In »Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagony« (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1930), Brecht used a German proverb, “Wie man sich bettet, so liegt man” (as you make your bed, so you must lie in it), as the basis for the rousingly cynical first-act finale, “Denn wie man sich bettet” (text and translation, with a clip of a Lotte Lenya performance). Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti posts the chorus with two published translations and his own (he confusingly calls it “Jenny’s Song,” which normally refers to this song from Threepenny Opera):
Denn wie man sich bettet, so liegt man,
Es deckt einen da keiner zu
Und wenn einer tritt, dann bin ich es,
Und wird einer getreten, dann bist’s du.
tr. H.R. Hays:
As you make your bed you must lie
And no one denies it’s true
And if anyone does any stepping, that’s me,
And when anyone’s stepped on, that’s you.
tr. W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman:
As you make your bed, so you lie on it,
The bed can be old or brand-new;
So if someone must kick, why, that’s my part
And another get kicked, that part’s for you!
He writes, “The insistence on rhyme obscures the meaning of Brecht’s German in these translations” and says he thinks the lines mean:
For as you make your bed, so must you lie,
And no one tucks anyone in there
And if anyone kicks, then I’m the one,
And if anyone gets kicked, then it’s you.
So my question to German-speakers is, is he right? Does “Es deckt einen da keiner zu” mean “And no one tucks anyone in there”?
Close enough. I’d translate it as “there’s no one to tuck you in”. “No one tucks anyone in there” puts too much emphasis on “einer” and “da”.
Yeah, the second lines of both of the poetic translations are complete inventions, trying to rhyme the final you. Gilleland’s translation is not particularly idiomatic, but it has the right meaning.
I wondered whether German deck might be cognate to native English tuck, but it appears not. It turns out that tuck is a doublet of tug, while the native cognate of deck was lost in early Middle English. The modern English senses of deck (meaning “cover” as a verb and the specific top covering of a watergoing vessel) were reimported from Dutch.
Google translate has it as “Nobody covers you up there,” and the wiktionary entry for “decken” says not only “to cover” but “as with a blanket,” although the entry for “zudecken” is not so specific. The remaining question is whether “tuck in” is a good idiomatic rendering or whether it adds a somewhat cutesy-wutesy vibe not present in the German, but I lack competence to answer that.
That’s what I was wondering; zudecken seemed to me to mean simply ‘cover up,’ but I Am Not a Germanophone (I just played one in grad school).
Zudecken = put a blanket or suchlike on top of. Not available for covering up a scandal. “Tuck in” seems fine to me in this context.
Treten does not overlap with “step” much; “kick” is correct here.
Also, there’s no “must” there. You lie in bed the way you make your bed, both of them habitually (as well as in the future – “so you will lie” isn’t wrong).
Som man reder, så ligger man. Annoyingly I can’t think of a simple verb with the sense of zudecken. The cognate/calque is tildække, but that means ‘cover up’. Talking-to-children Danish has putte, though.
BTW, sich betten doesn’t occur outside this saying. If invented today it would probably have wie man sich das Bett macht.
Interesting!
I agree with J.W. that „tuck in“ is too maternal sounding if not outright cutesy-wutsey. You can „zudecken“ a homeless man lying shivering in an alley, you wouldn’t „tuck him in“.
People give up too early on rhyme. So what if it’s endemic in English-language verse over recent centuries? To give it lowest priority in translating a rhymed text is surely a reactionary default.
The way you make your bed is how you lie;
There’s none to tuck us in or smooth the sheet.
If someone kicks, be sure it’s only me:
If you’re there too you’d best avoid my feet.
That’s frankly great. Interestingly, you’ve sacrificed more of the (not quite consistent) meter than all three of the other translation attempts.
Thanks David. I often feel compelled to “rectify” the metre. I secretly don’t want any reader to attribute the waywardness to me! I’d curb any over-rectification in a long translation, where strict regularity would be a detriment. But I’m comfortable with it in a quatrain, if strict English pentameters are hard to improve on.
