The Gallows Songs

A collection of dazzling, playful, and linguistically inventive poetry by one of Germany’s finest writers, in a classic translation that honors the author’s amazing verbal acrobatics.

Christian Morgenstern’s The Gallows Songs are some of the most delightful and imaginative creations of twentieth-century German poetry. Composed originally after an outing Morgenstern took with his friends to Gallows Hill near Potsdam, these lively, puckish poems envision Gallows Hill as a fantastical world populated with fabulous animals, bizarre mechanisms, and some truly unruly punctuation.

Morgenstern felt that people often used their familiar language unthinkingly, without ever pausing to marvel at the glorious arbitrariness of words. Through poems chock-full of irresistible wordplay and unabashedly exuberant rhymes, he invites us to meditate--but also to med-it-nine and med-i-ten--on all the incidents and accidents of language that make the world of words so vibrant.

True to the spirit of Morgenstern’s linguistic mischief, Max Knight’s translation sparkles with uncommon wit as it reinvents in English Morgenstern’s daring verbal acrobatics, and is itself a feat of poetic genius.

Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914) was a German poet, writer, and translator born in Munich. He worked as a journalist in Berlin, and spent much of his life traveling through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Most famous for his humorous and dreamlike poetry, he was also a translator of the works of Ibsen and Strindberg.

Max Knight (1909-1993) was a Jewish writer, editor, and translator. Born in Pilsen, then part of Austria, he worked as a journalist in Vienna and fled when the Nazis came to power. In 1941, he immigrated to the United States, where he was the editor of University of California Press. He received the Golden Cross of Honor from Austria.

Samuel Titan is an editor and literary translator based in Brazil. He has translated a number of French, German, and Argentinian authors into Portuguese, and has edited collections of essays by Erich Auerbach and Claude Lévi-Strauss. For NYRB Classics, he edited Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller Essays. He teaches comparative literature at the University of São Paulo.