Steve Schwartz wrote:

>Wow!  Well, I'm not a native German speaker, so I'm on really shaky
>ground speaking about German poetry.  I admit that I get mainly images
>from German poems, rather than the music.  The images seem sharper than
>in most German poetry, perhaps because the poems are translations from the
>Chinese (another language I don't speak).  I'd be interested to know (since
>I thought enough of them to do a "literary" translation of them) what makes
>them so bad in your eyes.

The whole stuff is translated and you can notice it.  The language is dry
and old-fashioned, all poems are too elaborate.  Bethge wants to be poetic
but it all sounds (without the music!) banal and proselike.  Compare this
with the brevity and density of Brecht's "East-Asian" poetry and you know
what I mean.  (And Mahler's three last verses show that he was a composer
and no poet.)

Robert Peters
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