Christian Morgenstern’s The Gallows Songs are some of the most delightful and imaginative creations of twentieth-century German poetry. Composed originally after an outing Morgenstern took with his friends to Gallows Hill near Potsdam, these lively, puckish poems envision Gallows Hill as a fantastical world populated with fabulous animals, bizarre mechanisms, and some truly unruly punctuation.
Morgenstern felt that people often used their familiar language unthinkingly, without ever pausing to marvel at the glorious arbitrariness of words. Through poems chock-full of irresistible wordplay and unabashedly exuberant rhymes, he invites us to meditate—but also to med-it-nine and med-i-ten—on all the incidents and accidents of language that make the world of words so vibrant.
True to the spirit of Morgenstern’s linguistic mischief, Max Knight’s translation sparkles with uncommon wit as it reinvents in English Morgenstern’s daring verbal acrobatics, and is itself a feat of poetic genius.
