The boy celebrated his 2nd birthday on the 29th. Well, I say 'celebrated', more of a bewildered acceptance of all the attention, gifts etc. It must have been even more confusing coming after what must have seemed a very similar day 72 hours earlier.

Here he is on Boxing Day at Seaford (Sussex) - where he concerned himself with the more familiar tasks of popping bladderwrack, cooing at the odd surface of slabs of cuttlefish, and engaging in the hermetic process by which three particular stones are chosen.

In honour of his second birthday, I have reworked our web album of him, to a single set of 30-odd photos from his first two years - family and friends may be interested...

The launch of Frances Leviston's first full collection in Sheffield last night was a fun and affectionate affair. The book itself is remarkable - lucid, intelligent and beautiful. How fantastic, then, that it has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize.

Buy it, if you haven't already done so.

As I kept mentioning line breaks in creative writing classes, someone asked me how these worked (Hallelujah! Or, possibly, 'Urk!'). So I sat down to dash off a quick one-page document on the topic. Six pages later, I decided to call a halt to the insanity.

The question is not really about line breaks at all, it seems to me. The question is: What is a Line of Poetry? I ended up pontificating under a few possible headings. I won't bore you with anything but the headings. Yet.

1. A line of poetry is a unit of sense
2. A line of poetry is a musical phrase
3. A line of poetry is an utterance
4. A line of poetry is a single card, dealt face-up
5. A line of poetry is a visual effect

Each poet favours a particular combination of these, perhaps. Perhaps the perfect line is the one which combines all of them. Poems can be even more interesting when they play with these ideas.

...but I have started messing around on Facebook.

I had a few wet days at the end of my stay in Wales, but nothing too bad. Then we went for a family holiday on the Suffolk coast at Dunwich (I do like an article which begins with a brusque "There's a lot of nonsense talked about..."), where the weather was mostly gorgeous. Then, for a few days, we seemed to dodge the downpours in and to the East of The Dukeries. Clearly I am a repellant to poor weather, like something rubberised. Those seeking a cool but summery Summer are advised to cluster around me.

A woman in Newark told us: "We're waiting to be flooded. Last time it happened, it was those buggers in Nottingham. They've got these fancy flood gates and, when it was over for them, they opened them too fast and we got this surge. It was probably deliberate," she added, darkly.

I had to go home for a couple of days - missing my partner and son. He was delighted to see me, but I suspected that my lovely partner had been relishing a break of her own, interrupted by my return. Harumph.

Alongside my poetry, I have been trying to break the back of my PhD thesis out here. It's one of those pieces of academic writing (an attempt to claim that translated poems have generic characteristics, and to name those characteristics) which cries out for pompous neologisms. I thought I had invented some good 'uns - paraphor and outerrupt for example. Once home, though, I checked them on the Web and discovered - inevitably - that they have all been used before in other contexts.

Keener than before, therefore, to have some minimal access to the Internet, I discovered that nearby Caernarfon has a wireless access cloud in Castle Square. I shall be visiting there soon - and uploading these journal entries when I do.

Being a slow producer of poems, I have some particular difficulties when trying to 'force' a number loose, as I am at the moment. I am used to composing for a long time (weeks, months) in my head, before I start drafting on the page, by which point the language, content and phrasing is usually set and fairly well-honed. The drafting mainly takes care of technical matters - sequencing, linebreaks and so on.

But here, I am forcing myself to start writing once I have a couple of lines. The trouble is,'a couple of lines' is a 'line pair' - that is, I know they belong together, and represent either an opening, a close, or a volta in a poem, such is my (possibly Asperger-y) method of making poems - and I am unused to entering the drafting process with no idea where the pair belongs, or what will surround it. So I currently have half-a-dozen part-drafts in which the line pairs which founded the poem move like yo-yos from the top to the bottom to the middle of the poem.

Does the following pair sound like an opening, a volta or a close, for example?

When next you pass through beeches, think:
These are old lovers; this how I left them.

I have no idea.

Watching the birdlife here is astonishing. Coffee, tobacco, a canvas chair - hours go by, when I should be working. Today I saw...er....

