![]() Likewise a no-no would have been alternating unstress-stress in some attempt to mimic a heartbeat. That would have thrown off the mystery of this masterpiece. It would have been easy to add a tail fin or dorsal fin or something. I think that making the shape resemble a fish more accurately would have diminished the poem, ruined its streamlined symmetry. In this poem, that isn’t an issue because there aren’t any words. ![]() I’m speaking of something deeper than rhyme scheme or meter I mean every vowel, every consonant. It is possible for subtleties of meaning and shifts in tone to be brought across with fairly high fidelity by a skilled translator but when the poem’s exact sequence of syllables gets disrupted, its unique musicality is lost. ![]() We say poetry is what is lost in translation, but it’s primarily the sound of those words in that order that can’t be replicated. I think the reason is that it is purely music. This Fish’s night-song, however, comes across perfectly. I looked for some additional work online, but it may have lost something in translation. It is difficult to add anything to this remarkable poem (a poem that is its own translation) and thorough, perceptive commentary. These symbols, particular to the study of prosody, root the poem in the tradition of Latin and Greek poetry from which all other literature in the Western canon blooms and Morgenstern, confronting the enormity of the canon behind him, baits the future with a little fish dreaming its silent song, the tune yet to be invented.ĭistinguished Guest Amit Majmudar's comments: But consider the use of the macrons and breves. Some critics may dismiss his poem as a textual trick, nice enough, but not poetry. Morgenstern wrote “Fisches Nachtgesang” in 1905 at the beginning of a century that would upheave the definitions of literature and art. Again, the reader must fill in the blanks himself. The breves look like fish scales of a child’s drawing and the macrons might be crude renderings of horizontal fins, but lines are not connected to form a solid figure. They show a fish in abstract with all its details lost in the murk. The macrons and breves cluster in a vaguely fish-shaped form. Likewise, the shape of the fish remains just out of view. The sound exists beyond the water and must be imagined. It is similar to looking at a real fish below real water and not being able to hear the swish and bubble of its aquatic world from one’s stance on shore. Morgenstern indicates no actual sound, and the stress marks wait for a reader to come along and give them meaning. The scansion symbols are variable one can assign any sound or instrument to them and all that remains constant is the pattern of stress they impart. It is the fish’s heart beating, an ambient underwater soundscape, a song hummed through puckered lips, and ultimately, with no words to anchor the symbols, no sound at all. Crescendo, diminuendo, terraced dynamics. If the macrons go thump in the night, and the breves consign a consonantal thm to their repertoire, then we get this percussive berceuse: thump-thm-thm-thump-thump-thm-thm-thm-thm-thump-thump-thump-thm-thm-thm-thm and so on. The scansion marks split the poem into one of sound and one of shape.Ī song at night might be a lullaby. How wonderful to turn something consigned to the paper oceans of Classics scholars into a watermark of whimsy. The poem consists of alternating lines of macrons and breves, the marks of scansion in Latin and Greek poetry, reimagined as both the shimmering scales of a sleeping fish and musical notations. The title translates to “Fish’s Nightsong”. Christian Morgenstern’s “Fisches Nachtgesang” is a piscine paradox: a concrete poem rendered in abstract shapes, a sound poem with no discernable sounds, a foreign-language poem that needs no translation, a metrical poem consisting of nothing but metrics that many on Eratosphere will no doubt never identify as a metrical poem, or even a poem at all.
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