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Michael Gilleland over at Laudator Temporis Acti highlights a poem by Hugo Wolf, showing its German and, ultimately, its Spanish origins. It’s interesting to see the differences in tone and cadence for the verse in each language.
Some of the best writing seems to come from British obituaries. Take this obit of Count Gottfried von Bismarck from the Telegraph.
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.
When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous “glamour” charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.
That’s just a sample. Read the whole thing for the literary value if you like. You can’t make this stuff up. (Via)
Yesterday I received a copy of Michael Drout’s Beowulf Aloud, a 3-CD set of his dramatic reading of the epic poem in its original language. I added the whole thing to my iTunes/iPod collection this morning, and hope to have some time to listen to it this weekend.
This morning I sampled the lecture and a few tracks of the poem. Although I can’t speak or read Anglo-Saxon, I’ve dabbled in it from time to time and have tried to pick up some sense of it by reading the poem itself. After listening to Beowulf in Old English for even just a few minutes, I’ve gotten some feeling for the original rhyme and rhythm, which even the best translations can’t recreate completely. Maybe I’ll post a few more comments on Beowulf Aloud after I’ve heard the whole thing.