Below are 7 journal entries, after skipping by the 20 most recent ones recorded in A journey through German poetry's InsaneJournal:

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Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
10:05 pm [foudebassan]	Gottfried August Bürger (1747-1794) was also the son of a pastor, and he too studied law but didn't get the degree. Instead he got a boring desk job, married a woman, promptly fell in love with her sister, was widowed, married the sister, and was widowed again. Then he remarried and divorced soon after that. That's not really relevant to this poem but I thought you'd like to know nonetheless. He was recognised as an important poet in his lifetime, but was never accepted as a serious one, so he didn't get much money for his literary work. He died dirt poor (though laden with honorific titles) aged 46. Today's poem is probably his most famous, so famous in fact that it's been translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It's also very long so I won't copy-paste, here are the links instead: Lenore (original) and translated. (Francophones: Gérard de Nerval s'est également essayé à l'exercice). First, it's a ballad - not in the medieval sense, in the romantic sense, ie it is a long poem, where the narrator doesn't use the first person, that tells a story, and that uses the kind of rhetoric tricks (rhymes, repeated phrases or even entire verses) that make it easier to learn it by heart. This is a genre that has never really been adopted in francophone poetry. I lack the expertise where anglophones are concerned, but I don't think it that common there either? Anyway. There's a bit of a dispute concerning who was the first to come up with this form. General consensus seems to be on its being Hölty, not Bürger, but I didn't find a nice long translation for anything by Hölty so here goes. On the poem: - first strophe: the battle of Prague was part of the seven years' war (a conflict a bit like WW1 - all European countries were implicated in it one way or the other via alliances). The beginning of the second strophe is about as harsh a critic as could be allowed without being censored. -Third, fourth strophes: we never know why Wilhelm doesn't come back. If he'd died on the battlefield (ie, covered in glory), surely someone would have told Lenore? My guess is that he deserted the army to come back to her earlier, got caught and executed for it. Now if you consider that desertion may be a form of suicide, and that people who kill themselves can only get buried after sunset... get my drift? It is a bit far-fetched though. - strophes 5-11. Two voices at play here, Lenore and her mother. You can assign a whole range of meanings to both of them - the accepted interpretation is that Lenore represents modernity in that she's individualist. She's sad, so she ought to be allowed to kill herself, she says (see the suicide theme develop...). The mother could be reason (eigth strophe - were this not poetry this would most likely be what really happened to Wilhelm). She's also the voice of tradition / religion - no matter what individual troubles her daughter has, she's not allowed to break God's laws (ie, she shouldn't kill herself). They're both talking of love, but Lenore's for Wilhelm (another individual), the mother's is for, shall we say law and order? - strophe 13: you just know anything happening in this strophe won't be good - strophe 15: he only left at midnight, heh. After sunset! (cf. suicide theme). This is also the first time we're confronted directly to supranatural themes (there's no way anyone can ride from Bohemia to wherever in Prussia Lenore lives in only a few hours). - 15 to 28: and this is a central theme to 19th century German poetry (Death and the maiden). The word death is masculine in German (der Tod) and the topic of young girls dying right before their wedding is one poets seem to love. In a society that has a huge collective fetish for female virginity, the wedding night does indeed signify a major change for the girl (who looses blood, like in death, and her last name, like in death). But, more to the point since women don't make the rules, a woman looses most of her desirability after the marriage - she's not the unsullied potential mate any more, but a future mother. So attraction tends to concentrate on the very last moments before the wedding night - and the simili-death it includes. Having death put a final and romantic end to the girl's existence is more poetical than having her become someone else's property - or even your own. The attraction is so much stronger when it's irrealisable, and tainted by tragedy rather than by the sordid consummation of one's lust. This is an archetype - a theme that comes again and again. This isn't the first poem to use the theme, but it's one of the most famous - why do you think the little dead girl of the comic book is called Lenore. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 7th, 2008