I don’t quite follow the argument about homeless people, or insofar as I do I see the conclusion as exactly the opposite. Zudecken translates to both “tuck in” and “cover up”. In this context I’d pick tuck in. I wouldn’t use the word cutesy to describe that, but that it’s a little more personal seems to be rather the point?
hura Noetica!
and for comparative purposes:
af yidish, דעקן צו [dekn tsu] does exist, but ‘tuck in’ is דעקן אײַן [dekn ayn], despite the fact that as a noun צודעק [tsudek] is a blanket/bedspread. and the construction in the first line is (i think) still alive, if not common, though i know it mainly from idioms and proverbs – for instance: װי עס קריסטלט זיך, אַזױ ייִדלט זיך [vi es kristlt zikh, azoy yidlt zikh] “how folks christian is how folks jew”, or more conventionally, “as the christians do, so the jews do”.
Mahagonny is one of my favorite 20th-century operas. For what it’s worth, the translation in the libretto that accompanied the classic 1956 recording conducted by Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg, with Lotte Lenya as Jenny (not the same as the version on the Berlin Theater Songs album, which you linked to), is
The translation is credited to someone named Guy Stern, otherwise unknown to me.
He got the line right!
My instinct is to use our household’s domestic noun/verb “foomp”, onoamtopoeia for “snapping something open”, used here in one of its primary meanings as “the sound of bedclothes being flicked by someone standing to cover the bed in one go, especially while a beneficiary of this action lies somnolent and about to be covered in perfect blanketry all at once drifting down from above”. I think this term is sufficiently neutral, despite my rhapsodies (you can also use about unfurling a tarp or expanding a plastic produce bag and/or kitchen garbage bag, both of which startle the cat a lot more than quilt-foomping does) that I would use it on, say, a tarp used as primitive shelter on someone else’s behalf.
So lie down in bed as you’ve made it
There’s no one to foomp you the quilt.
You kicking me shows you’re scornful
And me kicking you proves your guilt.
Hat:
He got the line right!
Really? I would have thought this Stern version was nothing but a literal non-metrical translation, to help listeners to the record follow the German as it was sung (“the translation in the libretto that accompanied the classic 1956 recording conducted by Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg”, writes MEL). Again, for convenient comparison:
For as you make your bed, so you will lie;
there’s no one to cover you there,
and if someone’s going to kick, it’ll be me
and if someone’s getting kicked, it’ll be you.
Guy Stern was at University of Cincinnati when he published this later version:
Take care of yourself – and you’re cared for
Wait for help – and wait till you’re blue.
So if someone kicks, it is me, dear
And if someone’s getting kicked, it is you!
[Stern, Guy and Conard, Robert C. (1969) “Brecht, Loerke, Lichtenstein: Three German Poets of the Twenties,” University of Dayton Review Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 4.]
Further from the surface meaning of the original. Far more consideration of metre – and it rhymes, in the correct places. I would adjust it like this:
Take | care of your|self and you’re | cared for;
Wait for | help – and you’ll | wait till you’re | blue.
If | anyone’s | kicking, it’s | me dear –
And if | anyone’s | kicked then it’s | you!
Nine-syllable three-stress lines.
Here’s the unattributed rhymed version sung by Dave Van Ronk (see Hat’s third link in the original post), with its more strained three-stress lines (up to eleven syllables):
We | all make the | bed we must | lie in,
And | tuck ourselves | into it, | too.
And if | somebody | kicks, that will be | me, dear,
And if | someone gets | kicked, that will be | you.
I listened to the singing of Lotte Lenya at the same link, and found it rhythmically complex and ambiguous. Here’s another Lotte Lenya version: beautiful, exquisitely clear, and bringing out a pentametric structure in the German. Her German text varies slightly from the version appearing in this thread. Others do too. In Stern’s 1969 piece, for example:
“… dann bist du’s!”
as opposed to this, which is better for rhyme:
“… dann bist’s du.”
