I'll close by reading you three little translations
from the great German comic poet Christian Morgenstern.
I don't read German and that makes it a lot easier
to translate.
[LAUGHTER] I do these with an Austrian lady Lore Segall, now,
Laurie Groszmann when I first met her and started working
on this, I was staying at Yaddo and I
had translated a few of these to amuse my daughter.
And when I noticed that the lady had a very heavy accent,
I asked her, "do you know Morgenstern?"
And something happened that I find
happens with all people who have German as their basic language,
especially if they're of a slightly older generation,
you said and say, "do you know Morgenstern?"
The lights come on, they tell you two,
and they will have them by heart.
Everybody waited for these poems to appear in the magazines
and then they told them at parties, to each other,
they memorized them and recited them.
Everybody loved Morgenstern, he would--
the thing that we've had that's closest to him
is Lewis Carroll, but he meant much more to them.
I mean, he has the same sort of insane perfection of form.
You'll hear the lines locking into place
like a beautiful piece of machinery.
Only that nobody ever thought of rhyming those words before.
Sort of a Rube Goldberg machine of poetry
that it works with marvelous perfection toward some utterly
insane end.
But he's also much spookier say than Lewis Carroll, much more
modern, he's like Lewis Carroll married to T.S. Eliot,
a strange marriage but what other kind is there?
In many ways, his greatest creation is a character named
Palmstrom, who is the kindest, and most courteous,
and sweetest, and most decent, and humane, and sleepless,
and neurotic of mortals.
He-- at heart, he's a petty clerk
and you'll hear it coming out in his language here and there,
but he has the highest aesthetic pretensions.
As a matter of fact, he's the man
who built an olfactory organ upon which his friend, Korf
gives concerts.
Unfortunately, it's not-- he plays upon it the sneezewort
sonata which blows poor Palmstrom off the bench
in the scherzo.
[LAUGHTER]
Palmstrom as I say, though has you know,
he's really in love with everything artistic
and idealized.
And well, this is a little poem meant to introduce you to him.
It's just called "Palmstrom."
"Palmstrom-- standing beside the brook unfolds a handkerchief,
white and red, on which a mighty oak is shown,
and someone with an open book.
Blow his nose?
He would not dare for he belongs to that sort of man who
are so often nakedly stricken by beauty, unaware.
What is only just out spread, tenderly now, he has to close.
No sensitive spirit will condemn him marching on
with unblown nose."
[LAUGHTER]
You know him?
I told you that Palmstrom can't sleep nights and he has many
poems about the ingenious ways that he has of entertaining
himself and sort of passing the terrible spooky nights.
But there's also wonderful poems about the ways
in which he has to bug himself so that he
will wake up and be terrified.