Ernst Jandl: Not a concrete pot

dingfest

auf einem stuhl
liegt ein hut.
beide
wissen voneinander
nichts.
beide
sind
so dingfest

thingsure

on a chair
lies a hat.
neither
knows anything
of the other.
both
are
so thingsure

Dedalus Press has re-issued Ernst Jandl’s Dingfest/Thingsure, a handsome dual language edition of the poet’s work with translations by Michael Hamburger, which replaces the volume originally published by the same publisher in 1997 as part of its Poetry Europe Series. The book collects the shorter poems of this wide-ranging experimental Austrian poet – a poet whose work, so embedded in the verbal possibilities of the German language, is often regarded as untranslatable. Here, for example, is his famous ‘ottos mops’ (otto’s pug), not included here, a poem which depends wholly on the different qualities of the sound of ‘o’ in German .

ottos mops

ottos mops trotzt
otto: fort mops fort
ottos mops hopst fort
otto: soso

otto holt koks
otto holt obst
otto horcht
otto: mops mops
otto hofft

ottos mops klopft
otto: komm mops komm
ottos mops kommt
ottos mops kotzt
otto: ogottogott

And here is a game translation by Elizabeth MacKiernan, from Ernst Jandl: Reft and Light, Poems, translated from the German by various American poets. Providence (USA): 2000. Both are available on the excellent German poetry site www.lyrikline.de

Lulu’s Pooch

Lulu’s pooch droops
Lulu: Scoot, pooch, scoot!
Lulu’s pooch soon scoots.
Lulu brooms room.

Lulu scoops food.
Lulu spoons roots.
Lulu croons: Pooch, pooch.
Lulu broods.

Lulu’s pooch drools.
Lulu:Poor fool pooch.
Lulu grooms pooch.

Lulu’s pooch poops.
Lulu: Oops.

Jandl would understand the problem, having written many poems in English, one of which, nicely summing up the challenge of writing different kinds of poems and being therefore inconvenient to categorise, Hamburger quotes:

i love concrete
i love pottery
but i’m not
a concrete pot

Hamburger’s selection makes available in English a particular thread of Jandl’s work, ‘short poems of all periods, yet only of the straight kind most congenial to a translator never mistaken for a concrete pot’. These poems are the comic, inventive, performance side of Jandl – the only side this reader knows – and are very attractive in their attention to language, their ‘thing-fixity’ and in the flavour of the sceptical intelligence behind them.

inhalt

um ein gedicht zu machen
habe ich nichts

eine ganze sprache
ein ganzes leben
ein ganzes denken
ein ganzes erinnern

um ein gedicht zu machen
habe ich nichts

gist

for the making of a poem
i have nothing

a whole language
a whole life
a whole thinking
a whole remembering

for the making of a poem
i have nothing.

Dingfest/Thingsure. Ernst Jandl. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Dedalus, 1997, 2006.