There is a running joke in Germany. Oettinger was minister president of Baaden-Wuertemberg, and down there they speak an accent, Schwaebisch, that most Germans agree to be the most terribly sounding of all German local tongues we have. It really drills into the ear and into the skull and that pain makes you aggressive. :D They used to run a TV advert campaign about the economic strength of that federal state (No. 1 or 2 amongst all German federal states, beside Bavaria), and that advert ended with "We can do everything - except speaking German".

Newspapers have reported meanwhile that Oettinger has promised to take English classes and get more training with English. If a private person speaks it like he does, then that is one thing. My French for example is not better than his English. But if an official representative of a nation does like that, he better should use a translator. and if before he even lectured other sabout the need to speak a solid English and that every low job worker must master it, then his performance simply deserves all mockery that so far he has gotten.

English may be the natural language of man, but German is it's poetry. :O:

For the next couple of days I will be hearing your local version of English, which many people who have English as their native tongue can find harder to understand than those german politicians featured at the start of the topic.

I think it is beaten by "Sächsisch".
*caughhighgermancough*
;)

Thes allus some chuffin chap who'll say owt to nark me, n's oft thee sen.
:03:

Blush response! :haha:

Damn that speed-typing. Repaired.

If you forget Shakespeare then maybe :03:

German is the language of heavy metal :rock: :DL

Now that I can agree with! :rock:

Little old me? would I ever? :yeah:
could be worse, it coulda been chuffin gauvies getting thee mithered

Shakespeare is imo as overestimated in English as Goethe is in German. Both languages have poets who were more competent in words and who brought both languages to higher peaks of melody and rythm, and had more interesting things to say. Rilke on my mind, or Auden, or Trakl, Yeats.

Goethe btw said in a letter to a friend that he did no consider himself to be a good poet, and that he would prefer to be remembered for his writings on natural observations. He was a universally interested "Naturkundler", a passion he followed with more interest than poetry. His skills as a poet I would say to be solid craftsmanship, at best. And Shakespeare - somehow it's always the same with him: first the turmoil, then the pathetic speeches, and in the end they are all dead. :) Not to mention the originally Klingon monologues. :haha:

On a sidenote, by chnace I stumbled over this page a while ago, tjhat illustrates the considerations and porblems of translating a poem that accoustically may sound very well in one language, but is hard to translate into another language. The first link illustrates that on a more theoretical basis, enriched with many examples of alternatives for a trasnlation, the second link illustrates the wide possible variety of translations for one and the same poem, sometimes they work, and soemtimes they don't.

http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-rilke-1.html

http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/rilke/rilke3.html

While sometimes a poem simply cannot be translated adequately into another language (I once checked for - and even tried myself - with Auden's wonderful As I walked out one evening, one of my all-time favourite poems), sometimes you have the paradoxical result that eventually in a translation a poem may sound even better than in the original. I experienced that with W.B. Yeats An Irish airman forsees his death. I know both the English and one German translation - and I prefer the German. This is not because I am German myself - the poem before, by Auden, I would not even think again to translate into German. It simply does not work, like most of the time it does not work to translate Rilke into English.

Are you familiar with Stephen Mitchell's English translations of Rilke? Those are the ones I have, and I love them. They include the original German texts but of course I'm nowhere near competent in German so I can't really compare one to the other. I've always wondered how good a job Mitchell did in capturing the essence of the originals.

Is it an online edition, or a book?

If the latter, would you mind to post "Die Insel der Sirenen/The Island of Sirens", if it happens to be included? That's is one of my favourite Rilke poems, I always wondered if there is a good English translation of it.

I have the books. I don't know if the translations are available online but I'll look. If not I can get it out of the book when I get home.

Altho that title doesn't ring any bells, so it's possible Mitchell didn't include it.

Just curious: do you understand German and compared the translation with the originals?