I

“Sommer 1942”

Tag für Tag
Sehe ich die Feigenbäume im Garten
Die rosigen Gesichter der Händler, die Lügen kaufen
Die Schachfiguren auf dem Tisch in der Ecke
Und die Zeitungen mit den Nachrichten
Von den Blutbädern in der Union.

—By Bertolt Brecht

II

Mary had a little iamb ...

Today was the deadline given for MILC abstracts, and you have no idea how difficult it is to write fake linguistics abstracts while sober.

I managed to submit two, one on the excusative case, another on the grammaticalization of diss-, but two I hoped to complete (“A B-tree Approach to Syntactic Deep Structure” by Mandee L. Baum and Rose N. Zweig and “Singular Nasal Optimality Theory” by Lucas M. Brane) remained unfinished. The party, er, conference, is next weekend.

I promised my students that I'd hand back all their old homework, quizzes, and the like on Monday, which means I have a decent amount of grading to get done this weekend. I'd rather watch Torchwood. Last night I finished season 2 of the new Doctor Who, and I'm eagerly awaiting the next season, which begins at the end of March. The surprise for me was that as the season progressed I actually came to like Rose; back in the first season I far too often found her a nuisance.

This afternoon I found myself reading both the language guy and Mr. Verb.

You know, transitioning from Moxy Fruvous to Mr. Bungle is an exercise in, well, dissonance (pick the type).

Back to Torchwoord or to Recurrence ... it's better than I expected.

III

Again, as is so often the case with Brecht's poems from this time, there is little that seems poetic about this verse. It's like a sentence, an observation or two squeezed into a few lines. Yet there is a little play with association that makes this piece at least marginally interesting.

Brecht had to wait for his visa to the US until May of 1941, and by 1942 he was in Los Angeles, where he met other exiles (e.g. Schönberg, Adorno, Thomas Mann) and did work in Hollywood. The “setting” of the poem could well be some location in California, assuming there is any specific location in mind, but the description matches and evokes a Mediterranean marketplace, more specifically something Turkish or North African: figs, chess, merchants, and baths. Yet the baths here—bloodbaths—seem instead to refer to wartime, a feeling strengthened by the reference to the Soviet Union.

The summer of 1942 saw “Operation Blue” (Fall Blau); thereafter, beginning in late August, came the Battle of Stalingrad.

“Summer 1942”

Day by day
I see the fig trees in the garden
The rosy faces of the merchants, who buy lies
The chess figures on the table in the corner
And the papers with news
Of the bloodbaths in the Union.