20 Misc Laff: Vogelsprachekund

When Lafferty titled his translations, he chose Vogelsprachenkund, a word that appears several times in his work and informs “Bird-Master,” one of his great stories.

In Friedrich Rückert’s “Aus der Jugendzeit,” the phrase Vogelsprachekund means something like “knowing the language of birds” or “versed in bird-speech.” Rückert addresses the child’s mouth as full of unconscious wisdom, Vogelsprachekund . . . wie Salomo: bird-language-wise, like Solomon. The phrase has little to do with ornithology but much to do with a Romantic and folkloric belief that children, sages, and mythic figures can still hear meaning in the sounds of nature. That is one place to find the Romanticist in Lafferty. A contemporary 1866 essay on “Die Vogelsprache” used Rückert’s lines as its motto and explained the broader idea as the translation of birdsong into human speech. For Lafferty, the phrase carried the music of sacramentality. It also surfaces allusively in Not to Mention Camels.

Who was Friedrich Rückert? He was a German poet, translator, and scholar, born in 1788 in Schweinfurt, Bavaria. He studied languages and literature, became known for patriotic poems during the Napoleonic Wars, and later won fame for his knowledge of Eastern languages, including Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and Hebrew. Much of his poetry turns on love, childhood, nature, grief, and spiritual wisdom, often blending German Romantic feeling with forms and ideas from Asian and Middle Eastern literature. Rückert taught Oriental languages at Erlangen and Berlin, and his translations helped introduce German readers to non-European poetry. He died in 1866, leaving behind a vast body of poems, translations, and scholarly writings. English readers have mostly forgotten him. Lafferty's translation.