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.