ottos pug

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A pug

ottos mops is a poem by the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl . The creation is dated November 20, 1963. In September 1970 it was published in Jandl's volume of poetry, the artificial tree . The poem consists of simple main clauses of two to four words that contain only the same vowel as the o . A short episode from the life of the master and the dog is told: After Otto initially sent his naughty pug away, he soon longs for him again and calls him over. However, the returning pug's reaction is not as expected: he pukes.

ottos mops is one of Jandl's best-known cheerful poems. The author himself described it as a spoken poem, which had a special effect during the lecture. It is often used in school lessons as a teaching example for concrete poetry and has found numerous imitations, both by children and by other poets.

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Ernst Jandl
ottos mops
Link to the full text of the poem
(please note copyrights )

ottos mops consists of a total of 14 verses in three stanzas . At the beginning, a naughty pug is sent away by its owner named Otto.

"Ottos pug defies
otto: fort pug fort
ottos pug hops away"

Otto comments on following his instructions with a "soso". Then he does everyday chores, fetching coke and fruit. After a while he listens for the pug, calls him and hopes for his return. The pug knocks, is greeted happily by Otto, but his reaction is unexpected:

"Ottos pug comes
ottos pug pukes
otto: ogottogott"

Text analysis

The most striking feature of the poem ottos mops is its monovocalism : the restriction of all words to the vowel o , while the consonants remain free. The choice of words is severely restricted by this restriction, but it is not purely serial in the sense of generative poetics , but allows the composition of a text with a variety of possibilities and the underlay of specific semantics . The poem consists of 41 words with assonance to o, but is only made up of 15 different word stems, which are constantly repeated. There are only two characters involved: “otto” and the “pug”. Verbs are assigned to them that are consistently in the third person singular indicative present active , only the imperative “come”, emphasized by its repetition , with which Otto calls his pug back , falls out of line . In addition, the nouns “coke” and “fruit” appear as well as Otto's colloquial speech particles “fort”, “soso” and “ogottogott”. The only punctuation mark is the colon to indicate literal speech. By dispensing with punctuation in large parts of his work, Jandl referred to Gertrude Stein , according to which the help of commas stood in the way of the reader's independence and activity. Equally characteristic of Jandl is the consistently lower case , which has a visual function in his poems , while upper case letters are reserved for special emphasis.

Every line of poetry begins with the anaphor “otto” or its genitive. The title is followed immediately by the “pug”, a combination that is repeated five times in the poem and underlines the close relationship between the two characters. The sentences are short, partly elliptical and consist of two to four words at most. In their simplicity, they are reminiscent of the language of a toddler. The individual words are monosyllabic, with the exception of “otto” and its comments “soso” and “ogottogott”, which stand out both because of their multiple syllables and their reduplication . Five times the pug is the acting subject of the short sentences. He contests the first and last of the three stanzas of the poem alone and Otto only comments on it. Only in the middle stanza does Otto himself become an actor. The first and last stanzas form an analogy syntactically, but a semantic contrast: the growing distance between Otto and his pug in the first four lines is in parallel with the return of the dog at the end . The superfluous line “ottos mops pukes”, which rhymes with the introduction “ottos mops trotzt”, falls out of the scope of comparability, so that the end of the poem becomes the consequence of the beginning.

interpretation

Order and rebellion

For the Germanist Andreas Brandtner, the headline already shows the relationship between Pug and Otto: The possessive genitive assigns the Pug, which is also only named with its generic name, to and subordinates it to its owner Otto, especially since the Pug as a traditional house dog suggests that Otto be his master. This order is disturbed by the insubordination of the defiant pug, without it being explained in more detail what his rebellion is against. After Otto sent the pug away, the conflict rested for the time being, while Otto was distracted by other activities. However, he soon felt the urge to revise the rejection. He calls for the pug, with hope revealing his inner connection. Otto's listening tension is answered in the third stanza by the knocking pug. For a moment it appears as if the conflict could be settled, when Otto's exclamation “come” and the activity of the pug “ottos pug comes” succeeded. But the pug's puke breaks this consonance and refers to the original defiance: the dog continues its refusal in an instinctive act. Otto's rather indifferent or even threatening “soso” gave way to a horrified “ogottogott”, an exclamation that contained the palindrome “otto”.

