Regarding the German language

[feuervogel]

I may rant a bit here, so be forewarned.

I'm so tired of people saying German is an ugly language, a harsh language, not a poetic language. I'm tired of trying to explain how they're wrong and completely uninformed, ignorant, and clearly not remotely familiar with the actual German language.

Have they never heard of Friedrich Schiller, often referred to as the German Shakespeare? Or his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who spawned an entire literary movement (introspection) and inspired the works of Mozart? Or Heinrich Heine, one of the most famous German Romantic poets and he who said "Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people"?

Leaving aside the copious examples of German poets, one aspect of the German language lends itself remarkably well to poetic expression: the (infamous) compound noun. There are nouns in German that require a full phrase (sometimes even a clause) to render in English. To take a well-known example, Schadenfreude: the (malicious) delight you take in someone else's misfortune.

Goethe contributed a delightful compound word to the corpus, which is a hapax legomenon (thanks joyeuse13 for the term!): Knabenmorgenblütenträume, in his poem Prometheus. (Yes, this is one of the poems I learned in college. My professor pointed out the uniqueness of the word, and it stuck in the back of my head.) A literal deconstruction of the word is boys' morning blossom dreams, which can sound a bit dirty. A better rendering is "the blossoming dreams of the morning of [my] youth."

The stanza:

Wähntest du etwa,
Ich sollte das Leben hassen,
In Wüsten fliehn,
Weil nicht alle Knabenmorgen-
Blütenträume reiften?

An approximate translation, not poetic:

Do you believe (implied: wrongly)
that I should hate life,
flee to the desert,
because not all the blossoming dreams of the
morning of my youth ripened?

The entire poem is about an angry Prometheus berating Zeus, asking why he should honor him. Interestingly, the entire compound noun only appears in the early version of the poem.

Don't disparage the language because of your ignorance. Make an effort to learn about it. You'll find you're rather wrong.

Comments

[sabeth]

:D ♥

[feuervogel]

:D

Ich hab vor, nach Berlin in April zu reisen, trotzdem ich es vielleicht nicht leisten kann. Ich hab seit einem Monat nicht gearbeitet. :P Wir sollten uns treffen!

[sabeth]

Oh noes, I hope I'm still here in April! I thought you were coming earlier in the year for some reason. Are you still doing the language course thing? (I've been thinking about whether to stay here or move back to Vienna for over a month now and I'm still not sure what to do, but I think I'll end up trusting my gut on this and that's saying it's homesick and tired of foreign countries. I ought to write a proper entry about this at some point.)

I still don't have a job, either. It's all part of my Big Plan (tm) to make the illustration career happen, but it's not the nicest of feelings. xD;;

[sabeth]

Er, which isn't to say that I definitely won't be here, just that I'm not 100% sure yet!

[feuervogel]

That's the plan, yeah. (I had the damnedest time making that comment, and I *still* think it's wrong, somehow.) I'd toyed with being over there now, but any time between, say, October and March it's too cold and dark. (For me, even April is too cold, and July isn't even properly hot!)

But! Even if you're gone, I've plans to go to Vienna with kirin in the beginning of May for our 10th anniversary. (Then off to Bratislava & Budapest.) And we can make a BPAL swap then :D