Tag Archives: Artun Ak
U-U-U: Christian Morgenstern’s “The Gallows Songs,” translated from German by Max Knight
One way to understand this project, then, is a childlike, though not childish, attack on an ossified adult language with its boredom and sterility (“call it infantile vendetta [Kinder-Rache] on life’s deeply serious aim,” to quote the titular poem [44]). By following puns to their ends or dead ends, letting rhymes and rhythms take language wherever it may go, Morgenstern injects an originary vitality into linguistic structures that have forgotten those other paths they could have taken.
Schablonen: Fatma Aydemir’s “Djinns,” Translated from German by Jon Cho-Polizzi
More than two years after its publication, Aydemir’s page-turner is still so popular and beloved among critics and readers alike that it gives shopkeepers grief about potentially lost business. Given this state of affairs, I would like to take Jon Cho-Polizzi’s admirably seamless and culturally cognizant English translation of this indubitably important book — according to him, “one of the definitive novels of our generation” (“Translator’s Introduction,” xvi) — as an occasion to work through some of my quandaries about and around the work.
Ginster, the Critical Idiot? Siegfried Kracauer’s “Ginster,” translated from German by Carl Skoggard
One does not think of fiction when one hears of Siegfried Kracauer, which is a shame. Most Americans who know of the man are acquainted with the two books on cinema he produced after escaping Nazi Europe for New York: the highly influential “From Caligari to Hitler” (1947) and the tome that is “Theory of Film” (1960). But Kracauer also wrote two novels, “Ginster” (1928) and “Georg” (1973, posthumous), and a handful of novellas and short stories, all of which have so far evaded the readerly radar on this side of the Atlantic.