(I should, before making any statements about wildlife, relate the following tale: I was sitting in a Sheffield garden with my partner a couple of years ago. The garden adjoined woodland. It was a pleasantly warm afternoon. The following dialogue ensued:

Her: Oh, listen! A woodpecker! Can you hear it?
Me : Er...no.
Her: There it is again! Did you hear it that time?
Me : No.
Her: You must have done. (Suspiciously) What exactly are you listening for?
Me : HahahaHAha?

So. Today I was watching tree-creepers. Possibly.

The pathetic nature of the last entry (after months of silence) made me feel I should do something more towards this Journal.

I'm in Wales for a month, alone, working on my poetry and my recently-ignored PhD. I have a tiny caravan, a pitch among the trees and - this is significant - no Internet connection (in fact, no mobile coverage either. Hm.) I did wonder how I would have felt in the unlikely event that, when I turned this laptop on a few minutes ago, I had received a message saying something like: Welcome to ForestNet, the Forestry Commission's Wireless Cloud... - frankly, I would have packed up and gone home.

As usual, a few months of teaching have left everything covered in dust, including this (ludicrous word in the circumstances) 'Journal', and my brain. I am now going away for a few weeks to do some writing in Beddgelert Forest in Wales.

Leaving behind the fruits of my students' labours at http://www.keelewriting.net/

We spent a few days in Lübeck in the run-up to Christmas. It's a place I used to visit occasionally when I lived in Hamburg, and have been back there a couple of times since. On this visit, showing my partner (and baby) around, I remembered how a visit a couple of years ago - and especially the Marienkirche - had helped to break a fallow period in the writing of Scattering Eva (the poem).

On that occasion, after looking around the various churches and their exhibitions about rebuilding after the 1942 Palm Sunday Bombing Raid, the fallen bells (click on the thumbnail for a selection of photos from Flickr) in the Marienkirche and the partly-restored statuary had me drafting a poem fairly rapidly. I imagined it as a single poem, but it was quickly absorbed into the longer piece - not quite a centrepiece, but some sort of turn-point, as if describing a reflective day-trip away from Hamburg, where the main action of the longer poem is set.

I have been interested in the cautious but growing debate in Germany in recent years about the balance of perpetrator and victim, complicity and resistance during the Second World War. Having exercised self-critique for so long - and so thoroughly - Germans are talking about other aspects of their experience of the period and testing out different ways of discussing and portraying events (the film Downfall is an example - earlier productions such as Heimat also touched on this; and there are historians re-examining Dresden, as well as the idea that Hitler's final act of intended annihilation was against 'his own' people. These discussions create more controversy in Germany, perhaps, than outside it).

There is a small memorial stone in Lübeck to the Lübeck Church-Martyrs (I can't find any decent English sites - there is a German Wikipedia entry here). The stone is in German and English. It commemorates the arrest and execution of three Catholic churchmen and one Evangelical pastor - ostensibly for breaking the wireless laws and undermining morale. They had been active in exchanging information and ideas on the progress and morality of the war with other churches and individuals and had formed some sort of an anti-war movement. Interestingly, the Palm Sunday 1942 destruction of Lübeck - and their churches - had given their thinking a powerful and somewhat primitive religious impetus (of the 'sign from God' type).

What intrigued me in particular, though, was a phrase in the translation, in which the 'justice' meted out by the Nazis on the Churchmen (they were tried and guillotined in Hamburg in 1943) is described in the German as 'wild' and in the English as 'arbitrary'. 'Arbitrary' doesn't seem to carry the force of the idea to an English reader - perhaps it does to a German; and yet we also have the idea of 'wild justice' (as in Revenge Tragedy), which is something else entirely - something comprehensible. It is one of those odd moebius strips which translation sometimes produces.

So, I think, 'there's a poem in that'. But I don't want to write poems on those themes - not for a while, perhaps never again. And so this long entry which begins with What I Did On My Holidays ends with a whimper. Oh, except for the original poem mentioned above:

Lübeck

Palm Sunday, Lübeck. Christ has taken
Jerusalem, the burghers settle at oak tables.
Europe capers through its Todestanz.

