Profound thought for the Task
Take the focus of your attention away from thinking and direct it into the body
– Eckhart Tolle
The Task: Make a new Fridge Poem
Does that sound like an easy task? Well there are complications. The poem is to be created from a little set of magnetic words that was bought for me by Ilka as one of the fun ways I could improve my German. So the words, and derivatives of words are all in German. And although I can write quite bad poetry in English because I understand all the words I employ, the same is not true when I use German.
Anyway, the first hurdle was to find the little box of magnetic words, which has been hidden in the darkest recesses of the house somewhere for many years. Once found, I had to lay out all words on the table so that I could see what sort of themes I could explore with them (see photo).
There were a lot nouns, a few adjectives, but not many verbs. Also there were a lot of options for articles and a few personal pronouns, but hardly anything useful like ‘and’, ‘as’, ‘like’ which tend to crop-up in my poems a lot. The designers of the set clearly wanted the poems to be about things rather than a loved one!
I looked at the words to see what themes jumped out at me. Frühling was the early front-runner, and that was appropriate because it was the first day of March and Spring was in the air. Great! A poem about Spring in bad German (or a bad poem about Spring), probably never been done before in the history of poetry.
Magnetic Fridge Poetry is also challenging because every time you have a beautiful idea for a sentence, there are just not the words available to build it. In English, for example “I wandered lonely like a cloud”, would probably have to be constructed with something like “I move feet alone as wet air”. Which is a different fish kettle no?
Because my grasp of German is not so strong, I can pick words out from the set to make a line that I think is really clever or poignant, only to discover that it means something else entirely. This can work to my advantage as well, where a German speaker might consider my poetry construction to be uniquely beautiful or evocative in my unusual choice of words and word order. Let assume that shall we.
Anyway, after an hour or so, I had managed to conjure-up a short poem on the theme of Spring (probably). I stuck it to the fridge and then translated it using common translation tools.
In German it reads thus:
Frühling darf verschleier sich im golden Schönheit.
Es schüttelt sein Haar und verlass ein delikat duft.
Der nackt Garten von Winter wird schnell steigen mit Blütte
Durch seltsam glänz wie Sommer Flaum
ich unarm glücklich ein betrunken Licht
The English translation is of course clumsy, but you have to understand that Poetry can never conveniently be translated to another language. It lives in it’s original tongue.
Spring may veil itself in golden beauty.
It shakes its hair and leaves a delicate fragrance.
The bare garden of winter will quickly rise with blossom
Through strange gleams like summer down
I happily embrace drunken light.
Not sure about the strange gleams, but I think it’s a good enough poem to be entered into the regional finals of the Bavarian Fridge Magnet Poetry competition next year.
Take the focus of your attention away from magnetic words and direct it onto the fridge
