Laura Freeburn Translations LLC

Author: lefreeburn

  • Marion Dönhoff and Bismarck’s daughter-in-law at the end of the world

    Refugees fleeing East Prussia

    In January 1945, East Prussian Countess Marion Dönhoff jumped on her horse and headed west, away from the Russian army. Seven weeks later she and the horse arrived safely in Hamburg, where she settled and built a long career in journalism. She recounted the journey in her book Namen, die keiner mehr nennt. Ostpreußen – Menschen und Geschichte (1962).

    One memorable incident was her encounter with Sibylle von Bismarck-Schönhausen, which I have translated here:

    We had been traveling about 14 days when we arrived one evening in Varzin, a large estate in the Rummelsburg district, which Chancellor Bismarck had acquired with his endowment after 1866: large, magnificent woods, and a farm run in exemplary fashion.

    The Nogat and the Weichsel lay behind us and I had thought this would be a place where we could rest a while. To finally arrive – what a relief it would be. We rode through the park gate and up the sloping path to the manor house. Up there, in front of the main gate, stood a wagon and two large rubber-tired carts, piled high with boxes. Others have already stopped by, I thought: hopefully there’s still room inside. But to my great surprise I learned that it was not the luggage of East-Prussian refugees; it was the Bismarck archive awaiting evacuation. Even here the decamping was underway. And I had believed that things were calm beyond the Weichsel.

    At that time the Chancellor’s daughter-in-law was still alive – a small, slender, highly amusing and very old lady, who in her youth had been the cause of many a furrowed brow: she had hunted on horseback, smoked cigars and distinguished herself through joking and witty repartee.

    And indeed she remained immensely compelling, so compelling that I could not decide – although it seemed imperative – whether to leave the next day. In the end we stayed two days. Two memorable days. Outside the refugees trekked slowly through the country, and as the last ones passed by, locals joined the train and became refugees themselves. Here, too, they had reached the turning point. The wagon we had seen had already driven away without the old Countess, who could not be convinced to leave Varzin. All our warnings and remonstrances were no use. She was quite sure she would not survive the Russian invasion. Nor did she wish to survive it, and she had had a grave dug in the park accordingly (on the assumption that nobody would have time to do so later on).

    She wanted to stay in Varzin and enjoy her home to the last. And this she did with grandezza. Around her everything was as it always had been. The old servant, who did not wish to leave either, served at table. One superb red wine followed another – vintages that were the stuff of a connoisseur’s dreams. Not one word was spoken about what was happening outside or what was to come. She told lively, nuanced stories of the old days, her father-in-law, the imperial court, and the time her husband Bill Bismarck had spent as governor of East Prussia.

    When I finally said farewell and we rode away, I paused halfway to the garden gate to look back once more. She was standing, lost in thought, in the doorway and giving a last wave with a little handkerchief. I think she was even smiling…though I couldn’t quite tell.

    The manor house at Varzin

  • Emma vs. Effi

    Last month I read Madame Bovary for the first time. Afterwards I decided to re-read Effi Briest, having read it about 20 years ago at St. Andrews. I used to think of Effi Briest as “the German Madame Bovary” just because it was a realist novel about an adulterous wife, but really they’re quite different. One could write about the differences (in tone, characterization, focus, moral/social concerns) at great length but since this is just a blog, here’s a fun chart full of spoilers:

      Emma Bovary Effi Briest
    Family background Only daughter of widowed farmer Only daughter of amusing couple from the minor nobility
    Husband Feckless doctor Extremely correct Prussian Baron
    Pet Dog (runs away) Dog (faithful)
    Children One daughter, Berthe One daughter, Annie
    Reasons for adultery Contempt for wimpy/embarrassing husband, desire for thrilling love affairs, voluptuous nature, probably reads too many novels. Would like to be good but has a weak, overly agreeable character. Judgment impaired by fear that her house is haunted. Needs a chaperon.
    Lover(s) Callous playboy (landed gentry) followed by earnest youth (lawyer) Callous playboy (military officer) with unpleasant wife
    Husband’s reaction Self pity (and she’s already dead by the time he finds out) Successfully avenges honor, divorces her, keeps child, continues living correctly. Lets her have dog.
    Cause of death: Suicide (arsenic) Stress, and looking at the stars in cold, damp air
    Raciness Pretty high for a nineteenth-century novel; obscenity trial led (as always) to increased sales So low it’s hard to tell how far this affair actually went. Reading between the lines required.

    Penguin has an excellent English translation of Effi Briest by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers.