This night, a little Gehenna will be tipped,
a little late, down the white throats
of Petri, Maria, Michel. The bells will fall

to lie soft-buckled in pits of shattered tiles.
Here's the soot-stained Christ of the Limbless,
of the Torso, and the Helpless Hand. Here's Mary,

clutching a stone book, the clasps blown off.
Whatever word it held will never drift
from the gutted roofs.

*

In the breakfast-room
the ladies are complaining of little sleep.

The men who melted in the East
watch from mantlepieces.
Broad shoulders. Level gazes.

They jostle there like gables
in a town of bankrupt merchants.

*

Pastor Bärbel, between organ phrases,
modulates Iraq. She drips a little Goethe,
Freud, the marginalia of a mediaevalist:

Let there be no stone for the German dead.
No carved name for a finger to trace.
The dead lie together in the far homeland.
Once something has bloomed, it can never end.

Naja.

Nathaniel is 1 today. Yay!

From little jaundiced scrap to very active proto-Lad in just 12 months.


Shortly after coming home a year ago.



And now.


Lots more photos of him through the year at The Nathaniel Site.

I learnt to drive this year. However, I don't seem to have got around to actually taking the test, despite the fact that I now do most of the driving, taking advantage of the slightly absurd UK law that with L-Plates and a real driver next to you, you can effectively drive as much as you like.

So why the procrastination? Well, poets don't drive, as is well-known, but that's not it. No, it's because simply by learning how to drive, I have finally laid a particular fear to rest. It goes like this:

I have always feared that when the critical moment came (I imagine it having a poetry-related context; perhaps...er... Dr. Evil has stolen my £100 cheque for a third-placed poem in the Joint Cheshire Libraries Poetry Competition to add to his world domination fund) - as I say, when the moment came when I had to run into the city street, waving my arms then dragging some luckless driver from his seat, I really didn't want to have to slide meekly into the passenger seat whilst asking my glamorous female sidekick to follow Dr. Evil at high speed.

Yes, what I have acquired this year is the ability to commandeer someone else's car. Passing a test scarcely seems necessary.

My partner reveals to me that whenever I steal a bit of food from our child's plate (whether jokingly or because he has lots to spare), she is suffused with an irrational rage which she feels only just able to suppress. As a psychologist, she finds this interesting and assumes it must be innate.

I test it out, and sure enough, on stealing a mushroom from his well-ladened bowl, she blanches and flashes me a look which is fairly disturbing. I mock the idea that we should take such things seriously, but she is unmoved - something so primal must be respected, she claims, and no, we have not 'moved on' simply because we no longer are squatting on the floor of a cave.

So, I say, when I trudge back from Aldi on a foggy evening carrying fresh bleeding chunks of grocery and enter the cave, you feel an overwhelming urge to present yourself on all fours on the kitchen floor?

Apparently not.

I have just emerged from the vortex of some undergraduate essay marking (literary theory). I suffer what I can only describe as moral-emotional agonies before, during and after the process - concerned to be both fair and encouraging; worried that I am too easily swayed by glib-but-fluent writing over stodgier but, perhaps, more content-rich work; a simultaneous fear that the borderline Fail I give is a) too harsh and b) too generous to answer for in an imagined court.

One thing which always gives me a hollow laugh, though. Feminism is largely dead for the current undergraduate age-group and - in tutorial/seminar discussion - the three most-expressed opinions from the women are that a) it might have once been 'needed', but now it isn't, b) everyone bangs on about it as if it still relevant and can we stop talking about it now, please and (most worryingly) c) it has 'spoilt' relationships between men and women, or made them more difficult. And yet how often they choose the 'representation of women / feminist critical theory' question for essays, and with what cynicism they rehearse the arguments and sound radical!

A happy accident of a photo...perhaps.

Nathaniel is determined to get at the camera. I topple backwards. A last shot as I fall... The result is suitably gothic, although it was fun at the time.

Mind you, as they say: You never quite know with kids.

Clicking on the thumbnail will give you a larger version.