We’d want a full investigation of the Weill and Brecht texts, of which there may be several. Looking at (and listening to) what precedes and follows our four-line sample, I found much rhyme and a good deal of metrical variation; but clusters of lines mostly have the same number of stresses.
Earthtopus:
That’s the spirit! I thought of “quilt” too. But every rhyme with it seemed forced so I abandoned it.
Really? I would have thought this Stern version was nothing but a literal non-metrical translation
Yes, and? He got the line right, unlike the ones quoted in the post. Not everything is about poetry.
Hmmm. bist’s du is required (not merely better) for the rhyme, but /st͡sd/ takes so long to say it gets us into выспрь быстро territory, i.e. it stretches the meter close to the breaking point.
Hat:
Yes, and? He got the line right, unlike the ones quoted in the post. Not everything is about poetry.
Aha! Looking hard at that, it still took me a while to realise that I had missed the point you had earlier wanted to communicate. I disambiguated the wrong way, without perceiving the ambiguity.
David M:
Hmmm. bist’s du is required (not merely better) for the rhyme, …
Yes it is required, if full rhyme is the aim. The enclosing text has instances of half rhyme (and textual variations, as I note above, that have metrical implications). We can’t know what Brecht, Weill, and others were thinking, or when. It could be that improvements were discovered in rehearsal and performance.
/st͡sd/ […] stretches the meter close to the breaking point.
Sandhified in performance, of course. The metre? Complex and problematic anyway. Broken already, some might say. Perhaps that’s aimed at also; the two Lotte Lenya performances I listened to drop the odd one-syllable word and alter other wording. Stressing in the recording that I link just above (1930, same year as the first performance of Mahoganny) is very marked and deliberate – as if the singer was wrestling with a metrical hydra.
I assume full rhyme is the aim because there’s no tradition of assonance as a stylistic choice in German. Rhymes are expected to be exact; inexact rhymes can sometimes be excused as humoristic, but even that is rare.
And indeed, in the text and the performance linked to above at “text and translation“, every rhyme is exact, even if the catastrophic misspellings obscure that. The scheme is A-B-C-B-D-E-F-G-F and so on:
Wort – Ort, mir – Tier, zu – du, Gesicht – nicht, gesagt – gefragt
Not at all in this performance, and it’s hard to imagine how that could be done in any other. Indeed, my dialect, which apo- and syncopates much more heavily than even the most poetic Standard accents, actually does the opposite and inserts a vowel into bist’s – but that inserts a syllable and would break the meter in a place where the tune can’t cover it up.
(BTW, Lenya’s accent is artificial. It combines features that aren’t found together, plus a few epenthetic vowels – liegt [ə] man, un[də] w- – that are found nowhere at all. But none of this affects the rhyming words.)
True in the sense that there are plenty of places that are occupied by one or two syllables in different lines. But those are places where the tune can accommodate that without falling apart into a long sequence of staccato. Four unstressed syllables in a row for -ten, dann bist es would be too much in that place; three, plus a ‘s that is really phonetically syllabic, is already stretching it.
David M:
Thanks for that analysis. I’m curious about differing perceptions of the /st͡sd/. Listening to the line at this precise location in the 1930 performance I definitely hear some elision. Don’t you? As for rhyme, I agree that full rhyme would appear to be the norm. But the “-agt” rhyme is supplemented by adjunctive non-structural weak half rhymes that do not seem accidental. They add coherence. I mark relevant lines with bold, in this text that I took from some other source (accurate, I hope):
Meine Herren, meine Mutter prägte
Auf mich einst ein schlimmes Wort:
Ich würde enden im Schauhaus
Oder an einem noch schlimmern Ort.
Ja, so ein Wort, das ist leicht gesagt,
Aber ich sage euch: Daraus wird nichts!
Das könnt ihr nicht machen mit mir!
Was aus mir noch wird, das werdet ihr schon sehen!
Ein Mensch ist kein Tier!
Denn wie man sich bettet, so liegt man
Es deckt einen da keiner zu
Und wenn einer tritt, dann bin ich es
Und wird einer getreten, dann bist’s du.
