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The pope | |
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Och here got wat is min bate |
Oh dear God, what use is station? |
Death answers the pope | |
[...] |
[...] |
English version © Jack Freckleton-Sturla, 2021. The following is a more literal translation:
The pope |
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Oh Lord, what does it avail me |
Death answers the pope |
[...] |
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The photo and the text are from the fragment in Tallinn.
The dance starts — as always — with the pope, who is the world's mightiest mortal.
Most of Death's reply (seven lines) is missing. In 1838, Russwurm meant he could read the first line as: »Dat were gud in ly. bekennt« / "that were known to God in "ly."".
When it came to translating "ly." Russwurm's best suggestion was the Danish word "ly", meaning shelter/cover mostly against bad weather. This didn't make much sense, particularly if the punctuation was meant to suggest a missing letter.
It is still possible to see single letters and parts of letters, but ever since Russwurm, nobody has tried to interpret them.
However, the last line is fairly legible: »Mr emperor, we must dance!«, which shows the unique structure of the text in Tallinn / Lübeck: Death's eighth and last line addresses the next dancer, in this case the emperor:
In this way, the verses are connected in a chain, just like the dancers in the picture. This applies to the text in Tallinn as well as in Lübeck, and this is one of the reasons why we without hesitation can use one text to complement the other.
The only other dance of death that has the same structure of the verses is the Spanish La Dança general de la Muerte.
Footnotes: (1)
slim der erden . . .: Compare with Genesis 2,7: »And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth«.
"Slime" means »Soft, moist earth or clay, having an adhesive quality; viscous mud« (Webster).