Friday, February 03, 2023
Unpleasant Companions
Albrecht Classen, The Poems of Oswald von Wolkenstein: An English Translation of the Complete Works (1376/77-1445) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 98 (from Poem 26 Klein: "Durch abenteuer tal und perg"; I corrected two misprints):
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VII. An old Swabian, named Blank,
had been placed next to me.
Oh God, he smelled terribly!
He did not contribute to my well-being.
He had an open wound at his leg,
he had a really bad breath,
and he also often poisoned the air
from below, very unmannerly.
If he were soiling the Rhine as well,
I would have wished him good luck with that!
VIII. Peter Heizer and his wife,
Mr. Blank and a scribe, who was drunk every day,
they all gave me nausea
when we dipped our bread together in the sauce.
See, the one was spitting, and the other
made deep and long farting noises below,
as if an overloaded mortar cannon
would explode through the power of gunpowder.
They demonstrated various kinds of "courtly manners"
in most unusual ways.
Labels: noctes scatologicae
