As mentioned yesterday, I will break up the Dublin photos into several posts. Here’s a look a park and monuments. Enjoy!
Viking Long Stone dating from the 10th century with a Victorian building in the background
Molly Malone (yes, the one from the song)
It was extremely difficult to get a clear shot of Molly, because people were constantly posing in front of her or sitting down on her base. And there was that guy dressed as a leprechaun who was hawking hell knows what right next to her.
James Joyce
The Literary Parade with plaques honouring Dublin's many great writers
A statue of playing children. This one was in a small park right next to the hotel.
The Dublin Spire, a gleaming steel sculpture replacing a Nelson monument blown up by the IRA
The statue of James Joyce seems to be looking up at the Spire as if marveling about its presence (What is this and what is it doing it doing in my city?) which made for a nice juxtaposition.
Statue of Daniel O'Connell, a 19th century mayor of Dublin and activist for Irish freedom
Monument to Charles Parnell, another important figure in the fight for Irish independance. The building in the background is a former hospital, now a museum.
Interesting orb-shaped sculpture in front of the otherwise dull building of the Irish national bank.
One thing that struck me about Dublin were the many ornate lampposts. One can be seen in yesterday’s post. Here are two more:
Ornate lamppost
Foot of an ornamented lamppost with the river Liffey in the background
And now for some green. The “emerald isle” is definitely justified, because Ireland really is very green (also visible from the air). Besides, Dublin has many lovely parks:
St. Stephen's Green Park
Seagulls at St. Stephen's Green Park
More seagulls in St. Stephen's Green Park
Fountain and pavillion in St. Stephen's Green Park
This shurb is called "Rotdorn" in German. I have no idea what it is in English, but it sure is lovely.
sending...
It’s a little hard to see, but it could well be a hawthorn. I can’t quite see the shape of the leaves, but we’ve one that colour.
Things I think I know, but haven’t googled (and the ability to fact check on the internet has taught me that half of what I think I know is rubbish): the hawthorn is also known as the May, hence the proverb ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May is out’ – doesn’t mean (as I thought as a child) that you shouldn’t take off your coat until the month of May, it means you shouldn’t take it off until the May tree is in blossom. Also, they’re fairy trees, so you can’t ever cut them down.
Which reminds me of a dinner just after my sister started dating my brother’s Physics teacher, a country bloke, and my dad and he somehow got on to the subject of Fairy trees leading to my my dad (also from the country), asking him in all innocence if he believed in fairies. And he replied he did, and thereafter my brother and I had to avoid catching one another’s eyes until we were excused from the table, because if we’d exchanged glances at any point we’d have disgraced ourselves completely, and he’d have spent the rest of sixth form in detention…
I just got my vintage 1902 English-German dictionary (used to belong to my great-uncle) from the shelf, which includes a lot more botanic terms than later editions, and both “Rotdorn” and “Weißdorn” (same tree with white blossoms) are called “hawthorn” in English. It’s rather unusual that the same plant has one name in English and two in German, but not unheard of. What is commonly called “kale” in English is about five different species with five different names in German, which makes translating recipes difficult (No, not that kale. You need the other kale that looks like this).
I didn’t know about the fairy connection. Whatever fairy lore there was in Germany is largely lost, though there is a certain kind of thistle the blossoms of which hold fairy shoes according to a story I heard as a child.
I mainly associate hawthorn trees (both the red and white variety) with going boating in the summer as a kid, because they used to grow on the river bank.
Re: German fairy lore – have you read Die wunderbaren Abenteuer der kleinen Dott by Tamara Ramsay yet?
I think that’s the nearest to Brandenburg historical stories and fairy tales that I know.
I actually read it years ago as a child. I think I got it from our school library, though I’m no longer quite sure. That was before the unification, so all of the Mark Brandenburg references confused me a bit. I remember getting out a map to follow Dott’s travel. Lovely book, at any rate, which is probably why I remember it at all after almost thirty years.
I sent the new edition to Sartorias (I had mine from my library and was hoping the new one would be as big and the illustrations, too – and then it turned out differently so there I was with the two new editions and not willing to get rid of my three volume older edition) and she really enjoyed it, too – and some older German friends of hers borrowed the books from her before she had even finished them.
I so wish those books had been translated into English so I could recommend them to fellow friends of fantastical children’s books , but Ramsay released them in 1938 originally, as far as I remember, and it was certainly not the time to take a German book for children to heart then.
I’m not surprised that Sartorias enjoyed it, it seems like something right down her alley. The older German friends probably enjoyed it for the nostalgia factor – or maybe they had read it as children.
I fear that we won’t be seeing a translation into English anytime soon, though some of the Ottfried Preußler made it into English in the wake of the Harry Potter boom, some thirty to forty years after they had been first published. But the 1938 publication date will taint the book as well as other good books from the 1930s, even if the authors weren’t Nazis and there is nothing objectionable in the books themselves.
