As one of the more inventive practitioners of concrete poetry, Ernst Jandl explored potentialities of meaningful sound both within German and across language boundaries. His oberflächenübersetzung takes a well-known English poem from the Romantic era and renders its acoustic surface using German words. The result is an exercise in literary and linguistic experimentation that poses questions about the value of words and stimulates attempts at decoding in an array of intersecting contexts. This short paper probes some of the dimensions that illuminate and are illuminated by Jandl's text and concludes that what appears to be a mechanistic project is in fact dependent on creative choices. Far from being simply a game of surfaces, oberflächenübersetzung invokes levels of signification that are unexpectedly profound.