Roddy Lumsden's VitaminQ - a temple of trivia lists and curious words headlines.

Roddy tests the thesis that bad girls in songs are always called Judy; lists the names of figure-skating moves; turns some excellent Google phrase searches into lists of, say, 'I lost my virginity when...'; and so on.

Waste some time.

Apple have been showing off some planned features of OSX Leopard.

The most astonishing feature is Time Machine, which allows the user to browse back through previous 'states' of his/her computer to find deleted files, entries in address books, purged emails, lost photos etc. The implementation of this idea is as lovely as you'd expect, but it does beg the question: How disorganised are we expected to be? Spotlight (introduced with OSX 'Tiger') allows you to save documents wherever you want to and find them via a system search-and-launch. Time Machine allows similar sloppiness with data over time.

Clearly, I'm harumphing and adjusting my tweeds here, and any moment will start muttering about 8+3 filenames and strict Directory organisation. I sometimes watch how my partner accesses the web resources which she needs regularly. No bookmarking for her - she uses the Google search box every time, putting in keywords and waiting for the drop-down auto-complete to...well...provide her with the equivalent of a bookmark.

As you may have noticed, I have made some changes to this site - essentially as a result of switching from TextPattern to RapidWeaver to manage it.

This may have the result of breaking RSS Feeds (and, indeed, Google searches; it's amazing how many people come in on searches for 'Snuff' and 'Mackie Messer'). Hopefully it will settle down in time. You can pick up the new RSS Feed from the link to the right, or from the URL above.

Where are yer, Adam? Answer yer frigging phone!

I have had this kicking around on various websites for a while now, and keep returning to it. It consists of a late-night message, left (in error) on my answerphone, cut up and set to some audio loops.

The ethics of taking a stranger’s late-night drunken ramblings are appalling, I know, but there was something about the underlying narrative that is fascinating, and I hope I have done some justice to it in the editing (as well as giving it a bit of extra spin.)

Play the file (*.mp3, about 3mb)

The original answerphone message is here – voice.mp3

Transcript of original:

Message received yesterday at 2.18 a.m. ... Where are yer, Adam? Where are yer? ... You’re supposed to be with me, I’m waiting in the Chinese now, where are yer? ... You’ve left us again! ... Dickhead … Where are yer?! ... ‘ve yer gone ‘ome to yer wife, is that ‘er? ... I’m furious … Don’t bother to ring me, because I’m sat here in the Chinese and…I’m sorry but…er…erm…that’s it, it’s over … Yeah, bet yer wife’s listening to this, in’t she? ... Yeah, answer yer friggin’ phone … Dickhead … Where is she? ... Oh you’ve got my…you’ve got my number, so…ring me. Yeah? ... Dickhead

I was discussing an extract from Tennyson’s In Memoriam today with a class of students, and we found ourselves talking about the complex emotions of going to look at a house where you had once lived or with which you had particular emotional associations.

It struck me that hunting down images of former homes on the web (see previous posts) falls between two sensations: the slightly furtive – and sometimes oddly dizzying – experience of approaching a former home, and the rather more settled experience of simply looking at a photograph which you have always possessed. The former has a stalkerish – or at least self-conscious – quality, and something of that remains in the hunting down of photographs in other people’s web collections. On the other hand, it feels free from the fear of discovery.

The Tennyson piece has a middle stanza which elegantly delivers grief, shame and the (impossible) desire for discovery; and the device of burying ‘hold’ within ‘behold’ is beautifully done.

Extract from
In Memoriam A.H.H.

VII.
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand.

A hand that can be clasp’d no more—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but, far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Tennyson

I came across a simple and highly effective piece of Mac freeware today – one that answered an immediate need, was instinctive to use and did the job very well.

Formulate allows you to overlay bits of text onto *.pdf forms – such as application forms. The resulting form/document can be saved and/or printed out. Neatly done and free. There are other tools for editing *.pdfs but none (that I’ve found) which are even cheap.

OK, so you could do the same with a typewriter…but I don’t have a typewriter (and, besides, you would have to scan the original back in if you wanted a digital version of the completed document).

