Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Time	Event
12:52a	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)
11:18p	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)

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