  • “Five Germanys”

    Recent events have inspired me to re-read Fritz Stern‘s book Five Germanys I have known (grammar nerds will note that it is “Germanys,” not “Germanies,” because the usual plural spelling rules don’t apply to proper names), specifically the middle section about nurturing, preserving, and defending liberal democracy.

    Reading this book ten years ago, I skimmed that part thinking, “Yeah, mm-hmm, whatever.” But it all seems terribly relevant now. Take his comments on the student revolts of ’68, when he was teaching at Columbia University:

    I was angry at the jubilant desecration of the university, and afraid that we were betraying our patrimony. […] I was afraid of the radical youths who were intoxicated by their own rhetoric, enthralled by the initial successes of violence, and convinced of their historic role as iconoclasts. […] Their disruptions were not cost-free: I feared a massive backlash, a reaction by conservative yahoos who would feel justified in their paranoid hatred of liberal (and expensive) institutions.

    How relevant.

    Then there was a rising desire on the right for repressive law and order, along with a “professed faith in the virtues of hard work and economic individualism, and contempt for the welfare state that ‘coddled’ the weak…a new version of Social Darwinism, bloody-minded if economically effective.” And there were advocates of la politique du pire — “that delusionary policy that holds that the worse things go, the better for radicals. I have often fought with these self-righteous ‘wreckers,’ who seldom realize how bad and irredeemable things can get.”

    Ditto.

    Having fled Nazi Germany for an America that was — on the whole and despite its economic woes — confident, well-meaning and optimistic, with a president who insisted the only thing to fear was Fear itself, Stern was wary of radicals on the left and right. Like G. K. Chesterton, he understood that it was worthwhile, and an adventure, to keep your horse running straight when it is tempted to veer onto the paths that lead to insane extremes.

    He gave an interview to Greenpeace magazine in January 2016, a few months before his death at age 90. The interview seems to be available only in German, so I’ve taken the liberty of translating an excerpt here:

    Historian Fritz Stern: “We are facing an era of fear.”

    GP: Is Europe moving too far to the right?

    FS: I fear it is. I believe we are facing an era of fear, widespread fear — the fear that can be exploited by the right. And you can already see in the example of Poland how fragile freedom is. It is shocking how quickly an authoritarian system is being built up in Poland. […] And as an American citizen I am also deeply concerned.

    GP: About what comes after Barack Obama?

    FS: Precisely. On the whole I’m an admirer of Obama and it was a great achievement on the part of this country to have elected him twice. But the current situation is so serious, so destructive, so dysfunctional, that it can only make you worry.

    GP: You mean Donald Trump?

    FS: Trump is the best example of the dumbing-down of the country and the appalling role of money. An absolutely amoral guy who flaunts his money and ignorance. I arrived in this country when Franklin Roosevelt was president. That someone like Trump, who is a nobody apart from money and monstrous ambition and ugliness – that he would not only put himself forward but would even be accepted by many people as a candidate, is simply beyond comprehension. 

    GP: What has changed in American society?

    FS: I’ve already spoken of dumbing-down. That is due in large part to the media and to the fact that there are fewer and fewer objective journalists. Most people can choose the ones who preach what they want to hear. […] A certain kind of new religiosity, which has very little to do with true religiosity, is also on the rise. I believe we are facing a new illiberal age. And for someone who dedicated his life to a certain liberalism, those are sad tidings. It’s a decline.

    RIP Prof. Stern. If there’s anything I can do to keep that horse on the trail, I’ll do it.

     

  • Translators in Space, part III: Embassytown

    China Miéville is a socialist who hates Tolkien. He’s also a little scary looking. His books are worth reading, though, even if you’re a reactionary who loves Tolkien.

    I’ve read two of his novels, The City and the City and Embassytown. The former has an intriguing setting (two cities that share the same space, where residents of one have to “unsee” residents of the other) but the plot is a fairly ordinary detective/noir story. Embassytown is more exciting, especially for linguists.

    Embassytown is an enclave of mostly human foreigners on a distant planet populated by giant insect-like creatures with two mouths. Their language, which is called Language (!), requires two words to be spoken simultaneously. In addition, the creatures (the Ariekei or “hosts”) are not capable of understanding speech unless it has a mind behind it – so you can program a computer to speak Language to them, but they won’t understand it. Many of them also seem unaware that the noises humans make amongst themselves are a kind of language.

