Description

by Roland Bibby

 

A5 size.  50pp

A translation of Walter Busch’s poem Max und Moritz by Roland Bibby.
This was the Northumbrian part of a much wider project to capture and compare dialects of English.

 

From the Author’s Introduction…

Manfred Gorlach of Heidelberg University is editor of English World-Wide, a journal concerned with varieties of English.  In 1981, I became involved with one somewhat hair-raising project of this energetic organisation, a six-in-hand edition of Max und Moritz, in as many dialects of these islands.  

At that time, three or four versions from Scotland, one from Ireland, and one each, in pidgin English, from West Africa and New Guinea, had been received.  English was represented by one from Yorkshire, which might or might not be completed.  English loyalties reinforced devotion to Northumberland, and overcame the natural terror induced by the scale and complexity of the required task – 400 lines of verse, precisely in the original pattern of metre and rhyme, and in Busch’s style, and, of course, telling the same lamentable, but salutary, tale, set in an era before living memory.    

 

 

Note –

The information on the back cover is out of date and should not be relied upon