The Gallows Songs

<b>A collection of dazzling, playful, and linguistically inventive poetry by one of Germany''s finest writers, in a classic translation that honors the author''s amazing verbal acrobatics.</b><br><br>Christian Morgenstern’s <i>The Gallows Songs</i> are some of the most delightful and imaginative creations of twentieth-century German poetry. Composed originally after an outing Morgenstern took with his friends to Gallows Hill near Potsdam, these lively, puckish poems envision Gallows Hill as a fantastical world populated with fabulous animals, bizarre mechanisms, and some truly unruly punctuation.<br><br>Morgenstern felt that people often used their familiar language unthinkingly, without ever pausing to marvel at the glorious arbitrariness of words. Through poems chock-full of irresistible wordplay and unabashedly exuberant rhymes, he invites us to meditate—but also to med-it-nine and med-i-ten—on all the incidents and accidents of language that make the world of words so vibrant.<br><br>True to the spirit of Morgenstern’s linguistic mischief, Max Knight’s translation sparkles with uncommon wit as it reinvents in English Morgenstern’s daring verbal acrobatics, and is itself a feat of poetic genius.