Matthew Rubery
The Untold Story of the Talking Book in the chapter on Caedmon
Still, there were limits to what cold be translated across media. Certain poems worked on the page alone. One of Caedmon’s album sleeves reprinted Christian Morgenstern’s “Fisches Nachtgesang,” a concrete poem with alternating lines of macrons and breves loosely arranged in the shape of a fish. No attempt was made to record it. What was the narrator supposed to do with a soundless poem?
Look:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galgenlieder#/media/Datei:Galgenlieder_025.jpg
I wonder what my friend Jeanne Iribarne author of Sound strategies: the acoustic in early modernist poetry, 1910-1935 would make of the challenge. Would she agree that the layout of macrons and breves could act as a score for a translation of sorts into audio form?
And so for day 2842
23.09.2014