Meine Herren, mein Freund, der sagte
Mir damals ins Gesicht:
“Das Größte auf Erden ist Liebe”
Und “An morgen denkt man da nicht.”
Ja, Liebe, das ist leicht gesagt:
Aber wenn man täglich älter wird
Da wird nicht nach Liebe gefragt
Da muß man seine kurze Zeit benützen
Ein Mensch ist kein Tier!
Rhymes are expected to be exact; inexact rhymes can sometimes be excused as humoristic, but even that is rare.
I had not expected Brecht to conform closely to such expectations (see here for example), and our text is surely “humoristic”.
No, I hear a different word order: dann bist du’s. Avoidance of the difficult cluster at the expense of the rhyme.
(Both dann bist du es and dann bist es du are equally grammatical; they don’t even differ in emphasis.)
prägte – gesagt: /eːgtɛ/ is different enough from /aːgt/ that it doesn’t even hint at a rhyme. In principle the repeated /gt/ cluster could be Russian-style assonance, but then I’d expect it to occur a lot more often than only twice in five lines, and there’s no tradition of doing this in German – few if any in the intended audience would have noticed.
sagte – gesagt: obviously these are similar enough to notice, but I think this is either a coincidence or a deliberate repetition of the same word (“he said / that’s easily said”) with no regard to how it sounds.
That’s interesting. überschwemmte – Hemde actually works for me because I have a /t/ in Hemd, Spaß has a short vowel throughout northern Germany (so Spaße – fasse works there), and -trick – Republik works in most accents, but the others don’t work in any Standard accent I can think of. Many of the consonantal examples work in various nonstandard accents, but others are so far off I’d really need to see the context to form an opinion on whether they were even intended as rhymes!
Hardly. It’s far from reim dich, oder ich fress dich.
David M:
No, I hear a different word order: dann bist du’s. Avoidance of the difficult cluster at the expense of the rhyme.
Heh, I hear that only as du. But it can’t be both ways, can it? If it’s du’s then we clearly do have a half rhyme, where surely some sort of rhyme is expected (and duly achieved, in the /st͡sd/ variant).
(In passing I note my spelling error above: Mahagonny, not Mahoganny.)
… and there’s no tradition of doing this in German – few if any in the intended audience would have noticed.
The way I made the point it was carefully attenuated: “non-structural weak half rhymes that do not seem accidental”. In my own work with verse I include recherché features that I’m sure very few would notice, but they have cumulative or auxiliary effect. Brecht was, as far as I can see, far from a conventional crafter of verse. He was certainly experimental and eclectic just as Weill was: “Brecht’s critics have frequently castigated him for his unabashed eclecticism” (Sonnenfeld, Albert, “The functions of Brecht’s eclecticism” Books Abroad Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring, 1962, pp. 134–138).
Hardly [humoristic].
Depends on what you mean by the term, which I take as extending well beyond “frivolous, light, and funny”. Apparently Mahagonny played in my own home metropolis this very year. “Brecht and [Elisabeth] Hauptmann’s use of projected text, short and juxtaposed scenes and a sense of anarchic humour is as fresh as ever … this production offers me an opportunity to bring it front and centre,” the director observed.
As another example
Lied der Mutter Courage:
Mit Wein von Leibs- und Geistesnot. 16
Doch sind sie satt, habt meinen Segen 19
Von Ulm nach Metz, von Metz nach Mähren! 33
3 lines out of 56, no half rhyme or assonance pattern I can see in other places.
For how you make your bed is how you lie
And no one tucks you in there
And when someone kicks, then it’s me,
And when someone gets kicked, then it’s you.
What I hear is “dann bis du’s”. In fact, presented with “dann bist’s du”, any good actor or singer would either change it automatically to the more natural “bis du’s”, or, if they are working in close collaboration with the author, they would protest against such an unpronounceable text.
As to what counts as pure rhyme in German: traditionally, rounded front vowels rhyme with unrounded front vowels, and long vowels rhyme with short ones. In Goethe’s Faust you find examples on almost every page. Rilke, on the other hand, seems to have avoided these kinds of rhymes, at least I couldn’t find any example.
