Vocalist.org archive


From:  Joel Figen <natural@w...>
Date:  Sun Aug 27, 2000  2:13 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist-temporary] ATTN German Speakers -- Please Help!!


At 11:29 AM 08/26/2000 -0700,
>>"Nacht grant Glas die Zeiten stehn"
>---Night (can't find granen or grant) the times stand
>>
>>"Fluestern plaetschert Blueten gehren Duefte spritzen Schauer stuerzen Winde
>>schnellen prellen schwellen Tuecher reissen Fallen schrickt in tiefe Nacht."
>---Whispers splash, Blooms (gehren?), Odors splash, Shivers fall, Winds speed

I can swear I've seen words related to gehren - look up
*begehren or *begehrig and so on - maybe even look up words
with *gier instead of *gehr - if you find enough cognates, you
can sometimes get clues as to meaning. try various prefixes and
I think something will turn up - I'd try the same sort of thing
with *gran... and *grän - I'd do it myself but I don't own a
german dictionary this decade.

(Every word with a prefix was once used without the prefix, if
you go back far enough. Sometimes it's still possible to drop
them under poetic license. In some cases the unprefixed form
may carry connotations of dialect or archaic usage - that's
something a native speaker would know that I don't.)

The fact that nouns are capitalized in German acts as a kind of
punctuation in something like this - I think it's reasonable to
parse "schnellen" "prellen" and "schwellen" all as predicates of
"Winde" - so we have a series of very short clauses - or simple
sentences - one of them has a single subject applied to 3 verbs
- I'd keep the tense and number invariant in translation... and
use a lot of commas in the first draft :) Remember that an
infinitive used as a noun is equivalent to an -ing form in
English: "Whispering splashes" - that's syntactically ambiguous
in English - but maybe the meaning will be clear in the sequence
of short sentences - or maybe "whispers splash" would be
preferable - it will all be clear soon - I think there's a
structure here. It feels to me like a complete poem, describing
a moment of desolate longing for someone who has gone away.

Possibly the title "Begegnung" (if I'm remembering it right from
another post) suggests a brief encounter of an amorous nature,
and the feeling of loss afterward. I'm reminded of a short poem
by Richard Brautigan that describes feelings like this in someone
else, and ends with the line, "I'm just glad it's you this time,
babe, and not me."




emusic.com