    The system humans ultimately developed in order to communicate in Language was to breed identical twins who are kept perfectly in sync. They spend their lives as Ambassadors and go by one name, with half of the name applying to each of them: CalVin, for example, or LuCy. One of them speaks as the top mouth, the other as the lower one.

    The native speakers of Language, the Ariekei, also lack the ability to lie. This includes not being able to use similes unless they have literally occurred in the real world: in order for anyone to be able to say, “You look like the cat that ate the canary,” an actual cat would have to have been seen eating an actual canary on at least one occasion.  This gets us into the topic of why their language is called merely “Language” — it connects to their thoughts in such a direct, primal way that they don’t have enough distance from it to use it untruthfully, or indeed to call a thing by another name. If you are literally not able to say that the sky is yellow, for example, you probably also lack the capacity to learn another word for blue, like “azul.” If in your childhood you are told “This is a table,” and later in life you begin to call it “ein Tisch,” are you, in some sense, lying? Speaking another language and lying both require you to put some distance between things and the words that refer to them.

    Because of the way they experience language, hearing lies is extremely exciting for them. The Ambassadors periodically hold a Festival of Lies where they stand in front of an audience of Ariekei and say whatever manifest untruths come to mind. “The Hosts grew boisterous in a fashion I’d never seen, then to my alarm seemed intoxicated, literally lie-drunk,” says the human narrator (and one-time star of an Ariekene simile that had to be staged so it could be spoken).

    The intoxicating effect of lies on the hosts foreshadows the cataclysm that occurs when an unusual ambassador couple with a different kind of mental connection arrives on the planet and begins to speak to them. It is a gripping (and pleasantly disturbing) story with lots of food for thought.

    Ursula K. Le Guin called this book “A fully achieved work of art,” and if that’s not enough to recommend it, I don’t know what is.

     

  • Nazi Summer Camp

    In 2015 someone contacted me from Radiolab asking for help with research for the episode “Nazi Summer Camp“. This was quite a thrill because I’ve long been grateful to this fun and informative show for preventing my children from bickering on long car trips.

    What they wanted was a summary of one chapter of a German book about POW camps in the US during the Second World War. They were still deciding which aspects to focus on, so they were gathering information from different sources. In the end, no specific information from my summary made it into the show, but I was happy to be part of the research process.

    The chapter gave a detailed account of German POW life at Fort Hunt, source of many anti-torture anecdotes. When James Mattis told Trump, “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I’ll do better” than the torturers, he was building on a tradition that goes back to the easygoing interrogators at Fort Hunt.

    Although POWs were not tortured there, they were subjected to a lot of secret surveillance. Their cells were bugged and monitored by a team of eavesdroppers, many of whom were Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. They worked in shifts and noted the POWs’ conversations by hand on forms, often in a sort of shorthand, but quite complete. When the conversations turned to especially relevant topics, the monitors started a tape recorder. With regard to what should be recorded, the adage was, “When in doubt, press button.” At the end of their shift the monitors transcribed important passages from their recordings. They learned precise coordinates of numerous bomb targets in Germany, technological details about various weapons, vehicles and machines, and much about the structures and practices of the Wehrmacht. What they learned the most about were the individual German soldiers.

    I enjoyed translating the transcripts that were quoted in the book. Here is a soldier explaining to his cellmate what the formal interrogations are like:

    G: So one of those guards comes charging in holding a piece of paper and calls out someone’s name, but always with English pronunciation. And then you have to go out, and then you go through the halls to a room and usually an officer is sitting there. And you can’t do a Hitler salute there.

    P: No, no.

    G: And then he asks a ton of questions. For example: Are you a member of the party? What do you think of Adolf Hitler? What do you think of the Jewish question? And then he wants to know other stuff.

    Most prisoners felt they were treated fairly and enjoyed the plentiful food and relatively comfortable conditions. However, some reacted with deep distrust. Helmut Engelbrecht told his cellmate: “Like I just told you, this is how Nordic people squeeze it out of you. The Russians, they let you starve and then cold shower, hot shower, cold shower, hot shower, until you’re half mad and you’ll tell them everything willingly. But here they try it with devious tricks, nice on the outside and on the inside – the craziest techniques and listening systems and whatever other kinds of shit.”

    Prisoners were not supposed to know they were being recorded, but some guessed. 22-year-old submarine lieutenant Peter Leffler from Braunschweig explained to his skeptical cellmate:

    Leffler: They’re recording our conversation now.

    Cellmate: Oh, I don’t believe that. The thing with recordings, that would cost a whole lot.

