Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder

Question

I recently got a Deutsche Grammophon CD with recordings of songs by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. When reading the texts, I noticed the translation of the title of one of the songs. Intuitively I knew it wasn't correct. The only reason why I'm posting this question is to find out if there's a better translation.

Anyway, the German text is "Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder", which is translated as "Don't look at my songs."

In my naive opinion (no German speaker) this is a poor translation because there's no posessive about the songs in the original sentence. The mir is more like a dative (?) (don't do this to me).

Intuitively I know the meaning of the original German sentence but the reason why I'm writing is to see if there's a more accurate single-sentence English translation. FWIW I've tried to come up with an English translation myself but it's rather difficult (no native English speaker either).

Answer 1

Credits first: Gerhard has already pointed out the pun that may be going on here, while tofro has shed some good light on the context of this sentence / line, which does sound a bit odd indeed.

Since your confusion seems to lie, mainly, with the Dative case being translated as an English genitive / possessive, I'm adding yet another answer to address that.

While you are right in that a German Dative was translated as an English genitive here, this translation is actually quite accurate. There is something in German called a "dativus possessivus" (possessive dative). This is a dative whose semantics indicate possession:

Ich habe mir das Bein gebrochen. - I've broken my leg.

Notice how English - which doesn't have a dative (any more) - defaults to the possessive in order to translate this phrase?

The same thing is going on in the verse / song title in question:

Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder. - Don't look at my songs.

Hence, I find the translation quite accurate. The only thing that could be criticised is that it loses the beautiful pun pointed out by Gerhard, but I don't see a way either to put it into English and not have it get "lost in translation". If everything could be translated perfectly, there wouldn't be much incentive to learn a language any more. ;)

For further study, you may look into the types of the Dative case in German. Unfortunately, I couldn't find this in English just now, so it's in German. But with a bit of digging you may find an English-language page.

Answer 2

The translation is only half of the story. In this poem by Friedrich Rückert we may also have an old spelling Lied in the meaning of (eye-)lid:

^{T. Ruete: Physiklische Untersuchung des Auges, 1854}

This is the original poem:

Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder!
Meine Augen schlag ich nieder,
Wie ertappt auf böser That;
Selber darf ich nicht getrauen,
Ihrem Wachsen zuzuschauen:
Deine Neugier ist Verrath.
^{Friedrich Rückert: Verbotener Blick}

Rückert may have intended this pun (i.e. song and eyelid both would have the same spelling) but it was originally written as a poem, not as a song.

Answer 3

That actually is a difficult piece of text - Rückert (the original poet) has left out quite a bit of words in order to make the poem go. The "mir" is actually dative and gives a hint to what's meant and the rest of the context clarifies it further.

You could extend the verse to somewhat like

Blicke mir nicht [über die Schulter] in meine Lieder, [während ich sie noch schreibe]

The rest of the poem makes it clear the poet doesn't want to show his half-baked lines while he is still working on them - Only when it's done and perfect, it should be visible to the public.

The dative actually is an expression of "don't do that to me", but that is actually hard to express in English.

Maybe

Don't you look over my shoulder at my songs

would somehow transport the dative.

Answer 4

The construct you are stumbling upon is called Dativus possessivus, denoting to whom the accusative object belongs (In your case the songs, belonging to me). Further examples are:

• Die Mutter putzt dem Kind die Nase (Mother cleans the nose of the child)
• Der Vater bindet der Tochter die Schuhe zu. (Father ties the shoes of the daughter)
• Schau' mir in die Augen, Kleines (Famous Casablanca quote, originally "he is looking at you, kid")

Answer 5

Hello everyone: please do not mention anymore "song" in this connotation!

There are two meanings of the German Word "Lied":

1. Song, indeed, but not in Rückert's poem
2. eyelid, today written in German: "Lid" - in Rückert's time "Lied", Plural: "Lieder", this antiquated spelling is the reason of this misunderstanding.

Best regards from Andreas, Berlin

Native German speaking