Come to think of it, I am amazed that I was able to find Die Abenteuer der kleinen Dott in a school library in the 1980s at all. But then quite a few children’s and YA books from the 1930s and even earlier made it into the 1970s and 1980s, usually passed on by parents and grandparents who remembered enjoying those books in their youth. I also have fond memories of the Pucki and Goldköpfchen books by Magda Trott, which I devoured in elementary school. Years later, I found out that Magda Trott was an early feminist and had even written an proto-SF novel about a world without men.
Hi Cora and Estara, I saw your comments about “Wunderbare Fahrten und Abenteuer der kleinen Dott.” I wanted to tell you that a translation of the book will come out in the fall. I worked on it for some time. I was happy to see that other people are familiar with it and like it as much as I do. Malve
Thanks for commenting, Malve. I’m glad that Dott will be available in English language readers soon and hope you’ll have a lot of success.
Malve, that’s BRILLIANT news! I can finally not just recommend but gift those fairy tales to English-speaking friends ^^.
Keep us up-to-date when you know a firm date and who is publishing it.
Oh my aunt gave me all the Pucki books in hardcover one by one for various occasions in the year. So when I read the Anne of Green Gables series later, it didn’t come as such a surprise.
What was actually my favourite “growing-up of girl with friends series” in the 80s were the Bille & Zottel books by Tina Caspari – not only were there horses, the setting was Northrhine-Westfalia as far as I could see (the famous rider being modeled on Hans Günther Winkler, I believe) which is where I was born and my uncle still lives AND the mother of Bille was from East-Prussia, which of course my mother was, too.
My oldest books of this sort I couldn’t find in the school library, though but in the small library of our church – and when they sold the really old ones – from the fifties and sixties – I bought my multiple reads. Heiligenwald, Cordula – about girls growing up directly after the war – were real old editions, Wohin mit Fritzi by Ursula Bruns was a 70s/80s reissue with a similar storyline (and the added attraction of being about dogs, as well), Friedel Starmatz was about a boy having lost his parents in the war and being taken in by a friendly and creative family for roughly 10 years.
I can actually re-read those books, because they are artefacts of their time and they all have some sort of positive or coming-to-terms end.
I read Bille & Zottel, too, though I wasn’t the biggest horse person, so they weren’t that big a favourite. I also liked Bummi series by Martha Schlinkert which was set in the Sauerland, the Elke series by Emma Gründel (set in Hamburg) as well as the really old ones, Nesthäkchen and Trotzkopf.
The postwar Pucki editions I had were edited to be set in Niedersachsen, though they were originally set in East Prussia. The Nesthäkchens were edited, too, to remove some overly patriotic WWI cheering.
IMO the YA and children’s series from the early 1900s to the 1960s were a lot better than their reputation. As a young girl, those books appealed to me a lot more than the trendy problem books of the 1970s and 1980s.
Oh yes, I bought the reissued Trotzkopf series, too! Reminded me somewhat of my gran’s Hedwig Courths-Mahler Romanhefter ^^.
Oh, interesting, I didn’t know that Pucki was set in East Prussia.
The Trotzkopf books were reissued sometime in the 1980s, when the TV series came out. And yes, there is a touch of Courths-Mahler about them.
Magda Trott, who wrote the Pucki and Goldköpfchen books, was from East Prussia and the novels were originally set there. Magda Trott was killed while trying to escape from the Red Army. When her books were reissued in West Germany after the war, all references to places and cities in East Prussia or generally east of the Elbe were changed to references to West German cities, usually places in Niedersachsen, so the kids wouldn’t be confused. The only reason I know all this is that I once met a scholar who had researched the life of Magda Trott and who told me all that.
Fascinating. Especially since parts of my family took the same way, fleeing the red army. My mother’s grandparents didn’t make it, but quite a few of the next generation and their children did.
One of my aunts fled East Prussia via the Baltic Sea. The ship they were on survived the trip, unlike the Wilhelm Gustloff or the Goya, and she ended up in Denmark with her mother and little brother. We also have a friend of the family who came from Silesia.
And my grandmother fled from Niederlausitz on the current Polish/German border with her two small children and her best friend, my aunt Metel. My grandmother headed for Bremen, where she’d lived before the war and where she still had family. She wanted to take her friend and the friend’s little daughter along, but Aunt Metel wanted to go to Halle, where her sister lived. In retrospect, that wasn’t such a good idea, because she ended up behind the iron curtain. My grandmother and her friend stayed in touch and my grandmother always sent her parcels. When my grandmother died much too young in 1968, my mother and my aunt took over sending parcels and visiting once a year. Aunt Metel lived long enough to see the unification. We are still in contact with the neighbours who took care of her and her daughter (who was mentally challenged after a meningitis infection as a baby) during the latter years of the DDR.
Hmm, I misremembered that – Bille lives in Schleswig-Holstein.