ottos mops
It is thought to have been written on the 20th of November, 1963, and was first published in 1970 in Jandl's volume Der künstliche Baum [Eng: the artificial tree].
It tells the story of a short episode in the life of a dog and its owner: after Otto sends his badly behaved pug away, he begins to miss it and calls it back.
Translations of ottos mops therefore tend to carry the basic structure of the poem into other languages, conveying Jandl's word play freely.
As such, Elizabeth MacKiernan translated ottos mops for the US-American Jandl poetry collection Reft and Light as Lulu's Pooch.
[3] The most striking feature of the poem ottos mops is that it is univocalic: all the words contain only the vowel "o", while consonant selection remains free.
It does not make word choice strictly serial in the sense of generative poetics, but rather allows the composition of a text under a variety of possibilities, which tells a particular story.
They are assigned verbs that appear in the first person singular indicative present tense, the only exception to this being the imperative "komm" [Eng: come] with which Otto calls his pug back, and which stands out because it is repeated.The only punctuation mark used is the colon, to introduce direct speech.
[6] By not using punctuation in his works, Jandl refers to Gertrude Stein's idea that commas get in the way of the reader's activity and autonomy when their only function is to make reading easier.
Equally characteristic for Jandl is that the poem is written entirely in lowercase, which has a visual function in his poetry, where capital letters are reserved for special emphasis.
[8] Because of this, the first and last stanzas are syntactically analogous, but they contrast semantically: the growing distance between Otto and his pug in the first four lines is juxtaposed with the parallel return of the dog at the end.
[11] Brandtner sees two levels at the core of the poem: the communication between human and animal, between master and hound, whose effectiveness is questioned; and the power relationship of the character constellation and its reference to real social-historic processes.
According to Brandtner, this places ottos mops within the tradition of Jandl's other poetry, which, in the broadest sense, can always be understood as critical of society and language.
[12] The German scholar Anne Uhrmacher, who wrote a dissertation on Jandl's poetry, feels that what differentiates ottos mops from the many adaptions that came as a consequence of its growing popularity is the form of humor that is different from the wit and irony of many attempts in the same style.
"[13] In this sense, according to Uhrmacher, Jandl's humor, which is expressed in Otto's longing for the pug as well as in the comfort of the little world described, is far more than just witty word play.
"[17] Volker Hage feels that nobody could "shout out, whisper, celebrate, stutter, twist, chop up, spit out or caress their own lines" like Jandl.
In the lines of the poem, a transition is accomplished "that succeeds afresh every time, namely from love of the vowel, to the reality of the image; from belief in the O for the revelation of poetry".
[24] The poetry collection der künstliche baum [Eng: the artificial tree], in which ottos mops was first published, proved to be an immediate sales success.
It has been incorporated into poetry books for children and young people, adapted into a picture book, published multiple times as an audio and music recording, and it is also the title of a German-language computer game, subtitled "In search of Jandl", which leads the player through Ernst Jandl's poetry.
