The Owl and the Pussy-cat

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The Owl and the Pussy-cat , in German translation as Der Eul und die Miezekatz , Eulerich und Miezekatz or also Der Kauz und die Katzen , is a nonsense poem by Edward Lear, first published in 1870 . It is one of the most famous poems in the English language today.

The Owl and the Pussy-cat
Edward Lear The Owl and the Pussy Cat 1.jpg

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
'O lovely pussy! O pussy my love,
What a beautiful pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful pussy you are! '

Edward Lear The Owl and the Pussy Cat 2.jpg

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring? '
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the bong tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

Edward Lear The Owl and the Pussy Cat 3.jpg

'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring? ' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

content

The three stanzas of the poem tell of the love between an owl and a kitty . The unusual couple pack some honey and a lot of money and set sail in a pea-green boat . After the owl has charmed the kitten, the beautiful kitten, with the guitar, the two decide to get married, but they do not have a ring . Therefore, they head for the land where the "Bong-tree" grows, buy a pig 's nose ring , and will be married in the third verse of a turkey. To the marriage they eat mince (a kind of hash ) and quince , with a "runziblen" ( "runcible") spoon, and finally dancing in the moonlight on the beach, holding hands.

Origin and context of the work

Lear wrote the poem in December 1867, which he spent like the two previous winters in Cannes in the south of France . He wrote it for the then three-year-old Janet Symonds, the daughter of the art historian John Addington Symonds and his wife Catherine Symonds (who had known the poet since she was a child); like Lear, the Symonds family spent the winter on the Côte d'Azur . On December 14th, Lear noted in his diary that little Janet was not well, and in general "everything is sad" ('Their little girl is unwell - & all is sad.') , Then on the 18th of the month that he was her to cheer an illustrated poem ( 'picture poem') wrote - namely the Owl and the pussy-cat . The whereabouts of this manuscript has remained unclear since it was auctioned by Janet Vaughan (a niece of Janet Symonds') in 1937 for the benefit of the Red Cross service in the Spanish Civil War . At least the illustrations from Lear's pen have been preserved for posterity, as they were reproduced in 1911 in the Queery Leary Nonsense selected edition by Lady Constance Strachey (a daughter-in-law of Catherine Symonds) . The Owl and the Pussy-Cat first appeared in print in 1870 in the American magazine Young Folks , which was tailored to children and young people , and a year later it was also published in Great Britain in Lear's first anthology Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets , here prominently the first of the poems and stories gathered in it.

In Lear's posthumous writings there is an unfinished draft for a continuation of the poem, which tells of the descendants of the couple in love; it was first published in 1938 under the title The Children of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat by Lear's biographer Angus Davidson. Accordingly, the couple's sons are more owl-like, while the daughters are more like cats, but they all prefer to eat mice. You live with the now widowed owl father on the east coast of Calabria .

reception

Popularity in the UK and beyond

The Owl and the Pussy-cat is one of the most famous and popular works in English literature today ; According to a survey conducted on National Poetry Day in 2014, it is the most popular nursery rhyme in the UK , ahead of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star , Humpty Dumpty and Jabberwocky . But it is also popular with older semesters and is often recited, especially at weddings. It is known that the Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito was able to recite the poem by heart in passable English while still completely drunk.

The poem has already been translated or transcribed into more than 100 languages. Lears' German translators include Grete Fischer ( Der Eul und die Miezekatz , 1965), Hans Magnus Enzensberger ( Der Kauz und das Kitten , 1977) and Josef Guggenmos ( Eulerich and Miezekatz , 1978). Le Hibou et le Poussiquette , a free translation into French by Francis Steegmuller , became an unexpected bestseller in the United States (but not in France) in 1961 and earned Steegmuller, previously known primarily as a Flaubert specialist, enough royalties to buy one Rolls-Royce to grow. This version differs in some details from the original, for example the lovers' boat is not pea green, but canary yellow , and instead of a five-pound note they wrap their money in a letter of credit , but like Lear they dance at the end au clair de la lune .

Literary arrangements: parodies, sequels and prequels

A parody of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat can be found in Lewis Carroll's Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ("Alice in Wonderland"). Caroll and Lear, the two outstanding representatives of English nonsense literature, succeeded around the same time, but apparently kept their distance from one another. Although they sometimes associated with the same circles (especially among the Pre-Raphaelites ), there is no evidence that the two ever met, and it is striking that they do not mention each other in their collected writings. The poem 'Tis the Voice of the Lobster' , which Alice recited in chapter 10 to her own amazement at the griffin and the “false turtle” - actually the griffin had asked her, 'Tis the Voice of the Sluggard', may represent a cloaked reference to recite, one of the most famous of the notoriously humorless and morally acidic works of the hymn poet Isaac Watts (1674–1748), but instead Alice hears herself recite very strange verses about a vain lobster who finds sharks obnoxious, but only dares to do it at low tide say. In the first edition of Alice's Adventures from 1865, Alice breaks off her lecture after the first two lines of the second stanza, which in this original version still tell of an owl and an oyster gathering in the garden of the lobster and eating a pie together ; In the seventh edition of 1886, Caroll replaced and added a few lines at this point that show some similarities to The Owl and the Pussy-Cat , whereby it is particularly noticeable that the owl no longer shares its meal with an oyster, but with it a panther, i.e. a particularly formidable kitty (in the following translation by Christian Enzensberger , which is otherwise true to the original, a leu ):

