ottos mops [Eng: Otto's pug] is a poem by, Austrian poet Ernst Jandl. 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]. The poem is made up of simple sentences of two to four words that contain exclusively the vowel "o". 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. The reaction of the returning pug is, however, not quite what is expected: it vomits.
Ottos mops is one of Jandl's most famous humorous poems. The author himself labelled it a 'Sprechgedicht': a poem that creates its particular effect best when read aloud. It is frequently used in German schools as an example of concrete poetry, and has inspired several imitations by other poets, and by children.
Content and style
Ernst Jandl's ottos mops and Elizabeth MacKiernan's Lulu's Pooch
link to full text
(please observe copyright laws)ottos mops is made up of 14 lines divided into three stanzas. At the beginning, a badly behaved pug is sent away by his owner, Otto."ottos mops trotzt otto: fort mops fort ottos mops hopst fort"
[otto's pug defies him
otto: away pug away
otto's pug hops away]Otto comments on the fact that the pug follows his command with the word "soso". Then he completes every-day activities, such as fetching coke and fruit. After a while, he listens for the pug, calls it, and hopes that it returns. The pug knocks, and is greeted joyfully by Otto, but its reaction is unexpected:"ottos mops kommt ottos mops kotzt otto: ogottogott"
[otto's pug comes
otto's pug pukes
otto: ohgodohgod]Because the sound of the poem is so important, a literal translation such as that above does not do it justice. 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. In 2005, the online service sightandsight.com held a competition to translate ottos mops in honor of Jandl's 80th birthday. Scottish scholar of German Brian O. Murdoch won with his poem "fritz's bitch".
Text analysis
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. This radically restricts word choice. 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. The poem is composed of 41 words with o-assonance, but is only built out of 15 different root words that are continually repeated. There are only two acting characters: Otto and the pug. 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. 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. In German, every noun is capitalized – in contrast to English, which only uses capitals for proper nouns – so this is even more striking.