Morton, Pierrot, and Benn

Turns out Tim Morton is a Pierrot Lunaire fan as well, and he ups the ante with this translation from Gottfriend Benn, which is really funny:

Oh, that we were our primordial ancestors.
Small lumps of plasma in a sultry swamp.
Life and death, conception and parturition
All emerging from those juices soundlessly.

A frond of seaweed or a dune of sand,
Formed by the wind and bound to the earth.
Even a dragon-fly’s head or the wing of a gull
Would be too remote and mean too much suffering.

Oh, just noticed that Morton posted HIS OWN FAVORITE PIERROT LUNAIRE VERSE, and it’s a good one. (My favorite, though, is definitely Pierrot drilling in Cassander’s skull and smoking rare tobacco grown in Turkey from the hole. Who among us would ever have come up with that image? The giant black moths are pretty good too, though.)

Great, now I can look forward to trading decadent verses with Morton at the next OOO event. We’ll be a colorful crew. As Lovecraft was to SR, perhaps Pierrot Lunaire will be to OOO.

I’m also psyched to see that Giraud’s original poems are in print in French. When I first became familiar with the Schoenberg version, it was said that this was a hopelessly lost and dusty older collection of poems, and since this was pre-internet days there was no easy way for me to check, and I took it for granted. But now it’s in PAPERBACK EASILY OBTAINABLE on Amazon.fr. I’ll just pick up a copy in Paris next week.