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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