An attempt at an English version of Otto Julius Bierbaum’s “Gott sei Dank!” I have rendered the refrain, not as “Thank God!” which, in English, is far more serious and reverent than the equivalent German, but as “Hallelujah,” which more closely approximates, in popular speech, the spirit of the original. Also:

It is rather surprising that so few of Bierbaum’s verses and stories have been done into English, for he was a fellow after our own heart–a sort of German Kipling and George Ade and Frank Stanton, with touches, too, of Gilbert, Dobson and Huneker, and even of Barrie and Wilde. So far as I know. Percival Pollard, that reformed Baltimorean, is the only man who has tried to translate him—and Pollard, after spending the whole of a Wiesbaden spring at the task, stopped with half a dozen songs. You will filld those songs in the seventh chapter of “Masks and Minstrels of New Germany,” in which you will also find an eloquent and illuminating account of Otto Julius, who died, by the way, on February 2 of the present year.

Bierbaum was the poet of the New Germany—that alert, agile and daring New Germany which has scarcely a trait in common with the traditional Germany of abysmal learning and beery tears. The joy of life was in the man: he was what Nietzsche (one of his gods) used to call a Ja-sager, a yes-sayer. It would be difficult to imagine a great artist with less pompousness and pose. He had, in the conventional sense, no dignity at all. He would write a vaudeville song as readily as a tome of criticism—but what a vaudeville song it would be! Villon, living today, might have done such work—or Herrick or Heine or Verlaine.

Imagine a book of verses selling 45,000 copies in five years! Yet that was the sale of Bierbaum’s “Irrgarten der Liebe” (The Maze of Love). Perhaps the “Barrack Room Ballads” did as well—but what other English volume of the past half century? And verse-making was by no means the only trade of Otto Julius. He was, in addition, a keen and hospitable critic, a novelist of some distinction, a writer of exquisite books of travel, a busy editor, a fashioner of beautiful little plays, a great linguist. Why doesn’t some one put his best work into English? Certainly it is high time we ceased judging modern German letters by Die Gartenlaube and the farces of the Berlin pornographers.

Contributions to the new dictionary of synonyms for bald head:

H. L. Mencken