Spaß can indeed be pronounced with a short vowel, but that’s a very colloquial pronunciation, almost dialect, and it doesn’t apply to inflected forms like Spaße (which in contemporary German is an almost obsolete form).
Rhyming überschwemmte with Hemde sounds very odd to me.
OTOH, getting back to Goethe, in an early poem (“Ach wie sehn ich mich nach dir”) he rhymed “erleide” with “streite”. It’s perhaps no accident that it wasn’t printed in his lifetime.
Guy Stern was a really interesting guy. He’s apparently still alive at 100, the last of the World War Ii “Ritchie Boys,” native German speakers* who did military intelligence for the United States.
* I am not sure whether the he’s actually the last of anyone trained for military intelligence at Camp Ritchie, or just the German-speaking (mostly Jewish) ones. Wikipedia’s list of Ritchie Boys includes other literary figures like Lloyd Alexander, Leon Edel, Ib Melchior, and Donald Shively alongside the German refugees.
No – as I said: either the meter gets stretched by a rather extreme consonant cluster, or the rhyme is compromised.
Yes (for the historical reason that the rounded ones have been unrounded in at least half the dialects).
…That’s news to me, and we read much of Faust in school. Do you have an example?
Oh, that’s interesting. Finding Spass in the north and Spaß in the south (or so it seemed to me, in a very handwavy way), with the word not being native in the south, I figured the long vowel was maybe just a spelling-pronunciation in pre-reform spelling (i.e. Spaß regardless of vowel length).
Ah, Inderior German Gonsonant Weagening, characteristic of Frankfurt.
Perhaps, but the famous neige / schmerzensreiche rhyme is in Faust…
David M:
No – as I said: either the meter gets stretched by a rather extreme consonant cluster, or the rhyme is compromised.
Ah, I was hoping that the more pointed meaning in the wording that I later silently regretted as ambiguous (in bold, below) would be more salient:
• Heh, I hear that only as du. But it can’t be both ways, can it? If it’s du’s then we clearly do have a half rhyme, where surely some sort of rhyme is expected (and duly achieved, in the /st͡sd/ variant).
You had seemed to want it both ways: Brecht uses only full rhymes structurally; and his text permits du’s as a compromised (half) rhyme for zu, where a structural rhyme is clearly intended.
Faust I, line 4012/3:
Line 4111-4113:
Heine rhymes Zauberstück with Musik (“Ja freilich bis du mein Ideal” in Neue Gedichte) and Offiz with Schlitz (“Der Ex-Nachtwächter” in Romanzero).
Yes, but I think it is no accident that this is spoken by simple, uneducated Margarethe (and not Faust or Mephistopheles).
That’s interesting about the length-ignoring rhymes. They sound plain wrong to me. I wonder if Goethe’s intended accent had generalized the lengthening of monosyllabic words to unstressed words/separated verb prefixes – they do get secondary stress from the meter here. I also wonder if Heine actually had short vowels in Musik and Offiz – long vowels preceding /k/ or /t͡s/ aren’t native, and might have been borrowed later than these words; I still have a short one in Republik.
(…In case anyone is wondering, Offiz promptly died out again.)
Good point.
No. I said there are only full rhymes in the text as written, and I said that I had expected that. I did not say anything, other than stating the same expectation, about the entire rest of Brecht’s work. (And indeed, above there’s now a long list of examples of improper rhymes, barely-even-rhymes and not-sure-if-even-intended-as-rhymes.)
What does that mean? The text has bist’s du. What Brecht may or may not have thought of a performance that used bist du’s contrary to the text, I have no idea.
David M, earlier I said:
“You had seemed to want it both ways: Brecht uses only full rhymes structurally; …”
You now comment:
“No. I said there are only full rhymes in the text as written, and I said that I had expected that. …”
But as I have pointed out, the text varies here and there: both as written and as sung. And you had earlier in this thread said: “Hmmm. bist’s du is required (not merely better) for the rhyme, …”. Given these facts, I thought my cautious “you had seemed” was fair enough, hardly warranting a less-than-cautious “No.”
