Wait for history to count to ten, then you can come and get us, come and get me

[sovay]

My poem "Shadow-Song" is now online at Uncanny Magazine. I wrote it in October on a train to New York. It started off as a ghost poem for Bertolt Brecht, but it changed.

Elisabeth Hauptmann not only performed the initial translation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) that evolved into Brecht and Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), she wrote much of the finished play's text, although she was not credited for it at the time. It is not completely a case of Brecht taking the labor of others for granted; Hauptmann seems to have published even her solo work under pseudonyms and anonymity by preference. She took credit for the book of the musical Happy End (1929) only under pretext of adapting it from an English-language original à la Threepenny when in fact she had written the story from scratch with lyrics by Brecht and music by Weill. I think it was complicated. Anyway, I knew who Kurt Weill was from childhood and certainly Brecht by the time I saw him haunting Marc Blitzstein in Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock (1999), but I must have been in college before I'd heard of Hauptmann. In life she was nicknamed Brecht's "devoted shadow," whence the title.

So that's my coincidental but heartfelt rebuttal to that article by Zoe Williams that's popped back up on my friendlist, about the value of art in times of apocalypse. Outside my office window, it appears to be lightly and dryly and sunnily snowing.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Congratulations! And it's getting some love on Twitter:

[selenak]

Terrific poem. Re: Elisabeth Hauptmann, did you she lived in Missouri of all the places during the war, due to her sister having married one of the locals, and wrote an acid essay on segregation which she observed first hand when taking a bus while she was there? It's a Hauptmann detail I found out only a couple of years ago during a conference which was mainly about Lion Feuchtwanger, but where one of the presentations was about Hauptmann, another about Salka Viertel and one about Gina Knaus under the header "female exile writers".

[dhampyresa]

I got actual chills at "let there be ballads to sing on the road to Berlin."

Edit: Also, congrats!

[ladymondegreen]

Apropos of the poem, I've been meaning to ask if you've read Inside the Dream Palace by Sherill Tippins, which has an extended account of the making of the film of The City of Mahogany.