    Leffler: What do you mean, it doesn’t cost a lot to make records.

    Cellmate: OK, listen, it’s theoretically possible but pretty difficult in practice. Imagine, we’ve been here together for a long time, with a record running 12-15 hours?

    Leffler: No, there’s someone sitting by it, listening, and whenever it gets interesting, he turns it on.

    Cellmate: Oh, well that’s…I get it.

    Leffler: In Danzig I was at a broadcasting studio once, and this is exactly what the rooms look like.

    Meanwhile, SS Oberscharführer Fritz Swoboda willingly told his cellmate about how he and his men had shot unarmed American POWs on the western front. Shortly afterwards he thought to ask:

    Swoboda: Could there be a microphone hidden in this room?

    Cellmate: Yeah, nobody knows. But I have nothing to hide.

    Swoboda: No, I just wondered. I don’t actually think there is one.

    Officers, men with specialist technical knowledge, or soldiers who had been involved in intelligence were the most likely to suspect bugging. Their cellmates often didn’t believe them. One simple infantryman responded, “Where’s a built-in microphone here? Where would something like that be? […] You’re crazy, that’s a myth.” A marine lieutenant was sure it was impossible: “Here? No, there are no microphones here, I know. […] Look, some man would have to sit there all day, listening all the time. Or they have to broadcast it by radio, onto records. Wouldn’t work, you can’t do it.” Most discussions about eavesdropping came to that conclusion: “There’s no microphone here.”

    They were there, and sometimes they picked up conversations that ran like a film script:

    J: If only we could get out of this shithole and back to Germany.

    H: They’ll get nothing out of me. They could keep me here a year and they wouldn’t know more than they do now. And in the meantime the war would be over and they’d have to let me go.

    J: You know, last night I woke up suddenly and I thought, hey, what’s going on? I was at home. I saw it all so clearly.

    H: Watch out. (guard going by)

    J: He’s gone. You have to be careful here, like a lynx.

    H: Yes, yes.

    J: Open the window again.

    H: Man, then it gets so cold in here.

    J: It’s just as cold in here. When you touch the radiator, you stick to it. It’s that cold. Are you hungry?

    H: It’s OK.

    J: You’ll start to feel it tomorrow and the day after.

    H: I believe you. When did they take you out?

    J: Yesterday.

    H: And you haven’t been back in?

    J: No, and he asked me if I wanted to go to a Nazi or Anti-Nazi camp. Then I said it was the same to me – whether I was a Nazi or Anti-Nazi, as a German I wasn’t going to tell him anything. He could do whatever he wanted. Then he locked me up here. But let’s not get down in the dumps. We can thank God things came out this well for us.

    H: Yes, I was lucky.

    J: So was I.

     

     

  • The Lady in the Hymnal

    I grew up in a mainline Protestant church, where my family always spent the organist’s intro to a given hymn checking on who wrote the words, who composed the music, what country they were from, and when they lived. If we spotted someone who was famous outside of church, like Haydn or Arthur Sullivan, there was a chance for some gleeful pointing and whispering before we belted out the first few bars.

    Do this often enough and you will find one name popping up with alarming frequency: Catherine Winkworth.

     

     

    Germany is to hymnals what China is to Wal-Mart. Remove all the German tunes from an old-fashioned hymn book and you will be left with a sad little pamphlet. And in many cases, it was Catherine Winkworth who did the translation that allows us to sing them in English. Occasionally I have heard a really solid German hymn tune and wondered if I could be the one to provide an English text for it, but no – Catherine Winkworth had beaten me to the job, every time.

    So I fell to wondering: who was this lady? I found her book of hymn translations, Lyra Germanica, on Amazon. My brother was kind enough to buy it for me for Christmas:

    guinea pig provided for size reference

    It contains the translations and a preface by her. To learn about her life, however, I had to look elsewhere. A few websites offered basic biographical information, but to know what kind of a person she really was, you need to go to Google Books and read the memoirs of her sister, Susanna. In summarizing them, I was going to say, “I read them so you don’t have to!” But in fact, this is an extremely interesting book, so if you enjoy my summary, go read the whole thing.

    Born in London in 1837, Catherine was raised in a family of devout Evangelicals with a rural background reminiscent of a George Eliot novel, except that none them turned out to be an odious hypocrite. Her maternal grandfather was banished from home by his father at age 18 “for becoming a disciple of Whitefield, and refusing to join in any worldly amusements.” Catherine herself was a good, intelligent and pious child. At 8, she was noticed by a family friend sitting with a Bible on her lap and reading the Sermon on the Mount aloud to her younger siblings. “What, Kate,” asked the friend, “Reading the Bible to your brothers?” “Yes,” she replied, “But I try to choose the parts that are suited to their capacity.”

