Lots to look at here. The rhymes in “Neuen Jahrs Wunsch-Gedanken” are basically the same two vowel sounds throughout. You could almost say the rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA ABABAB. Wouldn’t that be unusual in an English sonnet?
I wasn’t sure who this poem prayer is addressed to. My first thought was Cupid. But I guess it’s the moon, as hinted at in the title.
I wonder if the slashes function like Dickinson’s hyphens, although I don’t know if there’s consensus on how those hyphens should be read. Interesting that von Greiffenberg even included a slash in the title, which in the English becomes a comma.
Thanks so much for commenting, and sorry for the slow reply while we were away. You're right that these are more like Petrarchan sonnets than the Shakespearean version, which is more common in English -- though you do find English poets of all periods writing sonnets with very restricted rhyme schemes as well. I think the poem you mention is addressed to God (or perhaps Jesus specifically), and it's just set at New Year and inspired by the night sky -- I think the imagery of shooting arrows which runs through the poem is inspired by the constellation of Sagittarius, since he's an archer, but it's God that she's speaking to. I was going to add a learned note about the virgules (the slashes) but deleted it in the end -- but I believe they were still pretty standard punctuation in verse in German at the period the poem was written. You still see them in English manuscripts of this period too, though not very often -- much more commonly in 16th century material.
Thanks! I had never heard of her, or this broader context for the English poets. This was a great pleasure to read, including the discussion of compounds. And heavens, I had forgotten about ”German For Reading Knowledge.” I took a course with that name too, for similar reasons. One had to pass tests in both German and French — basically, translate a page or two of an academic article in one's field — as part of the general exams. Above all, it was practically necessary, since so much of the scholarship in the field was in German or French. I imagine that those requirements no longer exist in English-speaking countries…
Yes exactly, there was even a mysteriously expensive "German for Reading Knowledge" textbook, as I remember, full of extracts of German philosophy. I think it's still quite common for classicists and theologians to have to learn some German, though it probably depends on the field. Last time I looked into it, the best little book on the (fascinating) relationship between Horace and Seneca was still a 19th century one by a German scholar but written in Latin! A much quicker read for me than in German. There are some fields in classics in which French and/or Italian are also necessary or at least very useful. So I think the best graduate programmes in the US probably still insist on reading knowledge of at least one of these.
I remember that textbook! At least, not the contents, at all, but the shape of the book and how it seemed somehow too narrow, as if it wasn't a real textbook. The guy teaching the course was not at all interested in historical linguistics (I wasn't a linguist, but was linguistics-adjacent), and so not very fun to explore the language as language with. I didn’t look into Germanic at all — my languages were all much earlier — though moving to Scandinavia much, much later made me a little curious. Too funny about the Latin text! I probably would have found both the Latin and German a major effort. I remember sitting in the library doing the work for a beginning Hittite course and going from cuneiform to roman to a Hittite-German dictionary (because that's all there was), to a German-English dictionary — for every single word, just about. On top of that, the only German-English dictionary on hand was in gothic. (This makes it sound like it was in the stone age, but probably only a decade or so before you!) Nowadays all of that would be online and instant, but it's nice to hear that scholars in the English-speaking world still learn other languages for scholarly lit rather than relying on Google translate.
Lots to look at here. The rhymes in “Neuen Jahrs Wunsch-Gedanken” are basically the same two vowel sounds throughout. You could almost say the rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA ABABAB. Wouldn’t that be unusual in an English sonnet?
I wasn’t sure who this poem prayer is addressed to. My first thought was Cupid. But I guess it’s the moon, as hinted at in the title.
I wonder if the slashes function like Dickinson’s hyphens, although I don’t know if there’s consensus on how those hyphens should be read. Interesting that von Greiffenberg even included a slash in the title, which in the English becomes a comma.
https://poets.org/poem/im-nobody-who-are-you-260
Thanks so much for commenting, and sorry for the slow reply while we were away. You're right that these are more like Petrarchan sonnets than the Shakespearean version, which is more common in English -- though you do find English poets of all periods writing sonnets with very restricted rhyme schemes as well. I think the poem you mention is addressed to God (or perhaps Jesus specifically), and it's just set at New Year and inspired by the night sky -- I think the imagery of shooting arrows which runs through the poem is inspired by the constellation of Sagittarius, since he's an archer, but it's God that she's speaking to. I was going to add a learned note about the virgules (the slashes) but deleted it in the end -- but I believe they were still pretty standard punctuation in verse in German at the period the poem was written. You still see them in English manuscripts of this period too, though not very often -- much more commonly in 16th century material.
Thanks! I had never heard of her, or this broader context for the English poets. This was a great pleasure to read, including the discussion of compounds. And heavens, I had forgotten about ”German For Reading Knowledge.” I took a course with that name too, for similar reasons. One had to pass tests in both German and French — basically, translate a page or two of an academic article in one's field — as part of the general exams. Above all, it was practically necessary, since so much of the scholarship in the field was in German or French. I imagine that those requirements no longer exist in English-speaking countries…
Yes exactly, there was even a mysteriously expensive "German for Reading Knowledge" textbook, as I remember, full of extracts of German philosophy. I think it's still quite common for classicists and theologians to have to learn some German, though it probably depends on the field. Last time I looked into it, the best little book on the (fascinating) relationship between Horace and Seneca was still a 19th century one by a German scholar but written in Latin! A much quicker read for me than in German. There are some fields in classics in which French and/or Italian are also necessary or at least very useful. So I think the best graduate programmes in the US probably still insist on reading knowledge of at least one of these.
I remember that textbook! At least, not the contents, at all, but the shape of the book and how it seemed somehow too narrow, as if it wasn't a real textbook. The guy teaching the course was not at all interested in historical linguistics (I wasn't a linguist, but was linguistics-adjacent), and so not very fun to explore the language as language with. I didn’t look into Germanic at all — my languages were all much earlier — though moving to Scandinavia much, much later made me a little curious. Too funny about the Latin text! I probably would have found both the Latin and German a major effort. I remember sitting in the library doing the work for a beginning Hittite course and going from cuneiform to roman to a Hittite-German dictionary (because that's all there was), to a German-English dictionary — for every single word, just about. On top of that, the only German-English dictionary on hand was in gothic. (This makes it sound like it was in the stone age, but probably only a decade or so before you!) Nowadays all of that would be online and instant, but it's nice to hear that scholars in the English-speaking world still learn other languages for scholarly lit rather than relying on Google translate.