It’s at a very early stage (the author claims that it is version 0.0.1!). There is basic information and a screenshot at the site.

Friend and Hallam colleague Tony Williams (aka Ed Parsons) has started a blog. His first entries are effortlessly stylish musings on Wim Wenders, Arabic poetry in translation etc.. He’ll keep it up, too, if my experience of his output is anything to go by.

So, while I post fuzzy photographs of Places I Have Lived and get excited about pieces of geekery, he will be doing what needs to be done.

My advice? Read a better blog: aye-lass

One odd feature of this odd project is how easy it is to find photographs of the houses/buildings I lived in overseas. My homes in England are proving very elusive. Is it something to do with types of area in which “ex-pats” live? Or something to do with the unphotogenic nature of the streets of identical terrace houses in which I have, almost invariably, lived in when in this country?


I lived on the top floor of this building for a few months in 1998. It is on the southern side of Helsinki centre, on the border between Ullanlinna (<—link to Flickr photos tagged with Ullanlinna) and Eira (<— link to Wikipedia entry)

In this case, it’s certainly true that the availability of an image from the web is related to the nature of the area – I wouldn’t have been living in such a place unless the rent was being paid for me by a company I was doing some work for.

Clicking on the thumbnail will give you a larger version.

We are now into the realms of peripheral vision – I have managed to find two images which show (or almost-show) two of the three buildings I lived in in Hamburg in the mid-/late-80s, caught at the edge of photographs of unrelated matters. William Gibson would surely be proud.


This photograph is one of many from an activism site, recording the stages of a demonstration. The square archway (?) in the building to the left is the entrance to the first flat I lived in when I moved to Hamburg in 1986 – you’ll need to click on the thumbnail to see the larger version.

I have to say, the scene itself is very much how I remember the time.

Another photograph from an activism site – this time the slightly tamer world of cycling activism, cataloguing the blocking of cycle paths.
I lived in two flats in the building to the right – the ground floor front (visible here), and – briefly – the floor above.

Clicking on the thumbnail will give you a larger version, should you wish for such a thing.

The third building from my time in Hamburg is proving elusive. Surprisingly so – the area itself has been much-photographed recently, since the railway goods yards which fronted the entire street have recently been abandoned, leading to many a photoset on Flickr and Hamburg media sources. Somewhere on the edge of a photograph must surely lurk the 5-storey Altbau on the corner of Harkortstrasse and Holtenaustrasse.

OK, it’s all a bit sad, but here’s another one.

During my childhood, we were twice based in a small German town called Iserlohn – from 1967-70 and then again from 1972-76. Unusually, the two houses we occupied during these two ‘tours’ were neighbouring ones – 49 & 51 Dürerstraße.

Perhaps in recognition of the unifying force of my having lived in both, the houses themselves have since been connected, having apparently been converted to a Kindergarten. The piece of architectural frippery on the nearside is a later addition. In converting the houses into one, the entrance has been shifted from front to back – I guess because the steps up to the houses were steep, without space for the creation of a child- or wheelchair-friendly slope. It’s a poor picture, but it follows my self-imposed rules of finding web photos of former homes.

Having lived a total of 7 years in Iserlohn, and formative ones at that, it feels like the closest to a home town that I have.

Aha! Found another one (in fact, No. 3 will be along shortly – how strange that it’s possible to find images of previous houses on the web).

Known by the inhabitants as ‘Squash Court Villas’, here is an image of the house I lived in from shortly after I was born to the age of 5 (1962-67). The house is in an Army enclave called Blenheim Village, in the Dhekelia Cantonment in Cyprus. It appears to be still used as Army housing.

A poem from a visit to Northern Cyprus a few years ago (the first time back since the age of 5). This poem has never met with the approval of editors etc., but I wheel it out at readings:

Postcards from Famagusta

I.
Haloed still, the Saints’ purged faces
Still raimented, if that’s the word
for colours draining down the walls
towards the rubble, weeds and turds.

Map-marked still, the streets you named me
Yes, still extant, if that’s the term
for pockmarked hulks of wired-off houses
where rats and sentries take their turns.

