Vogelsprachenkund and Dotty (1957-58/1990)

The aim here is to create a record of Lafferty’s translations and an episodic account of Dotty, so what follows is inevitably a bit disjointed. If it has a center, it’s in the way poetry remains a constant throughline in Lafferty’s artistic life.

Before Lafferty turned to professional writing in 1957–1958, one of his hobbies was translating poetry. (I’ll include a list of his translations at the end of this post.) For something that so clearly captured his imagination, he gives surprisingly little space to it in his fiction. He writes almost nothing about the act of composing poetry, though the hundreds of verse fragments scattered through his prose show how much he loved it, even if he amped up the doggerel and humor in his own experiments. One exception to this general absence of “writing about writing poetry” appears in his early novel Dotty, first written in 1957-1958, revised several times, and published in 1980.

At one point, Dotty writes a sonnet. She does it at a time in her life when there is a lot of intellectual debate happening around her, and when she feels she must defend her faith from friends and peers who not only oppose but scorn her beliefs. When Dotty shows the sonnet, the response is pretty hostile. Lafferty calls the peer critics vultures. They seize on it and criticize it, even though it is finally judged to be as good as the best work of Felix Cassel and better than the worst work of Betsy Mish, two characters at this point in Dotty’s life.

I am at home as much as one can be Who knows the World a symbol and a toy. I cruise the compromise in prideful joy, And claim to God I also made the Sea. I walk in sunlight through the something dark Defiant of that ambush in the street, The Noonday Devil in the noonday heat That smirched the souls of Karl and Kitty Kark. I walk with winos and I glut and glow, And glib as any gull I gobble fish, Me, earthy as e’er born of green-haired turf. I am at home while this is home below. I walk the world that is itself a wish. I am at home beside the creaming surf.

What kind of criticism does Dotty receive?

Arthur Braden points out the “something” in the fifth line. He doesn’t phrase it this way, but Dotty has inserted a TUM-tee, leaving an stressed-and-unstressed bled-over position filled with a placeholder that cuts across two iambs, the fourth and fifth feet of the line: tee SOME-thing TUM. Lafferty uses this for a joke when Braden points out that a good sonnet is never really finished. Dotty says that she’ll replace the syllables when she finds the right ones, adding that Petrarch took thirteen years to refine a single sonnet.

Kitty Kark is more interested in herself than in Dotty's poem. She objects to the calumny: the soul of Kitty Kark besmirched? Kitty doesn't even believe in the soul. She does concede that Karl’s soul might be a little smutted. Kitty thinks Dotty has struck below the girdle. Like Lafferty, Dotty likes the euphony of Kitty’s name, which makes sense. He created it.

Karl Zaleski looks as if he might say something substantive. He is irritated by the rhyme scheme, calling it impure and labeling the poem an English–Italian hybrid. This sort of back-and-forth continues for a while, but it’s one of the few places where Lafferty directly discusses the craft of poetry outside his letters. Dotty’s early composition date places the episode near the period when he had been thinking seriously about poetic form and working on his Vogelsprachenkund translations.

One of my favorites among these translations is “Barbarossa,” with its connection to Lafferty’s sleeping-king motif. This theme recurs throughout his work and is often linked to the legends of Prester John and Christ. The motif will become profoundly significant years later when Lafferty writes Past Master (1968). There, he spells out the universality of the sleeping-king archetype so that it has programmatic importance on Astrobe.

“Every Old-Earth Nation, my grandmother told me, had its mythos of a sleeping king who would one day awaken and rule again in a new golden age. Of sleeping kings there was Alaric the slayer of Rome, who was buried underneath the Busento River (its course changed for the burial and changed back again to flow over him), and he was to arise from it again one day and lead the Gothic element, that shaggy thing that is the basis of a dozen peoples. There was Arthur of Britain in kingly sleep in an ensorceled room at the bottom of a lake. There was Brian Boru of the Irish buried on horseback in a pit with great stones heaped around him, and when he wakened he would scatter the stones and ride again. There was the Cid of the Spanish, not buried at all but riding forever a horse in death-sleep over dark moors in Estremadura. There was Barbarossa of the Germanies asleep at a table in a cave in a mountain and his beard grown through the table.”

It’s a motif deepened by the appearance of the stranger at the end of the novel, when More is on the scaffold, if the stranger is indeed Christ, with the motif being a folkloric transposition of Christian eschatology.

The sleeping king is also the subject of one of Lafferty’s translations—one of my favorites—by the German poet Friedrich Rückertt, who wrote about the legend of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. According to the legend, Barbarossa did not die in 1190 but lies enchanted in a hidden chamber within the Kyffhäuser Mountain. He sits at a stone table, his red beard grown through it, waiting for the moment when Germany needs him most. When the ravens stop circling the mountain, it is said, the people will know his long slumber is ending. Barbarossa will rise, restore peace, and reunify the land, rex quandam, rexque futurus.

Here is Lafferty's translation of Rückertt’s poem:

"Barbarossa"

The ancient Barbarossa,

The Kaiser Friederich

In castle 'neath the hill-side

Lies in enchantment thick.

He has not ever died there,

He's living down there yet;

Fast hidden he does bide there,

A sleep upon him set.

He has around him truly

A splendor rich and wide,

And some day he'll reign newly

And all it by his side.