Brandtner saw two levels at the center of the poem: the communication between humans and animals, between master and dog, the effectiveness of which is questioned, as well as the power relations of the figure constellation and their relation to real socio-historical processes. So ottos mops is in the tradition of Jandl's poetry, which in the broadest sense is always to be understood as critical of society or language. At the same time, ottos mops resides in a democratic perspective: the simple design encourages the reader to develop his own language games , it enables him to participate in the production of poetry according to the avant-garde creed of transforming art into practical life.

Identity and security

The Germanist Anne Uhrmacher, who examined Jandl's poetry in her dissertation, assessed the headline “ottos mops” and the similar sound of the two protagonists as confirmation of the popular prejudice that man and dog grew closer and closer together when they lived together for a long time. Human traits come to light in the pug, which is expressed, for example, in the knocking in the last stanza. Although humans are identified as the central figure, it is only the pug that ignites his emotions, to a certain extent bring him to life, which is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's famous dictum : “I am me because my little dog knows me.” Otto only gets through his pug Identity. In the middle stanza, loneliness spreads in the dog's absence. The line “otto listens” creates a pause due to its brevity. Otto's call "mops mops" reminds onomatopoeically of the call "ps ps". The longing for the pug inherent in the line “otto hopes” makes the poem suddenly change from comedy to pathos .

In the final exclamation "ogottogott" Otto and God unite. From the onomatopoeic resonance, Thomas Eder derived an associative equation of “otto” and “god” as the punch line of the poem. Anne Uhrmacher concluded: “ otto is in god and god in otto ”. The love that the dog owner feels for the creature "pug" suggests a creator who is also responsible for Otto. Just as the dog owner offers his pug a feeling of security, with the last word it opens up a hidden hold for him, which teaches him to accept earthly inadequacies such as defiance and vomiting in humorous serenity. Andreas Brandtner, on the other hand, contradicted a religious interpretation with reference to explicitly atheistic self-statements by Jandl as well as the clichéd use of the expression "ohgottogott" in the poem 1000 years of Austria . Norbert Hummelt interpreted the poem ottos mops , which is "about ties, about loss and recovery" and at the end of which "the expectation of the fetching, listening, hoping [...] is equally fulfilled and disappointed" as "a modern version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son ”.

Humor and poetry

Friederike Mayröcker next to Jandl at a reading, Vienna 1974

What ottos mops highlighted for Anne Uhrmacher from the many reworks that followed his growing popularity was the form of humor that differed from the wit and irony of many attempts at the same style. She quoted Ludwig Reiners : “The joke laughs, the humor smiles. The joke is witty, the humor loving. The joke sparkles, shines of humor. "In this sense Jandl's humor is that in the desire ottos after mops expressions as well as in the security of the small world shown, far more than merely witty vocal search. Jandl distinguished the cheerful tone of poems like ottos pug and fifth sein himself from the “grim” and “grotesque” humor of other texts. They are poems, "where people are right to laugh and where no polemical intention is noticeable."

The Germanist Dieter Burdorf recognized another form of humor in ottos mops . The poem reminded him of the slapstick used in silent films or comic strips . The comedy does not arise from the trivial content, but from the sound structure. The o-sound is the exclamation of astonishment. Even the facial expressions that a lecturer with a mouth rounded o invites to cabaret exaggeration when opening and closing the lips and was staged in this way by Jandl himself during lectures. Even Hans Mayer spoke about Jandl elocution: "Children were the concrete poetry of Ernst Jandl always evident immediately. People loved Otto's pug, who defied and puked. When Jandl speaks himself, the children do it afterwards ”. For Volker Hage nobody could “scream out, whisper, celebrate, stutter, stretch, chop up, spit out, caress” like Jandl. In the ranking of the poem by Otto and his Pug the structure sounded to him a nursery rhyme to.

In her comment on ottos pug, Jandl's partner Friederike Mayröcker referred to “the author's linguistic argument with a vowel: he sings the song of the O, the O-animal, the O-god, ogottogott, the dog owner Otto, the pug, the has come back home and we all laugh and cry ”. She saw the reader addressed by a naive sympathy that embraced the pug owner like his pug bull. The poem takes him back to early childhood experiences with animals. In the lines a transformation takes place “which always succeeds anew, namely from the love of the vowel to the reality of the picture; from belief in the O to revelation poetry. "