    Her family valued education very highly and was well connected in religious and literary circles. Catherine and Susanna were passionate about learning everything they possibly could in theology, the sciences, and humanities. Their mother died rather suddenly after preparing too vigorously for a dinner party. They ran the household until their father took a second wife, a superfan of Lord Byron who apparently excelled at her hobby of making realistic dollhouse furniture.

    This was their cue to leave home and have some adventures – Catherine went with an Aunt to Dresden, where she had lessons in German and music, as well as visiting art galleries, the theater, and the opera (both of the latter being dominated, at that time, by members of the Devrient family, whose acting troupe Susanna’s book describes as “the best actors of Germany, perhaps for tragedy the best of any country”). Upon her return to England Catherine was in a state of intellectual ferment: “Her early beliefs had been rudely shattered and she was at this epoch much inclined to replace them by the worship of Art and Culture. Goethe was her chief instructor and guide, and her philosophy was a chaos.” However, she eventually settled into an ordered Anglican existence in the mold of Charles Kingsley.

    It was Susanna who first expressed an interest in translation, specifically a book on the life of Niebuhr. When she mentioned this to the German diplomat Baron von Bunsen, he jumped at the opportunity to mentor her, encouraging her not only to translate the book but to add original research of her own. To this end he carted her off to Bonn and made her do scary things like ask the world’s foremost Niebuhr expert questions in German at dinner in front of other distinguished Germans. On the plus side, she got to waltz with the Prince of Prussia.

    Shall we dance?

    Meanwhile, Catherine also tried her hand at German to English translation, including “some German hymns that Susie and I are fond of, and [I] don’t succeed very well, but I like doing it.” Soon she was translating a hymn a day and succeeding rather better. They were published as Lyra Germanica and sold out within two months. Fan mail poured in.

    “Mein liebes Fräulein Winckworth,” wrote Baron Bunsen, to whom the work was dedicated, “Das Herz treibt mich Ihnen Deutsch zu reden, da Sie mir meine deutschen Lieblingslieder, die heiligen Gesänge meines Volkes so herrlich verstanden und wiedergegeben haben.” The prominent Unitarian James Martineau thanked her for introducing them “to the English reader with the least possible drawback from passing out of their own language.”

    A typical letter from Catherine to Susanna from around the time she began translating:

    “First of all, I must read Mill’s Political Economy some day; and then I want to learn Latin and Greek and Drawing, and perhaps I shall have to translate, and then there will be occupation enough; and so as I said, I am very well satisfied with my prospects; though, according to the doctrines M. and Mrs. P. are preaching to me at the moment, I ought to be very unhappy, because I’m not married, nor likely to be at present. They have been going on at me so about it, in a regular married woman style, which I hate.”

    The Winkworth sisters never did marry, but they knew everybody: Charles Dickens (“has a very rapid decided way of talking, and is excessively full of fun and spirits”), Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini (“Well, altogether he is simply the most wonderful-looking man I ever saw in my life. He may be any height he likes, he is so thoroughly manly-looking, you do not think of it”), French socialist “little” Louis Blanc, Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and Charlotte Brontë (“One feels that her life at least almost makes one like her books, though one does not want there to be any more Miss Brontës”), as well as everyone who was anyone in the English clergy, e.g. John Henry Newman’s younger brother Francis Newman (“a beautiful face and winning smile”) and F. D. Maurice (“I like him because he is so despotic”). They were highly active in the Sunday school movement, which in those days was much more significant than getting children to cut construction paper in a church basement.

    Film buffs used to enjoy playing “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” History buffs should start playing “Six Degrees of Catherine Winkworth.” In fact, I would wager that in every Victorian miniseries you’ve ever seen, there is a woman in the background who looks like an extra but is actually playing Catherine Winkworth. She’s one of the most important Victorian ladies no one – apart from the hymnal nerds – has ever heard of.

  • The Unbelievable Ride in a Crazy Airplane (and other films)

    Sometimes translation is straightforward. Sometimes, especially in the arts and entertainment sector, translators make significant modifications to their source material. Compare the English and German versions of these titles of popular films from the eighties and nineties (back translations in italics).

    The funniest German film titles are those that take a simple English title and turn it into a long, touchingly earnest explanation. Of these, the prime example is:

    Airplane! = Die unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug (The unbelievable ride in a crazy airplane). Thanks, translators – now I know exactly what to expect from that film!

