Witte Volder / Pangur Bán (original) (raw)

Singing Print, Reading Song: Navigating Voice and Writing in Herder's Volkslieder

The German Quarterly, 2018

How can one read song? reading is silent, introspective, singular; singing is audible , performative, plural. in his folksong collections, Johann Gottfried Herder acknowledges this dualism and favors song. yet he asks his readers to navigate the divide nonetheless-to read song. this article seeks to understand the meaning of this apparent contradiction by investigating the evidence at the scene of reading. Placing Herder's Volkslieder within a social history of reading can illuminate why he put so much energy into philosophically playing with this boundary. Within this context, the elisions and rough metrical edges of his folk poetry served alongside his phonophile's political philosophy to convince his small, elite audience to forsake their book-bound aesthetic to imagine a more songful kind of reading and, perhaps, to embrace a more natural and musical mode of existence. this imaginative exercise stands in contrast to the artifice of the subsequent history of the German folksong, whose poets, collectors, and composers who presented their readers with a landscaped Volksliedideal carefully crafted to appear natural. this article, then, seeks to embrace the strangeness of the historical distance between Herder's intellectual landscape and our own. Herder is often discussed as a father figure for modern disciplines like linguistics, hermeneutics, and anthropology. His folksong collections especially have long been considered key documents in the history of ethnomusicology (Bohlman, World Music 23-46). and yet-as Philip Bohlman and George Williamson have noted-the disciplinary boundaries within which Herder's work developed and circulated were different from our own today, with theological concerns often shaping his approach to music and poetry (Bohlman, Song 1-19, and Williamson 19-71). Nowhere is this mélange more apparent than in his collections of Volkslieder published in 1778 and 1779. this was not Herder's first foray into folksong collecting ; in 1773, he had published a collection of Alte Volkslieder prefaced with a call to collect and therefore rescue the fading voices of the German Volk. He writes, "also bliebe nur noch eins, und dem anschein nach das Geringschät-zigste übrig, [dass man] sich etwa noch nach den Resten der Volkslieder, wie sie jetzt leben, oder wie sie vor wenigerer zeit, uns noch verständlich, lebten, umthue und zusehe und sammle" (7). it is strange, then, to see the 1778 volume of Volks-lieder distance itself from such ethnographic efforts. this volume does not open with a formal introduction; rather, it has a brief anthology of "zeugnisse über 377 The German Quarterly 91.4 (fall 2018)

Herder's Kritische Wälder: A Vegetal Topography of Critique

Literatur für Leser. Special Issue "Das literarische Leben der Pflanzen: Poetiken des Botanischen." Edited by Joela Jacobs & Isabel Kranz, 2019

Johann Gottfried Herder’s Kritische Wälder [Critical Forests] capture the project of literary critique in an apparent oxymoron. The title of the essay compilation (containing altogether four diminutive forests or Wäldchen) features vegetative life [Wälder] alongside discourse [Kritik], which, in the eighteenth century as much as today, is generally regarded as the opposite of what is “natural.” Against readings that understand Herder’s vegetal poetological metaphors as essentialist “fictions” of immediate cultural production, I argue that Herder’s Kritische Wälder (1769) enact a meta-theory of literary criticism as network, that is modeled after the organizational form of the forest. Herder’s notion of Kritische Wälder challenges the paradigm of the critic as “weeder” prevalent in eighteenth-century hermeneutics, whose task it is to cultivate a critical literary discourse through the removal of improper readings. The Wälder, in contrast, envision Kritik as a material cycle of productive overgrowth, accumulation, and decay, Zufall being the condition of its vitality. Taking Herder’s model of Kritik as a central case in point, my reading relates the shift from philological to speculative criticism around 1800 to concurrent developments in Forstbotanik. I show how Herder responds to central questions of the Forstbotanik of his era, suggesting, as he does, that forests are functioning systems. On a different level, my argument also contributes to the histories of genius and the organic work of art, illustrating intersubjective and materialist facets of the concepts. I make my argument, first, by situating Herder’s Kritische Wälder in the context of visions of the proper forest in eighteenth-century Forstbotanik and hermeneutics and, second, by highlighting the concrete composition of Herder’s text as an accumulation and recycling of discarded materials from former projects.

Banat Su`ad: Translation and Introduction

A translation and introduction to Banat Su`ad, a poem known as the Burda poem, composed by Ka`b bin Zuhayr, a contemporary of the prophet Muhammad. Ka`b, the son of Zuhayr ibn abi Sulma, the author of one of the Mu`allaqat, is said to have presented this poem to Muhammad as a peace offering and to have received Muhammad's Burda or cloak in return.

CYDER: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS (1708)

Cyder, 2019

This is a full scholarly edition of John Philips's influential georgic poem Cyder (1708), with a particular emphasis on the political, historical and agricultural themes of the poem. The editors are John Goodridge (Emeritus Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University) and Juan Christian Pellicer (Professor of English, University of Oslo).

Stone Work ("Klipwerk" from Nuwe verse/New verse 1954, NP van Wyk Louw)

Stonework ["Klipwerk" - a long enigmatic poem in short stone slivers] , 2023

[NOTE: Two files are attached, see second line under title and click on arrow there: Translation A (with introductory notes, by myself, and correct layout as in original Afrikaans long poem), and Translation B (with editorial input from poet Basil du Toit, not with spread-eagled layout as in original, due to writer's fatigue)] A unicum in the work of NP van Wyk Louw (1906-1970), leading poet of the the first half of the twentieth century is "Klipwerk" [Stone Work], a poem set in the Roggeveld ("Rye lands") where the poet spent the first fourteen years of his life. This is a deserted and etremely dry, isolated mountainous area within the northeast of what was known as the Cape Province in the inner regions of the country - originally the home of the /Xam, the nomadic first people of South Africa. Louw's poetic oeuvre is generally perceived as complex and highly philosophical, from his confessionial debut collection to his ultimate late work (Tristia,1962). Thus "Stone Song"/"Klipwerk" stands at a strange remove to the rest of his work, although probably forming the vital organic underpinning for the nature of his more complex poetry. As such it deserves fresh attention. I translated the poem in the hope to increase understanding thereof. Although concrete and seemingly straightforward, the poem draws on Louw's close and intimate knowlege of the Nama Karoo biome of the Roggeveld area, and its inhabitants, both human and animal. On the surface basic emotions, tensions, and perceptions are in the focus, viewed through an ecological lens. Humour, irony, acute observation of humanity, nature and their interaction, all come into play in the setting for long lives lived in that isolated area by farm workers (descendants of the /Xam), villagers i(n the hamlet of Sutherland) and a farming families alike. This poem is also central to the oeuvre of novelist-historian Karel Schoeman, whose 1986 photo-book Die wêreld van die digter [The world of the poet] offers a vivid entry into this world. Translation is always a futile kicking against the wind of perfection...We can but attempt to offer a glimpse into another world. Another culture, another language, another poet, whose ashes now blows far away upon the deserted Roggeveld plateau...