Position in the factory

ottos mops , whose creation by Jandl was dated November 20, 1963, was only published in September 1970 as part of the collection of poems, the artificial tree . The delayed release wasn't unusual for Jandl. Older poems made their debut together with current productions in later volumes. Even before ottos mops , Jandl had experimented with poems that only use a vowel. So in August 1963 came the big e , a cycle of nine poems based entirely on the vowel e, and in 1963/64 the piece poem mal franz mal anna (drama) dominated by the a . Other poems are based on the accumulation of a certain consonant, for example the etude in f . Fifteen years after its creation, Jandl described the path from the formal idea of ​​monovocalism to the poem ottos mops with a wink: “[What] should one start with so many words with o now? You couldn't have started anything if some of them hadn't started to move, as if by themselves, and came up to each other and said: we here, we fit together, we can do something with each other, we can start a little story with each other ; Let's start the story of ottos pug . They did, and that's how this poem came about. "

In the volume of the artificial tree , Jandl sorted his works according to various types of poetry, distinguishing between visual poems and sound poems . He classified ottos mops in the reading and spoken poems section . In 1957 he explained about this form of poetry: “The spoken poem only becomes effective when it is read aloud. The length and intensity of the sounds are fixed by the writing. Tension arises from the succession of short and long drawn out sounds [...], hardening of the word by removing the vowels [...], breaking up the word and combining its elements into new expressive groups of sounds [...], varied word repetitions with thematically based addition of new words up to explosive ones Closing punch ". According to Anne Uhrmacher, ottos pug can also be enjoyed while reading quietly , but she emphasized that as a spoken poem it unfolds its very own effect when reading aloud. Jandl himself often performed the poem at his readings, where it was received with particular enthusiasm by the audience and the title itself triggered laughter.

Although Jandl protested against the reduction to the mere cheerful side of his work, he nevertheless accepted the special popularity of his pug poem, picked it up himself and staged it. For example, in a photograph by Werner Bern, he had himself photographed sitting next to a pug who - at least that is what ottos mops' knowledge suggests - had just thrown up. The recording can be found in the ten-volume edition of Jandl's Poetic Works on the flyleaf of each volume. Jörg Drews commented on the photograph with reference to Jandl: “He 's the pug; just look at the forehead wrinkles of both: both are deeply furrowed thinker's foreheads ”. Drews saw a "subtle staging of the photo by Ernst Jandl: Because Jandl looks at the dog and : he stands or sits as a dog next to him and regards himself as a person."

In general, dogs had a large place in Ernst Jandl's poetry. Drews counted 42 poems in which dogs appeared, which corresponds to three percent of Jandl's total production. The play die humanisten from 1976 themed the life of dogs and humans, the latter proving to be inhumane. Norbert Hummelt explained: "Dogs are always close to Ernst Jandl, often enough as objects of identification". He drew a comparison with Rainer Maria Rilke : “What the angel is for Rilke, the dog is for Jandl. The eyes of one must necessarily go upwards, those of the other necessarily go down. ”The pug is also present several times in Jandl's work, for example in the bestiarium from February 1957 in abbreviated language as“ ops ”. In the late poem Der Mops from August 1991, Jandl discussed the closeness between the author and the Pug:

"
Des is dea dea i waa wauni oes mops aufd wööd kuma waa
oowa wäu i ned oes a mops boan woan bin
is des ned in it"

reception

The collection of poems the artificial tree , in which ottos mops was first published, appeared in paperback format in September 1970 as volume 9 of the new Luchterhand collection . It turned out to be an immediate sales success. In the year of publication, the initial print run increased from 4,000 books through two additional editions to a total of 10,000 copies. Jandl himself counted the volume among his three standard works in the mid-1970s. The poem ottos mops was reprinted in Jandl selection volumes and anthologies . It was included in numerous volumes of poetry for children and young people, implemented as a picture book, published several times as a sound and music recording, and finally became the title of a computer game, which, with the subtitle In Search of Jandl, guides you through Ernst Jandl's poetry. In addition to Jandl's own readings, ottos mops was also often given by other reciters such as Harry Rowohlt . Musical adaptations come from Friedrich Schenker , Madeleine Ruggli and LaLeLu , for example . Herbert Achternbusch has planned an homage to ottos mops in his libretto An der Donau : “ Pig Ohhh! Ohhh! Ohhh! / Parrot Ogott! Ogott! ” Ottos mops became one of Ernst Jandl's best-known cheerful poems. Robert Gernhardt called it "the second most popular German tongue poem [...] after Goethe's Wanderers Nachtlied ". Although the poem was mentioned frequently in secondary literature, it was often only interpreted in a few sentences and hardly interpreted in detail.

