#german language literature

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

*Originally published in German with the title "Die Verwandlung"

[belovedapollo]

books at the bookstore for Franz Kafkas 100th anniversary 🪲 reblog is ok, don’t repost/use

[dark-longings]

Thomas Mann by Philipp Kester, 1906.

[lionofchaeronea]

Every angel means terror--and yet (woe's me) / I sing unto you, you all-but-fatal birds of the soul, / knowing all about you. Jeder Engel ist schrecklich. Und dennoch, weh mir, / ansing ich euch, fast tödliche Vögel der Seele, / wissend um euch. -Rainer Maria Rilke, "Duino Elegies" No. 2

[manouk32]

How can I explain to my friends how much I love analyzing literature? Like…even at school! I just love finding new little thing that foreshadow. Or details that explain the actions of a character. Pretty words that really mean something? It’s literally so fun! It’s like getting to know new people and understand them and their emotions. Understanding what makes them human even though they’re just ink on paper!

[czgif]

Miloš Kopecký and Rudolf Jelínek in The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (Baron Prášil) 1962, dir. Karel Zeman IMDB

[theforeverlearner]

About me

26 years old

Woman

French-Bosnian living in France

Graduated in 2022 with a Master's degree in International and European Law

Currently working full time

I started in September 2024 a second bachelor's degree in Slavistic (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrian, Serbian) – online program.

Languages I speak: French (C2), English (C2), German (C1), Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian (B2)

Languages I would like to learn one day: Spanish, Korean or Mandarin

Current language goals: pass the Goethe Zertifikat C1, pass the TOEIC exam and finish my bachelor in BCMS.

I enjoy reading!

I also practice yoga and I run quite often. I am currently training for a 21km run.

I'm an ENTP type.

Weirdly enough, I have a horrible memory! Makes my life a little bit harder than necessary.

[nympho-scene-boy]

[TRANSLATION BENEATH- Original and English]

Original [german]

Dear Mother

Du bist wie dein Vater

Eines Tages bin ich weg

Dein Vater ist ein schrecklicher, schrecklicher mensch; ohne dich wäre ich nicht mot ihm zusammen, dann wäre ich glücklich

Irgendwann kommst du von der Grundschule nachhause und ich bin nicht mehr da

Eines Tages werde ich einen Müllsack nehmen und alles wegwerfen was dir gehört

Ich hätte dich ja auch auf die Straße werfen können

Du kannst keine Depressionen haben- du hast eine tolle Mutter

Ich habe dich geboren- ich habe das recht dich nackt zu sehen

Sei froh, dass du als Kind nicht misshandelt wurdest; sei dankbar

Wenn du vergisst Gassi zu gehen, werde ich ihn einschläfern, wenn du in der Grundschule bist

Dir gehört nichts, es ist alles meins- ich habe es bezahlt

Geh aus meinen Wohnzimmer

Manchmal habe ich das Gefühl ich habe ein Kind geboren, was nie hätte geboren werden sollen

Sei nicht überrrascht, wenn ich alles packe, was du liebst und nie wieder komme

Weißt du eigentlich wie schlimm es ist, wenn man mich fragt warum meine Tochter keine Kleider trägt?

Solange, du eine Frau bist, musst du die Kühe putzen Ich werde gehen

Translated English

Dear Mother

You are like your father

One day I'll be gone

Your father is a terrible, terrible human, without you, i would never be with him, i would be happy

One day you will come home from elementary school and I won't be there anymore

Some day, I'll take a big trash bag and throw away anything that belongs to you

I could have thrown you out on the streets

You can not have depression- you have an amazing mother

I gave birth to you, I have the right to see your naked body

Be happy that you weren't raped as a child. Be thankful

If you forget to walk the puppy, I'll let the vet put him to sleep while you are in elementary school

You own nothing; it all belongs to me, I paid for it

Leave my living room

Sometimes, I get the feeling that I gave birth to a child who should have never been born

Don't be surprised if I pack all the things you love and ever come back

Do you even know how hard it is when I get asked why my daughter isn't wearing dresses?

As long as you are a woman, you have to clean the kitchen

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

*Originally published in German under the title "Nussknacker und Mausekönig"

[ifyourereadingthisblinktwice]

conflict of sticking with my environmental planning degree plan and a potentially more stable/well paying job vs wanting to go for an arts degree in literature analysis and writing and history and culture because i love it so so much but know it wont be considered ‘useful’. FIGHT

[belovedapollo]

Franz Kafka heaven at the local bookstore (bought two books)

reblog is ok, don’t repost/use

[outstanding-quotes]

Who would take pride in his own diseases, and brag about them too?

Ah, what am I saying? Everybody does it. It’s precisely their diseases that people pride themselves on, and I do— more perhaps than anybody else.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

[lionofchaeronea]

Current poetry reading is The Poetry of Rilke, in a lovely bilingual edition with translations by Edward Snow. I'm pretty pleased with myself--my German has been dormant for longer than I care to admit, yet I was able to resuscitate it quickly enough that I'm actually taking issue with some of Snow's translation choices. (This isn't a slam on him, though. His versions are, for the most part, very fine; and anyway, Rilke--like all truly great poets--defies translation.)

[polysprachig]

*Currently Translating Lord Byron’s “To Thyrza”*

Torn between the urge to explicate and the urge to contextualise, with the thoughts brought forth in the poem’s explication raising questions whose answers can only be found—one hopes—in Byron’s other poems to Thyrza, more broadly his poems on loss and grief, and his chronology of experiences at the time of writing the poem itself. Byron’s letters from October 1811 paint a sombre picture of a lover deserted and a youth shocked by untimely death and dwelling more and more on the one-sided longing that death necessitates, overwhelming him to such an extent that he remarks: “Oft have I born the weight of ill, / But never bent beneath till now!”

