tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2385543751878406713.post9151623301595232610..comments2024-02-26T21:31:18.490-05:00Comments on The Wrong Monkey: Samstag ist angekommen der Untergang von KrausSteven Bollingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03215202747829300924noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2385543751878406713.post-15937664135419841922014-01-05T09:17:46.743-05:002014-01-05T09:17:46.743-05:00Yeah, that's German. So is the earlier post &q...Yeah, that's German. So is the earlier post "Ist Denn Hermann Bahr wirklich noch nicht ueberwunden worden?" Some of my readers are German, Austrian and Swiss. I figured that the subject matter in those two posts would be more likely to interest German speakers. The earlier one has to with Hermann Bahr, a writer who seems to have dominated turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna literary life, a writer I just can't stand, and with my finding out that another writer in Vienna at the time, Karl Kraus, a take-no-prisoners sort of satirist, also couldn't stand Bahr. Kraus had been recommended to me often by my German-speaking friends, but it was his loathing of Bahr which finally convinced me to order of book of his from Amazon. This post is about the difficulties I'm having understanding Kraus, and speculations about to what extent humor might be culture-specific and untranslatable. For example, the book by Kraus I bought, Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie (Destruction of the World By Means of Black Magic), begins with a long tirade against blimps. And I'm really not sure whether Kraus actually detested blimps, or whether the blimps symbolize something, and whether German readers would tend to understand the symbolism. Confusing and difficult reading (not just because of the blimps, that's just one example of the difficulty), but very interesting. Some of the jokes I get right away. Like most of the references to Hermann Bahr. Steven Bollingerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03215202747829300924noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2385543751878406713.post-29252651970472660002014-01-04T22:11:36.907-05:002014-01-04T22:11:36.907-05:00German?German?Jo Hennhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17566276500934815959noreply@blogger.com