Vous êtes aussi repulsive comme singe dans un negligee!

Translation: You are as repulsive as a monkey in a negligee!

Comeback: I look THAT much like your fiancee?



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Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it.

Oh good. Translation. Thank you. Now I can sleep easy.

Hi teacher, welcome to our world. I think Barbie's got a good title there (or, as we say in Britland, a "snazzy" title) - Barbie, any reference to other authors who've used characters from multiple sources?

Violet - I shouldn't worry about not having heard of Wordsworth. I dare say you'd be lucky if the average Brit can name any German authors other than Goethe and Kafka. (This is where the Fforumites prove me wrong... :) I can name a couple, but only 'cos I took German at A-Level.)



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"Whisky-wa-wa," I breathed - she was dressed as Biffo the Bear.

Herman Hesse, Cornelia Funke...

(and wasn't Kafka from Prague?)

Max Frisch, Schiller...



_ _ _ _ _

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Patrick Suskind...

(yes, I think Kafka was check (sp?) - or were we influenced by the location of the movie with Jeremy irons? ;))

Hi Ptolemy -

Sunday Last?? ... Impossible, I am working for a university ... we need time to think. Sunday Next sounds much nicer anyway ...
Rock 'n' Brass sounds interesting. Did you join in with the Polkas and Ländlers or did they join you? ... Aaah, music is the language everyone understands (beer too I guess). Yes - Bavaria can make you feel welcome ... I almost feel at home there ...
I am still giggling about the Socialst Republic of Bavaria idea. The 'Workers Okterberfest Cooperative' running a proletarian entertainment for the reacreation of the working classes in Munich, border sikrmishes with the Empire of Austria etc.

Actually, it's a pleasure to post and since nobody has seen me for my office hour yet (they must have all gone swimming ... or maybes they READ?!) I can fforum along for a while ... (before I start marking or preparing the next session or something).

Apple?
Time flies like an arrow - fruit like a banana?
(Barbie knows were I got this from).
Try a watermelon if you dare and if you're strong enough

But now the mystery is gone. A French sentence you only half understand sparks off all sorts of ideas ...

I heard "time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana" in a Bill Bryson book. Probably Mother Tongue, I'd've thought...

Oh, and the brothers Grimm were German. That's about my limit. I did higher german and we did a very odd novelette about a man taking a small girl into a wood and killing her with a chocolate hedgehog. (Er, or something, but I'm not *that* far out...)



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Do something pretty while you can...

Granny Next in Daffodils? Wasn't it Polly who was flirting with Wordswoth? Or do you know something from volume 3 which I don't know (yet)?
Never mind not learining about the poem in school. I didn't know it before I started studying English ... and I still made it into teaching Nextian books.

Regarding the index - that is the safe version but it still truns me off somehow because it is so academic. Scholars abuse the footnoterphone to pester everyone with smart-ass remarks (no offence to the Non-Brits Guide meant ... I actually used it myself to show off in the classroom). The question is whether one has to get ALL the allusions.
I am thinking of Tom Stoppard who seems to actually enjoy splitting the audience of his plays into those who get one joke and other who get another ...

Grimm translates easily ...
The novelette sounds almost like Kafka (there IS the odd Kafka reference in Jasper's books ... who would have suspected that!). We read a Kafka story in school about a guy who turns into a huge beetle and finally dies of neglect and infection from the rotting fruit his family has thrown at him when they first saw his new shape. Fruit flies ... again ...

Czech

Kafka lived in Prague but he wrote in German. Prague belonged to Austria then and the city was partly German-speaking for centuries. It also has the oldest German university. And Kafka was Jewish.
So what does that make him (apart from a great writer)?
Well - I don't believe in national literatures anyway. But if you want to read Kafka in the original you have to learn German ...

Yeah, I read the beetle one recently - Metamorphosis, it's called. I wasn't greatly impressed, but that might have been the translation.



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Do something pretty while you can...

Have you read [www.triplette.com]?

It was in the New Scientist several years ago I think. You have just
reminded me of it.

It's a self referential story, but includes a bit of Metamorphosis.



Post Edited (07-23-03 12:35)

Dante -

I hated the story at the time. It made me entirely uncomfortable. It felt like I had been transformed myself. Disgusting. Only later I realised that this is the point of the story (just like in 'The Trial').
No use blaming the translation. You either like Kafka or you don't. I guess that becomes clear even from a Punjabi translation that was ripped off from an English translation.



Post Edited (07-23-03 12:36)

I tried Metamorphosis in german a few years ago, but only managed with the portuguese next to me.

Brecht is another german i know...

KT: I had read it years ago - just read it again, love it love it love it!

Teacher: It didn't make me feel uncomfortable, I just felt it was a bit... pointless. It probably made all sorts of points about acceptance and loneliness and despair and stuff, but nothing much seemed to happen. I want to read The Trial, though, especially since Jasper used it.



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Do something pretty while you can...

'Die Verwandlung' was one of the books I studied for German A-Level, and I quite like it. Other books studied were 'Die Judenbuche' by Annette von Droste-Huelshoff (hmm...), and 'Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan' by Brecht (ah, lovely Brecht), with Frisch's 'Andorra' on the side. Bit of a liberal, was German teacher Mr P :) . German teacher Mr T, however, was a simpering wreck who took us through 'Die Judenbuche' by giving us page after page of photocopied commentary and leaving us to it.



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"Whisky-wa-wa," I breathed - she was dressed as Biffo the Bear.