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The Gallows Songs

The Gallows Songs

by Christian Morgenstern, translated from the German by Max Knight, introduction by Samuel Titan

$20.00
$20.00
Available as E-Book German Literature Poets & Poetry
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Christian Morgenstern’s The Gallows Songs are some of the most delightful and imaginative creations of twentieth-century German poetry. Composed originally after an outing Morgenstern took with his friends to Gallows Hill near Potsdam, these lively, puckish poems envision Gallows Hill as a fantastical world populated with fabulous animals, bizarre mechanisms, and some truly unruly punctuation.

Morgenstern felt that people often used their familiar language unthinkingly, without ever pausing to marvel at the glorious arbitrariness of words. Through poems chock-full of irresistible wordplay and unabashedly exuberant rhymes, he invites us to meditate—but also to med-it-nine and med-i-ten—on all the incidents and accidents of language that make the world of words so vibrant.

True to the spirit of Morgenstern’s linguistic mischief, Max Knight’s translation sparkles with uncommon wit as it reinvents in English Morgenstern’s daring verbal acrobatics, and is itself a feat of poetic genius.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781681379456
Pages: 240
Publication Date:

Praise

Add to the season’s pleasures a generous helping from the writings of Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914), a man with a witty and playful mind ... full of verbal horseplay, fabulous animals and a host of inventions that would make the Smithsonian Institution drool in envy.
—The New York Times

The English translations match the feeling of the German originals to an astonishing degree.... The search for puns and symbols which would parallel the originals must have been a challenge of considerable degree.
—American-German Review

Christian Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs, long lost to the non-German-speaking world as untranslatable, have now been rendered in English by Dr. Max Knight. He has created more than a translation ... he rethought the idea and formulation of Morgenstern in English.
—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart

Knight’s translation shows why Morgenstern has become proverbial in his own tongue.
—The Los Angeles Times

Obviously, Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder cannot be translated. This was reason enough for Max Knight to translate them—and in a masterly way. After reading the English version, it seems perfectly clear that Morgenstern could have been translated only in this fashion; for everything superbly done seems simple as soon as someone has done it.
—Aufbau, New York

Critical echo in the United States praises the informative introduction and masterly precision of Knight’s unstrained translation. Isolated [translation] attempts have been made since 1938; but it is only through Knight’s book that ‘the enfant terrible of German poetry’ now has the prospect of attaining broad popular appeal in America.
—California Freie Presse

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