wars wr...Two Polish poets of the period between the wars wrote (some) poetry in an entirely imaginary language -- every word was a neologism -- it sounds Slavic, vaguely Polish -- and is quite pretty to the (slavic) ear. They preserve grammatical feaures of Polish -- and all those prefixes and suffixes, declentions and conjugations, superlatives, thickenings and diminutions and all the onomatopeic features of Polish make one feel that one almost understands what it is about, except, of course, one does not. (One has this "tip of the tongue" feeling throughout). <BR/><BR/>One of the poets, Tuwim, dropped this after a while and went on to develop a different idiom, while the other, Lesmian, made it an important element of his poetry for the rest of his life, and his poetry is full of these sort of neologisms -- which you "sort of get" except -- not quite. Reading him is a little akin to reading some of the denser Shakespeare -- where the meaning sort of washes over you. (Faulkner reads like that, too, though on account of syntactic confusion rather than neological invention, i think).<BR/><BR/>Two other similar Polish literary experiments come to mind: Reymont who in his "Peasants" (he got a literature nobel prize for it back in 18... something) in which he invented a non-existent (but very consistent an very beautiful) "regional dialect"; and a massive historcial novel written entirely in an imagined prehistorical Polish (oldest Polish texts date to 13th century but this story dates to 10th) (I completely -- and temporarily -- blanked out on the author's name, age is no fun). This takes some getting used to, but becomes a transparent reading once one acquires the "vocabulary". This is a sort of "Boewulf", you might say, made today, Tolkien-like.<BR/><BR/>this comment may as well for your coinage entry of today (in which you discuss the derivation of thesaurus).<BR/><BR/>br<BR/><BR/>Sir GSir Ghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07953581535133000686noreply@blogger.com