11:07 pm [foudebassan]	Matthias Claudius (1740-1815) Claudius was the son of a protestant pastor. Like many otherwise reputable individuals, he studied law, but had the good sense to give it up before graduation. He then became private secretary to an earl, where he met Klopstock (a contemporary poet) who in turn introduced him to literary circles. He became a journalist, married and had twelve children. Unfortunately, almost all of them survived infancy, so to avoid bankruptcy he had to find a better paying job. This isn’t his best-known poem – that one would probably be Death and the Maiden (made into a song by Schubert) – nor the cheeriest (for that, look at his ode to the wine grown in the Rhine valley). But it is representative of the era. (Text found here) ETA: Here's a short audio clip found by Scribens. ( Evening Song ) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 6th, 2008
10:35 pm [foudebassan]	Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau (1616-1679) was born in Breslau (now Wroclaw, in Poland) to a wealthy family. He studied in the Netherlands and travelled extensively before coming back home, marrying a girl both wealthy and noble, and making a very impressive career as mayor of his town and then governor of the province. He wrote a lot, mostly religious poems that were printed while he was still alive, but also a certain number of naughty poems that were copied by hand and then circulated very discreetly in knowing circles. This one is an example of the latter. ( Read more ) Tomorrow we’ll get into more serious stuff. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
11:41 pm [foudebassan]	Georg-Philipp Harsdörffer (1607-1658) Today’s entry is somewhat fantasy-ridden so you might prefer to ignore it. Harsdörffer (isn’t that a mouthful) founded the oldest poetical society still in existence in Germany, the Order of the Pegnitz flowers, in 1645. “Order” like in “Order of the Phoenix”, Pegnitz, after the river that flows through Nürnberg, his home town, and flowers because flowers, shepherds, green nature and anything bucolic by essence were all very fashionable at the time. This isn’t a German thing, more of a general trend in literature at the time – the last chapter of L'Astrée (loooooong novel detailing the love of a nice shepherd for a nice shepherdess on the green, green grass, with nice white, white sheep frolicking in the background) were published in 1627, for instance. ETA: apisa_b found this link (thank you!!!) ( Fortsetzung der Pegnitz-Schäferei ) (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 4th, 2008
11:32 pm [foudebassan]	Martin Luther (1483-1546) is better know, no doubt, for his contributions to theology than for his poetry. You probably know the details of his life better than I do – as a monk, he came to observe the excesses of the Roman Catholic church from the inside, in peculiar how they traded years in paradise for good money. He didn’t like it, and made it known, for which he got excommunicated and banned. He used the forced banishment to translate the Bible from Latin to German and when he came back to his home town to find many followers, he went on writing psalms and sermons. This is an example. Listen to the melody here ( Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
11:18 pm [foudebassan]	Walther von der Vogelweide We don’t know a lot about Vogelweide. We don’t know where or when he was born (1170 is an estimation) and we’re not quite sure when or where he died either (probably 1230), though there’s been a lot of research on that. What we do know is that he wrote a lot, and is considered one of the greatest German-speaking minstrels. This would be a good time to specify that, by “German”, I don’t mean “from Germany” but rather “who spoke German, or a German dialect”. As you are well aware, borders can and do change over time, even more so for the German-speaking area than, for instance, in the French- or English-speaking areas. No offence intended to Austrians or German-speaking Swiss. So, even though Vogelweide figures here as German, writing German poetry and all that, he actually lived in Vienna for the greater part of what we know of his life. His best-know poem is the incipit “Unter der Linde…”: (ETA: Thanks to sylvanawood, you can listen to it here) ( Read more ) Lastly, technical question. I’m allowed up to 100 icons here at the comm, but I don’t seem to be able to take a comm icon when I post – does anyone know how to do that? (30 Comments |Comment on this)
12:52 am [foudebassan]	Hello and welcome here. For poetry month this year, I'll be revisiting a few classics from the other side of the Rhine, and I thought it would be more fun to do so in public. So every day-ish, I'll be posting a link to a poem, a not-so-good translation of that poem into English, and a bit of thinking aloud on it. Since this is partly in German it will all be highly organised, I have a road map and everything. So at the end of each post I'll leave a hint about what's coming next, and you can try to guess what it'll be :) Chronological order will kind of sort of be respected. Last but not least, I'm aware that I'm neither German nor English so trying to translate German poetry into English is arrogant at best and may turn into a full-blown catastrophy. My excuse is that I'm only doing this as a bit of harmless fun. It is not my intention to force anything on anyone - just to spend a bit of time doing something I enjoy in company of people who might enjoy it too. I don't mean to be offensive in any way. Please speak up if I cross a line, criticism doesn't have to be constructive. Tomorrow's entry, ie the first real post, will have something to do with fields and birds. (Comment on this)