The chair is made of iv'ry

Where he does sit all day;

The table is of marble

On which his head does lay.

His beard is more than flaxen,

It is a fiery glow,

so greatly does it waxen

Does through the table grow.

Not as in dream does wile he;

His eye half open gleams

And every little while he

Does signal, so it seems.

He speaks with words revealing

"Go out, boy if you will,

And see if the crows are wheeling

Still high above the hill.

"For while the crow, the raven

Still fly forever there,

Still sleep I in my haven

Encharmed, a hundred year.

Lafferty's other translations:

Spanish

Ruben Dario (Mexico)

• Sonatina

  
  

Jaime Torres Bodet (Mexico)

• The Well

• Cypress

  
  

Anonymous

• Rimes (a collection of 10 short numbered poems)

• Coplas (a collection of 39 short numbered poems)

• Abenamar

• Fonte-Frida

• The Prisoner

  
  

Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola

• Soon after autumn tendrels brown have curled

• When pass annoying rains at last there breaks

  
  

Marques de Santillena

• Serranilla

  
  

Saint Teresa

• Let nothing be rued of you

  
  

Jose de Espronceda

• The Beggar

  
  

Fernan Caballero

• The Night of Christmas

  
  

Ramon de Camoamor

• I Wish I Could Write

  
  

Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

• Arrows humming

• In a corner of murk and of must

• For a glance I'd give the world

• The sighs are air and go into the air

  
  

Rosalia de Castro

• The Bells

  
  

Manuel Machado

• Philip IV

  
  

Antonio Machado

• I Go A-dreaming

  
  

French

Francois Villon

• Je connais Tout fors que Moi-meme

  
  

Joachim du Bellay

• A wheat-winnow to the Winds

• The Ideal

  
  

Arnault

• The Leaf

  
  

Beranger

• The Stars that Fall

• Le Vilain

• Souvenirs of a People

  
  

Alfred de Musset

• Song of Babberine

• Song of Fortunio

  
  

Victor Hugo

• Exile

• The Toumb said to the rose

• The Song of those who went over the Sea

• Proscrit, regarde les Roses

• Quand Nous Habitons Tous Ensemble

  
  

De Nerval

• Fantasy

• In the woods

• Neither the Day, nor the Even

• Delfica

• April

• The Black Spot

• The Cousin

  
  

Louis Bouilhet

• The God of the Porcelaine

• The Tung-Whang-Fung

• Derniere Nuit

  
  

Verlaine

• Le Ciel est, par-dessus le Toit

• The moon of white

• Colloque Sentimental

• It weeps within my heart

  
  

Louis Tiercelin

• Thee Little Baby

  
  

Portuguese

Olavo Bilac

• Song of a Romeo

  
  

Italian

Anonymous

• Figlio, dormi, dormi, Figlio

• Sonnet ('Tis woe to me who loved a falcon bird)

  
  

Torquato Tasso

• The love that in all worldly hearts does grow

• What are these dews that gleam so bright

  
  

Latin

Horace

• Prayer to Apollo

• To a Lyre

• The winter melts away beforethe spring

• What youth, now will you tell me, painted flower

• As brave above your deadly enemies

• To Venus

• To a boy

  
  

German

Friedrich Ruckert

• Aus der Jugendzeit

• Barbarossa

• Three Pairs and One

  
  

Anonymous Ballads

• Down where the little garden gleams

• The Three Lillies

• Hasel

• If I were a Bård

• Little sister

• You are mine and I am thine

• The coocoo to his death did fall

• There went a gay young fellow

• Child, where is it that you wander?

• There was a farmer had three daughters

• The two Kings-Children

• Snow-white

• Secret Love

  
  

Paul Flemming

• Grieve thou not keen

  
  

Platen

• The Pilgrim at St Inst's

  
  

Goethe

• Welcome and Goodbye

• May Song

• On The Sea

• Hope

• Reminder

• Wander's Night Song

• A Same (Over all the lea-tops)

• Know you the land where the lemon grows

• Heather Rose

• Into the woods

• Who ne'er with tears did eat his bread

• The King of Thule

• The Fisher

• Erlkonig

  
  

Wilhelm Muller

• The Linden Tree

  
  

Ludwig Uhland

• The Larks

• The Hostess's Daughter

• The Castle on the Sea

• The Inn

  
  

Storm

• Lucie

• Over the Heath

• May

  
  

Lenau

• The Three

  
  

Eichendorf

• The Broken Ring

• Moon Light

• Elf

  
  

Heine

• The Grenadiers

• In Rhine, that pretty river

• In my life that is so darksome

• When are children in the darkness

• Du bist wie eine Blume

• The Lorelei

• Auf Flugeln des Gesanges

• The lotus blossom is fearful

• A little fir stands lonely

• my darlint, we sat right together

• A youth did love a maiden

• Now the summer eve lies dusky

• There all lonely by the stream

• A night of coolness is the death

• There falls a star of heaven

• Lightly trickle through mine heart

• There was an aged monarch

• The roaring waves they are passing

• Where stands in the sea the runic stone

• In Exile

• Where?

• A Woman

• Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder

  
  

Liliencron

• Cradle Song

• Sweet Days of June

  
  

Norwegian

Henrik Hertz

• A pretty young rider to London did go