Everybody is writing about the 100th anniversary of Orson Welles' birth today, and I love Orson too, but rather than join the pile-on, let me talk about someone else. The German Christian Morgenstern is one of the greatest "nonsense poets" in any language; that sort of poetry is of course difficult to translate, but still, why Morgenstern isn't better known in the English-speaking world is a persistent mystery. Max Knight, among others, has done fine English versions of Morgenstern's Gallows Songs:
Die unmögliche Tatsache
Palmström, etwas schon an Jahren,
wird an einer Straßenbeuge
und von einem Kraftfahrzeuge
überfahren.
"Wie war" (spricht er, sich erhebend
und entschlossen weiterlebend)
"möglich, wie dies Unglück, ja- :
daß es überhaupt geschah?
"Ist die Staatskunst anzuklagen
in Bezug auf Kraftfahrwagen?
Gab die Polizeivorschrift
hier dem Fahrer freie Trift?
"Oder war vielmehr verboten,
hier Lebendige zu Toten
umzuwandeln, -kurz und schlicht:
Durfte hier der Kutscher nicht-?"
Eingehüllt in feuchte Tücher,
prüft er die Gesetzesbücher
und ist alsobald im Klaren:
Wagen durften dort nicht fahren!
Und er kommt zu dem Ergebnis:
Nur ein Traum war das Erlebnis.
Weil, so schliesst er messerscharf,
nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.
The Impossible Fact
Palmstroem, old, an aimless rover,
walking in the wrong direction
at a busy intersection
is run over.
"How," he says, his life restoring
and with pluck his death ignoring,
"can an accident like this
ever happen? What's amiss?
"Did the state administration
fail in motor transportation?
Did police ignore the need
for reducing driving speed?
"Isn't there a prohibition,
barring motorized transmission
of the living to the dead?
Was the driver right who sped . . . ?"
Tightly swathed in dampened tissues
he explores the legal issues,
and it soon is clear as air:
Cars were not permitted there!
And he comes to the conclusion:
His mishap was an illusion,
for, he reasons pointedly,
that which must not, can not be.
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