AMD 3

For this AMD assignment, I decided to listen to some German music. Since I already own a lot of music sung in German, I wanted to explore some of the translations to understand the meanings of these songs. Randomly, I happened upon Kraftwerk (Eng. - factory, not craft work), a '70s German group that had a heavy influence on electronic music.

After some listens, there were some lyrics that I understood immediately through my little German training thus far (e.g., "Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier!") A familiarity with common pronouns, conjunctions, and verb forms gave me a better feel for the band's poetry of speech, even though I couldn't actually make out many of the words. I looked up some interesting looking words in the lyrics (there were many), and discovered some pretty cool terms, like "Zerrbild" (caricature), "Künstler" (arsist), and "sogar" (even, as in "even we were surprised"). Finally, I translated an entire song, "Spiegelsaal" (Reflecting glass) from their 1977 album Trans Europa Express, and found a beautiful allegorical poem about the typical artist's view of himself. Here's a rough translation of some of the text:

Sometimes he fell in love with his reflection
And then again he saw a caricature
Even the biggest stars
Do not like each other in the reflecting glass
He created the person he wanted to be
And changed in a new personality
Even the biggest stars
Change themselves in the reflecting glass