I continued:
“… and his text permits du’s as a compromised (half) rhyme for zu, where a structural rhyme is clearly intended.”
And you commented:
“What does that mean? The text has bist’s du. What Brecht may or may not have thought of a performance that used bist du’s contrary to the text, I have no idea.”
Given the uncertain boundaries of “the text”, I wrote “permits”. Again, that’s me being cautious and acknowledging fluidity. In fact we do have a written text with “dann bist du’s”. Several, in fact. I quoted one above, with full citation details (the Stern 1969 piece). After doing that I said:
“We’d want a full investigation of the Weill and Brecht texts, of which there may be several.”
Indeed we would – and we’d need a good look at Weill’s score too, which in the variants I consulted has “bist du’s“. (And the score seems always to be headed “Jennys Song”, “Jennys Lied”, or so, which I mention because Hat writes, in the original post, “he confusingly calls it “Jenny’s Song”.)
(All that is solid melts into airs.)
(And the score seems always to be headed “Jennys Song”, “Jennys Lied”, or so, which I mention because Hat writes, in the original post, “he confusingly calls it “Jenny’s Song”.)
Ah well, I am no Brechtian, and I cheerfully withdraw my accusation of confusativity.
If Heine had a short vowel in Musik, it would have been the local (Düsseldorf) dialect form [‘mʊzɪk], with two short vowels and accent on the first syllable. That’s metrically impossible, and Heine never used dialect, anyway. The long [iː] ist standard in Germany, I guess imported from French (and Heine lived in France for the greater part of his life).
I doubt it. This would have sounded unnatural, something Goethe hated. He famously complained about the over-use of commas in German, misleading actors to make unnatural pauses (this quote makes you wonder about the quality of the actors available in Weimar). But he may have been lead to accept these rhymes by the spelling: in these cases the short vowel is followed by a single consonant letter, and not two or a group of consonants. He may have thought for example gethan and an rhymed because the syllable codas were spelled alike. Just like one of the Grimms (I forgot which one), who thought the word Fisch consisted of five sounds.
Two further examples from Goethe: offenbart – Art (“Freudig war, vor vielen Jahren”, 1820) and heran – gethan (“Wie man nur so leben mag”, 1820).
Another curious example from Heine: Eisenspor’n (with a syncopated Schwa) – Horn (“Die Ilse”, one of the Harzreise poems.
As I said earlier, Rilke seems to avoid any such rhymes (even the traditional rhyming of round und unrounded front vowels). But I accidentally found one odd rhyme: Gesetz – Estaminets (“Quai de Rosaires”). Considering that RIlke was fluent in French, the implied pronunciation of Estaminets is odd.
Ah, sorry! I didn’t click on most of the links, but should have.
Not in matters of intonation…
I’m too far from the Rhine to even know which of these historically has the long and which the short vowel. I have a total merger of */ar/ and */aːr/ into /aː/.
As it happens, Austrian Standard German carries over a word-final lenition phenomenon of Central Bavarian; this is blocked by preceding present or former consonants, so Art does have a /t/, but the 3sg ending -t was still preceded by a vowel when that sound shift hit, so it has become /d/, and the rhyme doesn’t work for that reason. But obviously none of this applies to Goethe or Heine (or Rilke or Brecht).
offenbart quite naturally has the same long vowel as the infinitive offenbaren, whereas Art normally has a short vowel.
Offiz is a shortening of “(Heiliges) Officium” (showing Heine’s disrespect towards such an arch-catholic reactionary institution), and the latter in German pronunciation will have a long i because it’s in an accented open syllable (the only ones who would have disagreed being those teachers of Latin who actually tried to teach their students the proper Latin quantities — in other words, pedants). A short i in Offiz would needlessly obscure the derivation from Officium.
With a very small number of exceptions, notably Haken.