Der Spatz in der Hand: Fabeln und Verse
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Issue Date
1971
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Book, Whole
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Abstract
I have tried to give a more objective account of this fine little book in the listing for the first edition in 1971. This book formed the stuff of my delightful long discussions with Sabine Obermaier in Mainz in summer of 2007. We found Schnurre fun, stimulating, insightful. I marked up this copy of the second edition abundantly with questions and observations. We learned early to take Schnurre's titles seriously: they often are crucial to the joke or point of a piece. There is a mixture here of verse and prose. We concentrated on the fables, that is, the prose. I marked the best with an asterisk. Let me mention a few samples here. A silver fox greets a furrier (12). Are you nuts? calls the hedgehog. The silver fox whisks a bit of dust from his fur and answers But he has brought me to respect and dignities. Schnurre's apt title is Der Gemanagte (12). Government and the media have managed this fox well! A wren discovers with horror that he has raised a cuckoo. There are two possibilities, he thinks with a shiver. Either Ella has given birth to the Messias or she has been unfaithful to me (14). Guess which of the two possibilities is more likely! Die geregelte Ausnahme (24) has a gazelle run from but then caught by a troop of hyenas. She is now in their jaws and horrified. But I thought nature had declared that you devour only the dead. The hyenas shrug their shoulders and ask Who says that we are going to violate this rule? In other words, they will wait until she dies in their jaws before they eat her! Clever! One fable giving its title to the whole section is Die schwierige Position Gottes (208). Its point is similar to that made by an Aesopic fable about a father with two daughters. Here the farmers pray on Sunday morning to be spared fire, bad crops, and swarms of locusts. At the same time, the locusts hold a prayer service that includes this: Smite the foe with blindness, so that we can eat his fields in peace.
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Langen-Müller Verlag
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Identifier
6442 (Access ID)