ottos mops also found its way into school lessons. In the German subject, it became a popular teaching example for concrete poetry and served as a guide for students to imitate. On the basis of this poem, “the step from analysis to one's own structure-imitating language experiment is quickly made”. According to Hans Gatti, such imitative poetry triggered “enthusiasm” in students, and he spoke of examples of how “niki's fish stinks”. On the other hand, Max Goldt said, looking back at his own school days: “Jandl was also chewed through: ottos pug pukes and lechts and rinks cannot be changed . The teacher's enthusiasm was by no means shared by the class. We found such brittle puns just silly. ”Jandl himself received numerous school poems. He published several of them with titles such as Hannas Gans , Kurts Uhu or Ruths Kuh in Ein bestes Gedicht and commented: “It is mostly children who copy this poem, but in reality they don't copy it at all, they just discovered how to do it can make a poem like that, and then you make it, and it becomes your own poem. "

Robert Gernhardt at a reading, 2001

Other poets also imitated ottos mops . Robert Gernhardt published the cycle Otto's Mops ond so fort. A contribution to integrative German lessons . He added four further poems to the other vowels ottos mops : Anna's goose , Gudruns Luchs , Gittis Hirsch and Enzensberger's exegete with Gernhardt's attempt to record a longest word made up entirely of the vowel e: "Enzensbergerexegetenschelter". Translations by ottos mops also mainly adopted the basic scheme in other languages ​​and largely transferred Jandl's puns freely. Elizabeth MacKiernan translated ottos mops for the American Jandl selection band Reft and Light as Lulu's Pooch . In 2005, on the occasion of Jandl's 80th birthday , the internet service signandsight.com organized a translation competition on ottos mops , which the Scottish Germanist Brian O. Murdoch won with his version of fritz's bitch . Jandl himself commented on the numerous imitations as early as 1978: “A lot of new poems are being created, beautiful poems. But I really can't say whether anyone will succeed in writing a poem with o after ottos mops already exists. But I think: not really. "

