Vorgetragen:
Der Werwolf

Mark Herman on "Humor and Translation" 
(ATA Chronicle, April '95, p. 26) 

Can word play be translated from one language into another?...   'Der Werwolf', in which the title character asks a ... schoolmaster to grammatically decline him.  The result is a sendup of German case endings, in which, to achieve parallelism, the archaic 'wes' is substituted for modern 'wessen': Der Werwolf, des Weswolfs, dem Wemwolf, den Wenwolf [The who-wolf, the whose-wolf's, to the whom-wolf, the whom-wolf].  Alex Gross' translation depends on the fact that, while English nouns do not take case endings as in German (other than possessives and plurals), English verbs are conjugated and "were" is a form of "to be."  His corresponding English forms are: Werewolf, Waswolf, Amwolf, Iswolf, Arewolf...
 
 

THE WEREWOLF 

A Werewolf, troubled by his name, 
Left wife and brood one night and came 
To a hidden graveyard to enlist 
The aid of a long-dead philologist. 

"Oh sage, wake up, please don't berate me," 
He howled sadly, "Just conjugate me." 
The seer arose a bit unsteady 
Yawned twice, wheezed once, and then was ready. 

"Well, `Werewolf' is your plural past, 
While `Waswolf' is singularly cast: 
There's `Amwolf' too, the present tense, 
And `Iswolf,' `Arewolf' in this same sense." 

"I know that--I'm no mental cripple-- 
The future form and participle 
Are what I crave," the beast replied. 
The scholar paused--again he tried: 

"A `Will-be-wolf?' It's just too long: 
`Shall-be-wolf?' `Has-been-wolf?' Utterly wrong! 
Such words are wounds beyond all suture-- 
I'm sorry, but you have no future." 

The Werewolf knew better--his sons still slept 
At home, and homewards now he crept, 
Happy, humble, without apology 
For such folly of philology. 
 

[This translation is Copyright ©1957 & 1989 
by Alexander Gross.]

 

THE BANSHEE (An Approach) 

One night, a banshee slunk away 
from mate and child, and in the gloom 
went to a village teacher's tomb, 
requesting him: "Inflect me, pray." 

The village teacher climbed up straight 
upon his grave stone with its plate 
and to the apparition said 
who meekly knelt before the dead: 

"The banSHEE, in the subject's place; 
the banHERS, the possessive case. 
The banHER, next, is what they call 
objective case--and that is all." 

The banshee marveled at the cases 
and writhed with pleasure, making faces, 
but said: "You did not add, so far, 
the plural to the singular!" 

The teacher, though, admitted then 
that this was not within his ken. 
"While bans are frequent", he advised, 
"A she cannot be pluralized." 

The banshee, rising clammily, 
wailed: "What about my family?" 
Then, being not a learned creature, 
said humbly "Thanks" and left the teacher. 

[Translation by Max Knight]
 
  • Some of Goethe's enlightening thoughts on Translation and Literary Adaptations can be found in Other Voices 2.2 , the (e)Journal of Cultural Criticism.