old high german

after my second collection went to the publisher i’ve turned my eye toward finishing a couple other book projects, so not as much poetry writing of late, but the dry spell is broken momentarily as the new verse review just put out my translation of a fragmentary versification of the ‘christ and the samaritan woman’ scene from the gospels worked up in old high german verse likely in the 9th century. the general dialect (alemanic) is the same as where one of my maternal ancestral lines is from.

the meter has internal rhyme, which felt very clunky to me at first, but it’s grown on me somewhat. it was weirder when i found out about b/c my years of learning about dead germanic languages tended to assert that any rhyme in this literature was an import or quirky experiment. but plenty of old high german is written in this way, and before latin started rhyming regularly. huh.

anyway, maybe you’ll enjoy it. 🙂

the little chapbook i never thought would see the light of day has indeed done it. begalende (old english for “singing/chanting ’round”) is a small digital chapbook of my verse translations of “charms” or “spells” found in old english, old high german, and old saxon manuscripts.

these texts (called “galdru” in old english) are strange ducks, landing somewhere between story, prayer, and recipe, what we now call—with little precision—magic. but they were also passed down (almost surely in each case) by christian monastics. the apparent paradox may not really be such, given the time period. that is, the strangeness, i conjecture, is more about these being “pre-modern” than being “pagan.” (if you want a good study of this basic view, see here.) they reflect a time when human minds and bodies were understood to be much more “porous” to their environments—things like “elf shot” could get you on any day of the week!

the texts translated here are a fun and bizarre time capsule of human experience, and you can download the book free from ghost city press right here. (tho’ any funds you may want to donate come straight to me, which is kind of them.)

happy reading!

Jacob Riyeff

new translation of old high german fragment in _new verse review_

freely downloadable microchap _begalende_ out from ghost city press