Sunday, January 17, 2010

German Poetry in color

... and no, not Goethe ...

Farben
Vor allem Schwarz und Weiß und Grau
vergesse ich manchmal
die bunten Farben in meinem Leben:
Du bist für mich
weder Schwarz nor Weiß
sondern Rot und Blau und Gelb und Grün
meine Lust und Freude


rev: it occurred to me that most of my friends don't speak German, so a translation is in order:
With all of the Black and White and Grey,
at times I forget
the brilliant Colors in my Life:
You are for me
neither Black nor White
but rather Red and Blue and Yellow and Green,
my Passion and Joy

My friend The Author enjoys poetry; I braved the elements of authorship & posted something I wrote on her blog. to wit:

The only thing vaguely like poetry that I’ve written in my adult, post-college life was in German.
We do not, and will certainly not, even consider what spewed forth from my pen during those heady days in Arnold Hall dating one of the ... uh, no, the greatest asinine Idiot I've ever given my affections to. Boy, and that's some epitaph. What a waste of paper that relationship was.

This is why one should clean out the car regularly, besides achieving the status of mobile microbiological experiment station. One might leave bits of paper with incriminating doodles indiscriminately about a semi-public space.

My mother-in-law saw a small bit of such paper in my car. My heart sunk, as she read it. Her comment was along the lines of “it looks like something written to a lover”.

I responded, with forced courage, “I wrote it for Mr.Gopher” (who at the time of maternal discovery was my husband, although he was my lover at the time I wrote it).

I’m not sure if the surprise was due to the fact that I wrote it, or that I wrote it for her son. Although, I suppose, the surprise might simply have been that I wrote anything in German.

And, strangely enough, I didn't feel embarrassed, when I contemplated sharing it on The Author's blog. This is strange since I’m horribly, mortally embarrassed every time I think about asking for someone’s opinion on the prose fiction that I wrote. Perhaps this is simply too short to be able to be embarrassed.

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