Improve illogical formatting for Bonhoeffer Poetry

David Goodman

This is quite frustrating to the reader and a disservice to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's poetry. You obscure the esthetics of the poetry when you sometimes have a CR between German and English translation and sometimes do not. In fact, it begs the question of what your rationale is for a CR. It would help if you used italics (or some other means) to easily distinguish the languages or put them parallel. But a CR would help. Part of the esthetics of poetry is visual placement and what you have done is quite jarring (along with confusing the reader). I can't imagine the editors of the collection approving this. I will attach one example in 3 successive screenshots of how you savage his poems. It first appears in jpg The Friend #1 that we are reading the entire poem in German followed by the English version in #2 but then suddenly (with not even a CR) the English version becomes German. Is this continuing the German poem or what exactly are we to take from this? Why not give a complete version of both as most readers will not be capable of comparing? Or do them side by side. You do this repeatedly with his other poems. (This is my second effort to alert you to this). I can't believe Bob Pritchett would approve this either. BTW please greet him for me. I am overjoyed at his deserved success.