literature

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Andreas Brandtner: About the game and the rules. Traces of style in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops. In: Volker Kaukoreit , Kristina Pfoser (Ed.): Interpretations. Poems by Ernst Jandl. Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-15-017519-4 , pp. 73-89.
  • Anne Uhrmacher: Varieties of the comic. Ernst Jandl and the language (= German linguistics , volume 276). Niemeyer, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-484-31276-0 , pp. 138-146 (dissertation University of Trier 2005, 244 pages).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ernst Jandl: ottos mops . In: Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 4 . Luchterhand, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-630-86923-8 , p. 60.
  2. ↑ Brandtner: Of game and rule. Traces of the design in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops, p. 80.
  3. ↑ a b Dieter Burdorf: Introduction to poetry analysis . Second edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 978-3-476-12284-1 , p. 39.
  4. ↑ Brandtner: Of game and rule. Traces of the design in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops, p. 75.
  5. ↑ Uhrmacher: Varieties of the comic. Ernst Jandl and the language , pp. 174–175.
  6. ↑ Uhrmacher: Varieties of the comic. Ernst Jandl and the language , pp. 139–140.
  7. ↑ Brandtner: Of game and rule. Traces of the design in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops, p. 76.
  8. ↑ Brandtner: Of game and rule. Traces of design in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops, pp. 76–78.
  9. ↑ Brandtner: Of game and rule. Traces of style in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops, pp. 80–81, 84.
  10. ↑ "I am I because my little dog knows me". In: Gertrude Stein: The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. Random House, New York 1936, p. 71.
  11. ↑ Uhrmacher: Varieties of the comic. Ernst Jandl and the language , pp. 140–141.
  12. ↑ Thomas Eder: Reality in a poem? To Ernst Jandl and Reinhard Priessnitz . In: Michael Vogt (Ed.): JANDL is big on the back. Interpretations of texts by Ernst Jandl . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2000, ISBN 3-89528-284-7 , pp. 193-214, here p. 206.
  13. ↑ Uhrmacher: Varieties of the comic. Ernst Jandl and the language , pp. 141–142.
  14. ↑ Brandtner: Of game and rule. Traces of the design in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops, p. 78.
  15. ↑ a b Norbert Hummelt : Remember, your name is Ernst Jandl. A missing person report . Published in copybook band 55/2000, online (PDF) at planetlyrik.de.
  16. ↑ Ludwig Reiners : Stilkunst. A textbook of German prose . CH Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 978-3-406-34985-0 , p. 422.
  17. ↑ Uhrmacher: Varieties of the comic. Ernst Jandl and the language , pp. 144–145.
  18. ↑ Ernst Jandl: I very much love the German spoke . In conversation with Peter Huemer . In Wespennest 125/2001, ISBN 3-85458-125-4 , p. 27.
  19. ↑ Hans Mayer : Afterword . In: Ernst Jandl: dingfest . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1973, ISBN 3-472-61121-9 , p. 103.
  20. ↑ Volker Hage : Everything was invented. Portraits of German and American authors . Rowohlt, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-498-02888-X , pp. 154, 157.
  21. ↑ Friederike Mayröcker : To: ottos mops . In: Requiem for Ernst Jandl . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-41216-7 , pp. 43-44.
  22. ↑ a b Brandtner: From play and rule. Traces of design in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops, pp. 73–74.
  23. ↑ Ernst Jandl: the great e . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 3 . Luchterhand, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-630-86922-X , pp. 17-19.
  24. ↑ Ernst Jandl: sometimes Franz, sometimes Anna (drama) . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 6 . Luchterhand, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-630-86925-4 , p. 141.
  25. ↑ Ernst Jandl: etude in f . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 2 . Luchterhand, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-630-86921-1 , p. 16.
  26. ↑ Ernst Jandl: A best poem . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 11 . Luchterhand, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-630-87030-9 , p. 185.
  27. ↑ Ernst Jandl: The speech poem . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 11 , p. 8.
  28. ↑ a b watchmaker: varieties of the comic. Ernst Jandl and the language , pp. 138–139.
  29. ↑ For the picture of Jandl and the pug see: Jürgen Christen: Musen auf vier Pfoten - Writers and their dogs . Authors' House Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86671-032-0 , p. 14 f. ( Preview at blickinsbuch.de ).
  30. ↑ Quoted from: Uhrmacher: Spielarten des Komischen. Ernst Jandl and the language , p. 145.
  31. ↑ Jörg Drews: Man is a dog to man. Animal metaphors and animal metaphors with Ernst Jandl . In: Luigi Reitani (ed.): Ernst Jandl. Proposte di lettura . Forum, Udine 1997, ISBN 88-86756-21-6 , pp. 153-164, here p. 153.
  32. ↑ Ernst Jandl: the humanists . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 10 . Luchterhand, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-630-86929-7 , pp. 159-175.
  33. ↑ Ernst Jandl: bestiarium . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 2 . Luchterhand, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-630-86921-1 , pp. 151–155.
  34. ↑ Ernst Jandl: the pug . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 9 . Luchterhand, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-630-86928-9 , p. 206.
  35. ^ Herbert Achternbusch: On the Danube. Libretto. Suhrkamp Theaterverlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, p. 28.
  36. ↑ Uhrmacher: Varieties of the comic. Ernst Jandl and the language , p. 17.
  37. ↑ Robert Gernhardt : Speaking in tongues. Voice imitations from Gott to Jandl . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-596-14759-X , p. 208.
  38. ^ For example, Gerhard Rückert, Reinhard Schuler: Concrete poetry in the 5th to 10th school year. Language horizons 21. Text and supplementary booklet. Crüwell / Konkordia, Dortmund 1974.
  39. ↑ Lothar Jegensdorf: Analogies to concrete poetry . In: Praxis Deutsch Heft 5/1974, pp. 45–47; Brandtner: About game and rule. Traces of the design in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops, p. 85.
  40. ↑ Hans Gatti: Students make poetry. A practical report . Herder, Freiburg 1979, ISBN 3-451-09321-9 , p. 28.
  41. ↑ Max Goldt : Jandl knows what he knows . In: Die Welt from October 10, 1989. Quoted from Brandtner: Von Spiel und Regel. Traces of the design in Ernst Jandl's ottos mops, p. 84.
  42. ↑ Ernst Jandl: A best poem . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 11 , p. 184.
  43. ^ Robert Gernhardt: Light poems . Haffmans, Zurich 1997, ISBN 3-251-00366-6 , pp. 128-130.
  44. ↑ Ernst Jandl: Lulu's Pooch . Translated by: Elizabeth MacKiernan. In: Ernst Jandl: Reft and Light . Poems, translated from the German by various American poets. Burning Deck Press, Providence 2000, ISBN 1-886224-34-X , p. 33.
  45. ↑ And the winner is ... on signandsight.com from September 28, 2005.
  46. ↑ Ernst Jandl: A best poem . In: Ernst Jandl: Poetic works. Volume 11 , p. 187.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on June 3, 2010 in this version .