The direct and the poetic translations are equally challenging, as the first requires grammatical precision and assigning fair lexical equivalency to all things signified, both within and without the poem, and the second risks boiling rich emotion and expression down to the bone, resulting in a style vaguely reminiscent of German Romanticism and too brief-sounding for Byron’s wordy, yet precise 8-syllable lines.

How can one hope to capture the desperate all-encompassing grief of a lover’s pledge unworn?

Asking for a friend.

From my insta @athenasannexe

[icharchivist]

Wait French grammar is close to Spanish????

Oh man

I think I officially tagged out when we got to the conjugation of verbs in indirect speech. I had Spanish in school and I was fine before that and then it just got wayyyy too much

lmaoooo rip anon

yeah French/Italian/Spanish/I think Portugese too? and a few others latin language, are all built on the same latin root logistic so the grammar works very similarly.

i picked on Italian in middle school but it's more the vocabulary that never stuck, and i picked up Spanish at uni, but same, didn't really stick.

though it means also i can somewhat read Spanish/Italian ahah

Like, English is simpler in term of just writing/grammar. (English's real challenge for Latin rooted language is the fact it's a tonal language, compared to French that's syllabic. Means English's accentuation of the words tend to focus on one syllab as the center of the word to pronounce but the rest will be muted. But that's also something i know English speakers don't realize, hell, i didn't realize either until i started to study English Linguistic and suddenly it made sense why, if you're from a language with more focus on syllabic, English comes off way harder. Point is that the real challenge for a Latin rooted language will be more on prononciation than on grammar. ) So it is easier to pick up when you don't have a native english background, but English to other language will be more challenging.

Conjugaison in French/Spanish/Italian follow similar logistic even in term of how many exceptions you have to remember. mostly because we slap everything on the suffix of the word. English will use modal words to mark various level of intentions, except in past tense. And in French/Spanish/Italian the suffix are also influenced by which pronoun is used (in Italian at least there's also the fact you can drop the pronoun all together if the verb is clear enough in its conjugaison about who you're talking about). And there's also the whole "the language is inherently more gendered so any attempt at a neutral comes with its lot of problem to discuss".

ironically despite being called Latin languages, this specific conjugaison rule doesn't apply to Latin itself, which has the same basis as German: the suffix aren't influenced by the pronouns, but by the role the word has in a sentence.

I picked up a bit of latin in middle school, didn't stick as well but i remember this sticking out.

English is just.... drastically simpler in the sense that conjugaison is stripped to its bare minimum and the pronouns use will do the heavy lifting in a different way. It's just that English is also working on difficult phonetic rules that aren't instinctive to follow, but yeah.

so yeah. rip you anon o7

[further-from-maths]

28th Feb 2024, 12:24

I'm back lol sorry for dropping off the face of this blog. that's what IB does to you I guess

Some very cool things have happened since I was last here in writing. I got all five offers back, and I've accepted a firm and insurance choice to two wonderful places!!! Their creative writing departments were wonderful, and the lecturers at my firm were genuinely inspiring to listen to. To get in, I need a 6 in English, and 36 points overall. I think I can do it. My current goals/predictions are:

HL English LangLit: 6 needed for uni, and I managed it in my one mock since switching up. If I get a 5 I can still get into my insurance just fine, but I REALLY want to get into my first choice if I can.

HL Psychology: 7 is the goal. I really want a 7, and there's no excuse barring a lack of revision to not get one. My psychology department is genuinely incredible, and I've done very well in all my mocks. I really want to make them proud so I'm hoping the essays they give us are kind.

HL Global Politics: 7 suggested by the mocks so far, but I'm not the most confident in my politics abilities. I do want a 7 in it if possible though because I really like my politics teacher and also want to make him proud lmao

SL CompSci: 7 almost certain considering my mock grades thus far. I'm not worried tbh.

SL Maths Analysis: 7 PLEASE Maths is so easy to revise and it's easy points!!

AB German: 6 is probably more realistic than a 7 because too many minor slip ups can sink the grade completely, but I really want a 7 too.

Core: 2 is what I'm expecting tbh. My EE and TOK were both fine but I don't think they were WOW yk. I'm expecting a B for my EE hopefully and a B for my TOK, but if I've made my corrections well then hugely maybe I can get an A, which would give 3 points????? That's assuming my EE is in fact B-worthy which I really have no clue about.

Obviously I want to get as high as I can, but if I get a minimum of a 6 in everything, that's still more than enough with Core. I know I'm extremely likely to get a 7 in at least CompSci, so at a minimum I'm thinking I'll get 39 unless core flops?? My goal is to get over 40 though:))))

I'm terrified of making some kind of mistake that gets me disqualified. I know that's irrational but the fear is still there. My English teacher kinda spooked me by saying someone once failed their diploma because they didn't put page numbers in their EE so uh.......................... woooooooo. I'malso terrified about AI writing affeciting me. I haven't touched AI for anything I've done for school ever, but I'm nervous that the AI checker will be bad:( And what if I haven't cited something correctly?????? aaaaaaaaaaaa:(((((((((( Also as a heads up, for this exact reason, I won't be liveblogging my exams lol. I don't want to risk saying anything I'm not supposed to regarding the exams, so I'll make notes and post about them after results day or so. If I post anything during exam season, it'll probably be good-luck posts and nothing more lmao.

We've finished content in pretty much every subject now, which is exciting!! IAs are nearly done -- just waiting for final confirmation that a handful of them are ready for submission, and I've got my computer science IA to finish correcting. The end is scarily close.

Feeling terrified, but as long as I keep my head down and work hard, it'll be alright. Less than 11 weeks left. Let’s do this.

75 days until.