    Or they keep the English title but append a little explanation:

    Backdraft = Backdraft – Männer, die durchs Feuer gehen (Backdraft – men who go through the fire)

    Gremlins = Gremlins – kleine Monster (Gremlins – little monsters)

    Top Gun = Top Gun – sie fürchten weder Tod noch Teufel (Top Gun – they fear neither death nor devil) (a common saying to describe fearlessness, and also used as the German title of the 1966 film “Lost Command”)

    Sometimes they’re just very different:

    Sixteen Candles = Das darf man nur als Erwachsener (Only adults can do that)

    The Emperor’s New Groove = Ein Königreich für ein Lama (A kingdom for a llama)

    Also amusing are those that are just way more prosaic than the original:

    Saving Private Ryan = Der Soldat James Ryan (The soldier James Ryan) — whoa! That sounds exciting!!!

    Meet the Parents = Meine Braut, ihr Vater und ich (My bride, her father and I)

    There are, of course, also some that are exactly the same:

    Back to the Future = Zurück in die Zukunft (Back to the future)

    Among the films I searched through to compile this list, one jumped out at me, namely:

    The Princess Bride = Die Braut des Prinzen (The prince’s bride)

    Now…the book on which the film is based is called “Die Brautprinzessin” in German, so why did they change the film title? Wikipedia won’t tell me why, and what I’d like to think is that some loser just misheard or misread “Princess” as “Prince’s.” I’ll go on thinking that until someone tells me otherwise.

    Why, you might ask, did I choose films from the eighties and nineties? Partly because I haven’t paid much attention to films since 2000, but also because it seems translation of film titles is becoming less frequent and, when it occurs, is more straightforward (or else it follows the pattern of Backdraft, Gremlins, and Top Gun, i.e. Real Title + Explanation). In these lists of Oscar-winning films from 2014 and 2015, you will see only a few titles were translated. Internet databases and constant international communication mean fewer unbelievable rides in crazy airplanes, and more Airplane!s. Ah, well.

  • Metaphors that make you go WTF?

    With regard to Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen, “Lessing, who had just held up his own newly published Emilia Galotti as a model of how a stage-play should be constructed, was bitter; he exclaimed angrily that Goethe had filled sausage skins with sand and sold them as rope.”

  • Don’t even think about it….

    A friend took this photo at Karlstein Castle in the Czech Republic. It seems they don’t serve my kind in there.

  • Most people have a cold.

    I do have a cold. I powered through it during Christmas preparations but spent the Feast of Stephen in bed. And that’s where I’d be today, as well, if there weren’t things to do.

    Most people have a cold in one of my favorite poems: Weltende, by Jakob van Hoddis. Good old Raymond Furness of St. Andrews read this one to us in a German Expressionism lecture and I thought it was just the most delightful little apocalyptic poem ever. Seriously disturbing in a way, but also darkly comic with its blunt descriptions of catastrophe and its wry juxtaposition of everyday annoyances and huge disasters. The last two lines, which have the exact same meter in the original, are “Most people have a cold. / The railroads are falling from the bridges.” The end!

    Here it is in German:

    Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,

    In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei,

    Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei

    Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.

    Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen

    An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.

    Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen.

    Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.

    A couple years ago I thought about trying to translate Weltende. But after ruminating on the first line, especially the word “Bürger” (“bourgeois”? “burgher”? something else?), for half an hour with no progress, I got to thinking about what it would be like to write an Onion-style article based on each line of the poem. And I did it. Like most of the funny things I write, it was only slightly funny. Here’s the first one (notice how I tried to make the guy seem as consistently bourgeois as possible):

    AREA MAN LOSES HAT
    John Burger, a manager at a local store, was surprised when a strong wind carried his hat away last Tuesday as he was heading into Starbuck’s Coffee on Main Street. “It literally just flew off my head,” said Burger, 41. He added, “Maybe my head is too pointy.”

    So it went on in that vein, with mixed success.

    There are a lot of translations of Weltende into English and I don’t love any of them, except for this one by Rolfe-Peter Wille, which is accompanied by an insightful essay.

    Meanwhile, Google Translate sez:

    The citizen flies from the pointed head the hat, In all the air it echoes like shouting, Roofers fall off and go in two And on the coasts – one reads – the flood rises. The storm is here, the wild seas pluck On land to crush thick dams. Most people have a cold. The railroads fall from the bridges.

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