I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
while the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon;
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
and concluded the banquet by ---

I once visited him: behind a wallpaper
the
owl was eating a pie with the lei : the leu ate meat, crust and sauce,
and the owl had the empty bowl as a consolation.
The pie was gone and the leu was generous:
he bequeathed the fork to the owl as a reminder;
He picked up the knife himself, and then, with pardauz!
If he concluded the meal cheerfully with the ---

Numerous other authors have taken up and embellished Lear's reverie about the owl and the kitty, including Beatrix Potter and Julia Donaldson, two of the most successful British children's book authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. In her story The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (1930), Potter explained how the pig came to the land where the bong tree grows: it is kidnapped on a sailing ship and intended for slaughter, but escapes the saucepan with it Help a friendly ship's cat and flees board in a dinghy. Donaldson, who is best known in Germany for her books about the “ Gruffalo ”, reported in The Further Adventures of the Owl and the Pussy-cat (2013) about the adventures that the newlyweds still have to endure after the wedding as you Wedding ring is stolen; On the hunt for the thief, Eulerich and Kitty encounter several characters from Lear's other poems, including the dong with the shining nose and the bogey who has no toes. Eric Idle (known as a member of the comedian comedy Monty Python ) described further or other heroic deeds of the newlyweds in The Quite Remarkable Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat , published in 1996 as a children's book as well as an audio book with vocal interludes by Idle himself and program music by John Du Prez .

Settings

Lear's poem was set to music several times. There are, among other things, the working of Mátyás Seiber (1953) and Igor Stravinsky in twelve-tone held Arrangement for flute, guitar and cello along with chant (1967), at the same time (that is, his "his last composition Swan Song ") represents.

The performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson set the Lear poem to music and put it as the song "Beautiful Pea Green Boat" on the first position of the B-side of her album "Bright Red" called "Tightrope".

The Royal Opera House commissioned an opera version to mark Edward Lear's 200th birthday. The libretto was written by comedian Terry Jones (also once a member of Monty Python), the music by Anne Dudley . The work was premiered in the summer of 2012 as part of the cultural program of the Summer Olympics on a ship cruising the Thames .

literature

expenditure

The Owl and the Pussy-cat can be found in the extensively annotated modern standard edition of Lear's poems:

  • Edward Lear: The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense. Edited by Vivien Noakes. Allen Lane, London 2001; New paperback edition entitled The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse . Penguin, London 2002.

The translations of the poem into German include:

  • The owl and the kitty . Translated by Grete Fischer. In: “How nice to know Mr. Lear.” Rhymes and stories by Edward Lear . Heimeran Verlag, Munich 1965.
  • The owl and the kitten . "Smuggled into German" [sic] by Hans Magnus Enzensberger . In: Edward Lear's Complete Nonsense: Limericks, Songs, Ballads, and Stories . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1977.
  • Eulerich and Miezekatz . Translated by Josef Guggenmos , with illustrations by Gwen Fulton. Sauerländer, Aarau and Frankfurt am Main 1978, ISBN 3794116623 .

Secondary literature

  • Kay Harel: A Natural History of "The Owl and the Pussycat" . In: Southwest Review 100: 4, 2015, pp. 481-492. ( Text online on the poems.com website)
  • Hugh Haughton: Edward Lear and 'The Fiddlediddlety of Representation' . In: Matthew Bevis (Ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry . Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 2013, pp. 351-369, ISBN 9780199576463 .
  • Augustus A. Imholtz, Jr .: The Owl and the Panther: Lewis Carroll's Parody of Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussy Cat . In: Jabberwocky: The Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society 12: 3, 1983, pp. 62-65.
  • Daniel Karlin: 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat', and other Poems of Love and Marriage . In: Matthew Bevis and James Williams (Eds.): Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2016, pp. 202-222, ISBN 9780198708568 .

Web links

Wikisource: The Owl and the Pussycat  - Sources and full texts (English)
Commons : The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jenny Uglow : Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense . Faber & Faber, London 2017, pp. 375–378.
  2. ^ Angus Davidson: Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet . John Murray, London 1938, pp. 247-248.
  3. ^ Rebecca Smithers, The Owl and the Pussycat voted most popular childhood poem . In: The Guardian (online edition), October 2, 2014.
  4. ↑ Jenny Uglow: Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense . Faber & Faber, London 2017, p. 378.
  5. ^ Fitzroy Mclean: The Heretic: The Life and Times of Josip Broz-Tito . Harper, New York 1957, p. 222.
  6. ↑ Lewis Carroll : Alice in Wonderland . Translated into German by Christian Enzensberger . Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973 [first edition 1963], p. 108.
  7. ↑ Laurie Anderson: Bright Red / Tightrope . Warner Bros. Records Inc. 1994, 9362-455334-2, WE 833.
  8. ^ The Owl and the Pussycat on the Royal Opera House website , accessed August 2, 2018.
  9. ↑ Stuart Jeffreys: Terry Jones: The Python, The Owl and the Pussycat . In: The Guardian (online edition), July 24, 2012.