Ah, 28 December: 144th anniversary of the Tay Bridge disaster, which tragically took the lives of 59 people — and rather more happily gave the world ‘Sir’ William Topaz McGonagall’s most famous work.
What’s perhaps most remarkable about this work, though, is that it’s not the only astonishing poem written about the disaster. There was also Die Brück’ Am Tay by Theodor Fontane, which was (and this seems particularly astounding) published the day after McGonagall’s.
That’s what this printing of McGonagall’s suggests, anyway. His seems to have come out on 9 January…
…while, according to this essay, Fontane’s was in print in Die Gegenwart the following day.
None of this suggests to me that either man asked himself the crucial question: do you want it done well, or do you want it done quickly? However, I am not an expert on translated German verse (or, indeed, verse), so maybe it’s a masterpiece.
I have to say, I have my doubts. It opens with an epigraph from Macbeth: “When shall we three meet again?” This, apparently, is because Fontane had seen a production of Shakespeare’s eight days before the bridge collapsed. Then the witches open the poem…
That’s the 1916 translation by Margarete Münsterberg, Duchess of Anhalt. It continues:
The bridgekeeper’s house that stands in the north
All windows to the south look forth
And the inmates there without peace or rest
Are gazing southward with anxious zest.
Hmmm. The bridge keeper is looking out for his son, Johnny, who is the engineer on the train, and is 11 minutes away from a late Christmas with the family. The young man is, we are told, confident that although “the train with the gale it vies”, it will win.
Spoiler alert: it won’t.
Then the witches come back and it’s all over, in slightly more (if shorter) lines than McGonagall’s – ahem – masterpiece. Perhaps it lost something in translation, because, to be fair, the idea that “what the hand of man hath wrought” is “a bauble — a naught” is not bad.
…and as long as it doesn’t conclude with this, I think we can safely say that the German poem is at least better:
