Pierrot lunaire

Here is an alternate markup of the verses (German with English) of Hartleben's rendering of the Albert Giraud poem.  Each markup "element" can be defined to suit the purpose ( suppress the Engish translation, place the English in a pop-up responding to a mouse click or other effect.) Note that the r=  is used to encode the repeating lines so that they can be presented with some indication or none ( r=0  is a non-repeating line.)  n=  gives optional line-numbering.

The markup is defined using the Curl web content language from www.curl.com and my example markup can be viewed as ordinary HTML text at poets.aule‑browser.com/hartleben‑pierrot.html.

The markup can be implemented as macros, procedures, text-formats, text-format procedures or as new Curl syntax or any mix of the above as suits the text presentation task.

[ the entire sequence is 21 verses comprising 273 lines ]

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Graphic folly in text presentation on the web

There was a movement in the Adobe Flash vein, to have non-Latin script on the web replaced by a graphic image in the browser.  Why would that be folly?

I would suggest installing PeraPera or some such plug-in for the Firefox browser and then placing your cursor in the text of a Japanese poem.  If the poem is by text character (for Haiku, that sometimes will mean more simple Hiragana than complex Kanji), you have a good chance to capture the sense if you have a smattering of Japanese grammar and a pop-up tool with multiple senses for the Kanji.

If the poem is in a Java applet as a graphic, or embedded as Flash, or is an image in PNG or JPG or some such format, you will not have access to pop-up hints from tools such as PeraPera.

Some of the tendency to use graphics may have been based on a 'web-myth' that UNICODE could not be adequate for the graphemes which can be identified in the great variety of scripts in use around the globe. This was nonsense.  UNICODE after 2.0 is in no way like the old code-pages for character-encoding. Visit unicode.org if in doubt. Validate any claim by eccentric or luddite Eastern Language professors who are not themselves computer linguists (linguists specializing in computer science language encoding, or computer scientists specializing in linguistics in the area of phonograms as graphemes.)  Be prepared to learn at least three new technical terms with a very specific sense in the case of UNICODE.

In one of my favourite web languages, Curl, ( from www.curl.com ) there is the class for TextShape to hold an unbroken sequence of characters. But a series of characters as a single graphic is not the same as a series of graphical characters within a single container. Since Shape is also a container for Shape's, this can be a subtle point.

The use of a single graphic need not completely defeat annotation and obtaining a gloss, if the image is accompanied by text as an alternative.  However, for an unusual Kanji variant in a classical text, this is unlikely to be the answer as we are now back to the very issue at hand: how best to present infrequently encountered or otherwise difficult graphemes in text presentations. The snake has taken hold of its tale but need not begin swallowing.

Here are a few related Kanji for Albrecht Haushofer's "Der Vater" from his posthumous sonnets:
 海   and   毒 and, of course,  魚釣

The above kanji characters (the last is a two-kanji compound or JuKuGo) should be visible if your browser view has char-encoding set to AUTO-DETECT or to UTF-8.

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Shakespeare Sonnet 116

At poets.aule-browser.com I have added Curl markup of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

The subtlety of the otherwise elegant markup is only evident when resizing the browser window horizontally: the lexical equivalents flow in and collapse.

Most of the lines are in Curl web content markup using a simple text-format defined so as to enable

{ln Let me not to the marriage of true minds }
{ln Admit ... next line with footnote }

The superscript degree symbol is given with

some word{lex-mrk}

and the full line includes

some word{lex-mrk} more words {gap}{lex synonym1 / synonym2}

As yet I have no alternative to explicitly specifying an auto-adjusting filler width with a {gap} as markup.

A line with lexical annotation is a

{linx  A line with the sounds of crepitating{lex-mrk} leaf litter ... {lex crisp  / crackling}

A footnote, as usual, is {fn 1} which gives a small superscript numeral and the corresponding annotation is in

{footnote 1 The expected footnote in a suitable small font}

For the complexity of the sliding annotation presentation, the markup remains suitably minimalist and simple to learn, master and retain.

Versions of the poem without footnotes or other annotation use the SAME source file with the SAME unchanged markup.  This is an alternative to the usual separation of content and presentation.  This permits using the same source for both teaching, tutoring and practice examinations: one source file with different home page format definitions.

For foreign language poetry instruction this has many advantages.

The next version will include optional line meter presented below each line of the sonnet.

I have a note for the global Curl community at http://communities.curl.com/showthread.php?tid=336&pid=890.

Freud Gradiva

I have added German and English versions of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva and Freud's essay to poets.aule-browser.com. It is a companion to the Luther Bibel: the connection is dreams. The new web page requires the Curl RTE browser plugin.

In Freud's Traumdeutung text there are passages which must be read in the original in order to reflect Freud's own tendentious readings onto his own writings.  The parallel with the Luther Bibel might seem mistaken: Freud's family did not originate in Catholic Vienna: they were Jews in Galicia, where the few Protestants were Augsburg Confession, Confessio Augustana. But Freud earnestly sought the Lutheran-minded Jung (Binswanger, for example, while Swiss, was from a Jewish family of Augsburg) as has often been noted. In the wider world, the Germans were Lutherans (see the struggle of the Lutheran convert Husserl in the Freiburg university and the long standing issue of Catholic influence intruding into Protestant "instances".)

In some ways you might see Freud's later "metapsychology" essays as his struggle to post his "theses". Sigismund Schlomo Freud certainly saw his psychoanalytic movement as comparable to that of a Moses or a Luther or a Galileo (but in the city of Ignaz Semmelweis and Ludwig Boltzmann.)

Central Freudian terminology such as “Traumentstellung” have a subtle ambiguity - this one more easily noted in French - but even further, the use of “Entstellung” in chemistry in Freud's day is not that of morgue notes: defaced, disfigured, distorted, Tatschen entstellen, Tatsachen verdrehen, Wirklichkeit entstellen, irren, Irma.

Freud: «Aus dem im Träume [Trauma] mitspielenden Gedankenkries [Benzinring] möchte ich nachträglich den Ausdruck für diese flüchtige Empfindung einsetzen [einstellen]. Es ist, als ob er mir gesagt hätte: Du nimmst deine ärztlichen» (my insertions in square brackets)


The page ends with Freud's essay Der Dichter und das Phantasieren.

Albrecht Haushofer

At http://poets.aule-browser.com/haushofer-1.html I have added "Der Vater" by Albrecht Haushofer, a victim of the Gestapo in the last days of Nazi Berlin.

The poem is in my Curl poetry markup, but the text is not selectable as I have no copyright information for the version which I have available.

The page requires the Curl RTE browser plugin available at http://www.curl.com/download/rte

Bavarian Gentians

There is now a web page with simple Curl markup of D.H. Lawrence's Bavarian Gentians at poets.aule-browser.com which is built from a text-to-Curl tool.

In this case the markup uses the default {paragraph } text-procedure and the markup has no semantics particular to an English poem from the twentieth century.  Each paragraph is a Visual object and can be assigned a name property.

The text of the poem is not selectable in this version of the page.  In a study version the word "Dys" would be clickable as might several others.  Initially the page might be up 3 minutes before any links or button appear, especially if displayed in a teaching browser for students with no BACK button.

The button for the image and the links were added manually.

Poem continues

 
A lovely German poetry volume has a font glyph which indicates that a poem on a facing or recto page continues on the next, back or verso page: the character resembles // but I do not find one in the Ogham Unicode 6.0 page or the like.  It seems to be more of an issue in bilingual books with the source language on verso and the translations on recto pages such that both pages may benefit from a continuation character.  Judging from what I.A. Richards wrote about when a poem knows that it is done, the reader may deserve the same.  This is clearly more of an issue in e-book formats.

I do see some lovely Unicode points for the glyphs in the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.

Some poetry is set with a centered asterisk between sections.  I recall having seen a variety of barred lines and curved-lines for poem separations or endings.

A very simple macro in Curl would allow you to choose what to place within a poem immediately prior to where a page break has been placed.

One user-controlled optional presentation feature in Curl web content line-numbering could be
    50 / 150 (at verso last line)
  100 / 150 (at recto last line)
which might alert a reader (but perhaps not well-advised for some epic poems.)

Roger Moore

I have added a Curl poetry markup page with two poems by Roger Moore to the Aule-Browser Canadian poets page.

The poems are set to Oaxaca photographs by Tina Modotti.

Curl Poems

More poems in Curl markup are being added today to aule-browser.com

Curl Markup

While I usually import the layout declarations so that they do not clutter my view of a file containing a poem in Curl markup such as

{poem
   {stanza
      the first
      couplet
   }
   {stanza
      the second
      couplet
   }
}

here is a simple Curl page with a StyleSheet declaration:


{curl 7.0 applet}
{curl-file-attributes character-encoding = "utf8"}

{def styl_em =
    {StyleSheet
        {StyleRule "text.emphasis",
            font-style = "italic",
            font-weight = "bold"
        }
    }
}

{paragraph style-manager = {BasicStyleManager styl_em},
  
    {text style-class = "emphasis",

             this text will be presented as italic font-style with bold font-weight
    }
  
}

The resulting page is simply:

this text will be presented as italic font-style with bold font-weight