That jetty’s there – the one you swam from.
It still strides out, if that’s the phrase
for broken pilings stripped of planking
within the watchtower’s arc and range.

The hill-road’s open. The uplands offer
cool relief, if that’s the point
of all this earth-art angled Southwards:
Flags and slogans. Threats and taunts.

II.
We’re out of season.
The chairs are cleared.
The pool stays flat.
The lobby’s dull with uncut wax.
A cane-and-cut-glass chandelier
lies outspread like a polypod.
Our mornings flutter by with books.
The barman makes his brasswork glitter
with vinegar and a twist of cloth.

At night, the headlands push out arms
pricked with beads of coastal lights.
They bleed a little of what lies behind:
the South shines orange; the North glows green.
The night we crossed the plain to here,
the hills tracked us like arcing fins.
The driver nodded to the shattering flares
of some wired compound, turned and grinned:
“Your country! Your country, over there!”

Among this year’s Forward Prize winners are Robin Robertson for the excellent Swithering and Sean O’Brien – Best Single Poem for Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright (respectively, my editor and my Doctoral supervisor – good people to have in a good mood, I’d say).

Of the latter, the judges said O’Brien’s poem is “as close as it is possible to come to a perfect poem”. I like the idea (The Last Poem, the End of Poetry etc.) – but it seems to be one of those phrases designed to haunt the recipient. Probably deliberately.

The Best First Collection prize went to Tishani Doshi for Countries of the Body (Aark Arts), beating Hallam Poets colleague Tim Turnbull and his excellent Stranded in Sub-Atomica

Perhaps it’s middle age, but I found myself trying to Google up former homes. Here’s the first result – the house (or its identical neighbour) in which I lived between the ages of 9 and 11 (70-72ish).

The luxuries of neo-Colonial living, eh? It’s all a bit redolent of Gin and Lime and rattan chairs. My father was an officer in the British Army, and this was probably the flashest example of Married Quarters the family enjoyed.

The ‘enclave’ in which the house was located has become an area for evenings out – many of the houses have been converted into restaurants. It is, apparently, considered ‘of historical interest’ because of its former existence as a collection of British Officers’ houses; although I seem to remember that when the Army left Singapore in the early 70s, the houses were snapped up by Chinese businessmen.

Clicking on the thumbnail will give you a larger version.

Just to clarify: this is about nasal snuff, not chewing tobacco or, indeed, pornodeath films

I have been an inveterate and happy smoker for over 25 years, rolling and enjoying 30 cigarettes a day, without any desire to give up.

A few months ago, I was in a pub with some people after a poetry reading in Beverley. One of the company – once a heavy smoker – was taking snuff, and seemed content with the result.

A while ago, I felt like some aromatic rolling tobacco to mix with my usual brand, and so ordered some online from UKTobacco. I thought it would be fun to order a couple of brands of snuff. I had tried it a couple of times, years ago, with the usual result of massive sneezing and puzzlement.

The snuff arrived. I took a couple of pinches of Red Bull. Pleasant sensations in the nose, nice head-clearing effects, and a rather intense nicotine dose. No sneezing. I continued taking it throughout the day, occasionally alternating with the once-ubiquitous Sharrow S.P. 1 brand (Finer ground, musty, a bit sneezier). Lovely.

My cigarette smoking immediately dropped to 2-3 a day. A week later, I was choosing to smoke a cigarette after meals, but could have dropped these last smokes from my day without any trouble. This was not my intention at all. I was on the verge of having accidentally stopped smoking.

Nasal snuff is effectively safe tobacco – and very enjoyable, too. It is a fantastic tobacco alternative, and should be recommended to smokers who enjoy their addiction and the qualities of tobacco. And it can be taken anywhere – I have particularly enjoyed taking snuff in places where smoking has long been banned. I have ordered some more varieties, in the search for a perfect blend of effect and aroma.
There is good information on the SnuffBox website.

Scattering Eva has been shortlisted for a Glenn Dimplex New Writers’ Award in the poetry category.

