[Chris Childers]

The naysayers are taking this way too seriously; even being called "crap" is much harsher than it deserves. At worst it should be greeted by a shrug. Anyway, it's just a little jeu d'esprit. In a book that contains mostly the sort of stuff John is posting, sure, I'd pause and contemplate this for a bit. Don Paterson knows what he's doing and Rain has a poem that's just a blank page--if it bores you, or seems cliche, just ignore it, there are other good poems in the book. This one is, as Bill says, touching in its way, & a neat idea. Plus I like the way the breves shift before your eyes from smiley faces to closed eyes (/sleepy faces) and back. It seems like a happy dream. It's cute.

[Roger Slater]

I don't see signs of Yoko Ono having ego. She's confident enough to do what she wants, but I've never seen her make any claims about the quality of her work other than to say that she understands its popularity, such as it is, comes from her marriage to John and not from any real connection that most people have with it. In fact, she simply claims to like the kind of stuff she does, not that other people like it or that it requires great skill.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Here's the whole article by the way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/ma...anted=all&_r=0

[Lance Levens]

Among the German people Morgenstern = play and erudition, not a common coupling. I'm a huge fan.

[Mary Cresswell]

Here's a 1964 translation into English - the two versions were originally published on facing pages, with the German on the lefthand side.

Not bad, I think!

[David Rosenthal]

Originally Posted by Chris Childers

The naysayers are taking this way too seriously; even being called "crap" is much harsher than it deserves. At worst it should be greeted by a shrug.

A shrug and a smile pretty much sums it up for me. I do not feel harshly about it at all, and have none of the programmatic objections some other posters have. But I think some of the yaysayers should be just as careful about taking it too seriously, IMO.

David R.

[Andrew Frisardi]

What David said.

And that's pretty good, Mary, although I think it's more a Lowellian "version" than a translation per se. I'd retitle it "Marinated Fish Nightsong."

[John Whitworth]

May I alert Spherians to similar poems by Apollinaire - in French!

Actually the one I found seems to be in Arabic. Here's one by Edwin Morgan in Hungarian.

Siesta of a Hungarian Snake

Z sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs ZS zs zs z

[Janice D. Soderling]

John, actually that Edwin Morgan poem starts with s not with Z. (Boldfacing mine.)

At least it is so given in the collection "Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems" edited by Simon Armitage.

I hope you will agree with me that this typo alters the entire way the poem is interpreted, whether the snake is really snoring (horkolás)
or is afflicted with a personality disorder személyiséqzavar. The Uralic languages (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian being the main ones) are never easy.

[Michael Cantor]

This had me a bit confused at first, Janice, and then I realized that you probably meant személyiségzavar. I'm sure John would agree with me.