Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914)

A wonderful example of how good design can make use of constraints: The text in this book is only fifteen couplets long, the illustrations are composed solely of punctuation marks, and the only colours used are black, white, and red.

Mogenstern's poem, whose German original is included, tells of an alliance between the stops (periods) and the commas made in order to rid their land of those presumptuous semi-colons (think about it). The question marks sneak away before the semi-colons are show more routed but return before the attack upon the commas conducted by the blade-like dashes, who by beheading the commas leave the ground strewn with more dead semi-colons (again, think about it). A funeral is conducted and 'Then through their comma-form free nation/They all march home: dash dot dash dot'.

If that sounds slightly twee, it isn't, .nor is the polemicism blatant... And even if it had been, iphe illustrations would have wiped away any impression of cutesiness: A line of black question marks near the top of a page returning home over a jumble of red semi-colon corpses that fills the rest of the page is actually disquieting, as are the ranks of dashes beginning to penetrate those of commas.

Every page of this book is attractive and every illustration displays an intelligent interpretation of the text and a clever use of those punctuation marks--not only armies and the dead they leave behind but trees, skyscrapers, a cemetery, and perhaps most impressively a train made with ?!-:[ and the like.

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Some of these seem almost untranslatable, but by and large Knight did an excellent job in conveying their comic spirit if not their exact sense.

Christian Morgenstern foi um pioneiro da literatura nonsense em língua alemã, por isso não o vi no curso sobre literatura nonsense que fiz na USP que privilegiava a literatura nonsense de origem inglesa.
Não sei até que ponto os poemas desse livro foram bem vertidos ao inglês porque meu alemão continua uma lástima, se na poesia normal já sentimos uma enorme diferença na tradução, ouso dizer que no nonsense é pior ainda.

I studied for my graduate German language exam at Yale by reading the Galgenlieder. I passed. I think some of them are among the funniest comic poems I know, notably the Werwolf.