The awards seem to be structured rather like the Whitbreads – a winner in each category, with an overall winner chosen from the category winners.

Very cheering.

Before moving to Macs a couple of years ago, I was always very fond of a small writing tool called TreePad – a excellent way of keeping everything from fragments and phrases to drafts and completed work alongside notes and feedback. Early drafts of ‘Scattering Eva’ were assembled with the help of TreePad, as well as pieces being subjected to workshops and poetry forums.

I have discovered what might be an even more suitable writing tool for the Mac. Copywrite is described a a ‘project manager for writers of all kinds’ and works particularly well for poetry, not least the sense of progress it provides. Putting my new work and drafts in there cheered me up, in any case…

I have a borderline obsession with the Brecht/Weil song Die Mackie Messer Moritat – the fantastically grisly relish with which German female vocalists deliver it, the seemingly-random exclusion of certain verses, the frankly odd English version by Blitzstein.

The best version, to my mind, is by Ute Lemper and well worth a download from your online music store of choice.

I have a stalled project to do some sort of translation of it, making some sort of of child-scaring ballad, but there is something so powerful about the form and meter of the original that it seems impossible to escape its chime.

Here’s the original lyric, and the best attempt at a faithful song translation by Willet:

Die Moritat von Mackie Messer
Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne
Und die trägt er im Gesicht
Und MacHeath, der hat ein Messer
Doch das Messer sieht man nicht.

Ach, es sind des Haifischs Flossen
Rot, wenn dieser Blut vergießt!
Mackie Messer trägt ‘nen Handschuh
Drauf man keine Untat liest.

An der Themse grünem Wasser
Fallen plötzlich Leute um!
Es ist weder Pest noch Cholera
Doch es heißt: Macheath geht um.

An ‘nem schönen blauen Sonntag
Liegt ein toter Mann am Strand
Und ein Mensch geht um die Ecke
Den man Mackie Messer nannt.

Und Schmul Meier bleibt verschwunden
wie so mancher reiche Mann
Und sein Geld hat Mackie Messer
Dem man nichts beweisen kann.

Jenny Towler ward gefunden
Mit ‘nem Messer in der Brust
Und am Kai geht Mackie Messer
Der von allem nichts gewußt.

Wo ist Alfons Glite, der Fuhrherr?
Kommt das je ans Sonnenlicht?
Wer es immer wissen könnte –
Mackie Messer weiß es nicht.

Und das große Feuer in Soho
Sieben Kinder und ein Greis
In der Menge Mackie Messer, den
Man nicht fragt und der nix weiß.

Und die minderjährige Witwe
Deren Namen jeder weiß
Wachte auf und war geschändet
Mackie, welches war dein Preis?

Und die Fische, sie verschwinden,
Doch zum Kummer des Gerichts
Man zitiert am End den Haifisch,
Doch der Haifisch weiß von nichts

Und er kann sich nicht erinnern
Und man kann nicht an ihn ran,
Denn ein Haifisch ist kein Haifisch
Wenn man nicht beweisen kann.

Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die anderen sind im Licht
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.

Brecht/Weil

*

The Ballad of Mac the Knife
See the shark has teeth like razors
All can read his open face
And Macheath has got a knife, but
Not in such an obvious place

[untranslated verse]

[untranslated verse]

On a beautiful blue Sunday,
See a corpse stretched on the Strand
See a man dodge around the corner…
Mackie’s friends will understand.

And Schmul Meier who is missing
Like so many wealthy men:
Mack the Knife acquired his cashbox
God alone knows how or when

Jenny Towler turned up lately
With a knife stuck in her breast
While Macheath walked the embankment,
Nonchalantly unimpressed

[untranslated verse]

And the ghastly fire in Soho,
Seven children at a go—-
In the crowd stands Mac the knife, but
He’s not asked and doesn’t know

And the child bride in her nightie,
Whose assailant’s still at large
Violated in her slumbers—-
Mackie how much did you charge?

[untranslated verse]

[untranslated verse]

Because the one acts in the darkness
And the other stands in light
And those things we know in daylight
We never see at night.

John Willett