Das aesthetische Wiesel (The Aesthetic Weasel)

German Original (1905) Nachdichtung Literal Translation

Ein Wiesel A weasel A weasel
saß auf einem Kiesel put some teasel sat on a pebble
inmitten Bachgeriesel. on top of an easel. in the midst of a brook's ripple.

Wißt ihr, On whose Do you

weshalb? behalf? know why?

Das Mondkalb The moon calf1 The moon calf

verriet es mir had news divulged it to me
im stillen: at some time: surreptitiously:

Das raffinier- The liter- The art-

te Tier rate critter ful animal
tats um des Reimes willen. did it just for the rhyme. did it for rhyme's sake.
_______________ _______________
1
Source: Ibid. p42 See comment 3!

Comments:
1. The first three lines of the German original describe an animal that has put itself in an
implausible situation "for rhyme's sake". I don't see any great significance, per se, in it being
a weasel: Wiesel simply rhymes with two words in German that allowed Morgenstern to
achieve his purpose. In English, "weasel" also rhymes with two words that can be used for
the opening three-liner, but to me, the resulting situation is much more forced—how many
people know what teasel actually is? I could not come up with any other rhymes involving a
weasel and would have preferred to use a different animal altogether, for example, "A rat/sat
on a mat/wearing a hat". But I did not have the nerve to do that—it would have required
changing the title to "The Aesthetic Rat", which would have gotten me farther away from the
original than I'm prepared to tolerate right now.

2. In the original, lines 4, 7, 9, and 10 all end in the same rhyme (without sharing an apparent
meter). I could not find any satisfactory way of mirroring this in my translation. All I could
manage was to have lines 4 and 7 rhyme and, separately, lines 9 and 10. Believe me, this was
difficult enough, given that these lines had to be very short (you would lose the cheekiness of
the German original otherwise)—if you ever try your hand at a rhyming poem, you will
notice that it becomes the more difficult the shorter the lines are because you are given less
and less slack.

3. I thought initially that the moon calf was another one of Morgenstern's invented animals,
only to learn, after a little research, that the term "moon calf" has existed both in German and
English long before Morgenstern's time. In the narrow sense, it used to refer to a calf with
birth defects, which were attributed to the influence of the moon. In the broader sense, it
could refer to any misshapen creature (see, for example, The Tempest III.2, where the
deformed Caliban is called "moon calf"). Which is not to say that Morgenstern's moon calf is
of the traditional kind. It may well be that he found the name intriguing and treated the
animal as yet another mythical creature in his invented bestiarium. His use of the definite
article suggests as much: There is only one moon calf, and it apparently has access to
privileged knowledge about the aesthetic impulses of forest animals.

Source: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ujf/blog/Morgenstern_poems.html

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Source: Khwahish Hai Namumkin Kee. Marcel Reich-Ranicki Dvara Chayanit German Kavitayen