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Arts feature

Taking the pissoir

14 July 2016

1:00 PM

14 July 2016

1:00 PM

You have to imagine the lines that follow in separate fonts to get the full sense of the nonsense in ‘Karawane’, one of Hugo Ball’s ‘verses without words’:

jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla

grossiga m’pfa habla horem

égiga goramen

And it ends not with a bang, but with … ‘ba-umf’. See the original and it’s impossible not to be impressed by the industrial-strength madness of Ball’s absolute certainty.

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