#265. SMILING SWEETLY LIKE A WELL-FED BABY.  Worst customer service story ever:  I was working in a foreign-language bookshop in Cambridge, and a woman came in and told me she was looking for a gift and wanted to have something humorous in German.  I told her jokingly this was a contradiction in terms.  Bad call: she scowled.  I brought her hastily to the store manager, the best-read person in human history.  She told him she wanted something humorous in German.  He snorted.  A short while later, while the woman was standing at the cash register, a coworker came out and said, “I hear some lady came in here looking for something funny in German.  That’s a laugh.”  At which point the frowning customer finally said, “Alright, alright,” and burst out laughing.  It was a narrow escape.

     BUT.  For all that, we did not fail the lady.  She left carrying an edition of the Galgenlieder, a book of quite wonderfully funny poems by the late nineteenth-century writer Christian Morgenstern.  Morgenstern is discussed at great and serious length in studies of German literature; his familiarity with the work of Nietzsche, Heine and Goethe is extolled; he is seen as a step away from Romanticism and into Modernism, even as a precursor of Dadaism.  Because he is German, and so are his commentators, his work is praised for “exploring both the absurdity of life and the complex human condition.”  

      Nowhere in the little that is written on Morgenstern in English could I find any suggestion that writing a book of giggle-inducing and imaginative poems—that committing the aberrant act of producing “something humorous in German”—might be an entirely sufficient accomplishment, with no ballast of philosophical weight necessary.  He has been praised as his work “offers a form of existential release from the seriousness of life.”  Oh—you mean he’s funny?

The seagulls by their looks suggest

that Emma is their name;

they wear a white and fluffy vest

and are the hunter’s game.

I never shoot a seagull dead;

their life I do not take.

I like to feed them gingerbread

and bits of raisin cake.

O human, you will never fly

the way the seagulls do;

but if your name is Emma, why,

be glad they look like you.

       Okay, yes, there can an absurd streak in Morgenstern’s joking, and in his first series, the Galgenlieder, or Gallows Songs, a mordant streak as well.  Some mild air of uncertainty sometimes colors the sky above them.  Reading them, I was reminded of what Seamus Heaney wrote of Stevie Smith’s poems: “You don’t feel that the top of your head has been taken off.  Rather, you have been persuaded to keep your head at all costs.”  Morgenstern’s tone is a kind of becalmed hilarity.

In the railroad station, never built for her,

walks a hen

to and fro.

Where, where did the station master go?

Will not men

harm the hen?

Let’s hope not.  Let’s candidly aver

that our sympathy she still enjoys,

even in this place, where she annoys.

      Recently reissued by New York Review Books, one of the great pleasures of reading The Gallows Songs is in scanning and savoring Max Knight’s inspired translations, which so nicely mimic the bounce and rhymes of the originals; they are funny themselves, rather than reproductions of something funny.  There is some echo of Belloc in them, and, in Morgenstern’s zoomorphic flights, the Hawkenchick, or the Nightrogue and the Sevenswine, something finely Learical.  Korf, one of Morgenstern’s recurring characters, has this attributed to him:

Korf invents a novel kind of joke

which won’t take effect for many hours.

Everyone is bored when first he hears it.

But he will, as though a fuse were burning,

suddenly wake in bed at night-time,

smiling sweetly like a well-fed baby.

     The Gallows Songs, Christian Morgenstern and Max Knight together, are for me none of the boredom, all of the bed and baby.  Bless them.