Piscine nocturnal ethnomusicology

Once when she was little, my friend Tatjana dreamt about fishes.  They were beguiling and menacing and they sang a song:

Wir sind die Fische, Wir mögen auch beißen...

We are the fishes, We can bite, too!

For a Fisches Nachtgesang, however, this was both prolix and unusually familiar.  A more typical encounter with piscine songmaking is recounted in Marshak's Tale of the stupid little mouse:

Стала петь мышонку щука — Не услышал он ни звука: Разевает щука рот, А не слышно, что поёт... Глупый маленький мышонок Отвечает ей спросонок: - Hет, твой голос нехорош. Слишком тихо ты поешь!

Mrs. Fish's mouth is round, But it doesn't make a sound: Though she moves her lips to sing Still the mouse can't hear a thing... Says the sleepy little mousey Barely opening an eye, "No, your voice is way too quiet! I don't like your lullaby."1

It took the genius of Christian Morgenstern to accurately transcribe the songs of the fish in his Teutonic waters.

Fisches Nachtgesang — ⌣ ⌣ — — — ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ — — — ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ — — — ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ — — — ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ ⌣ — — — ⌣ ⌣ —

Fish's Night Song (translated by Max Knight) — ⌢ ⌢ — — — ⌢ ⌢ ⌢ ⌢ — — — ⌢ ⌢ ⌢ ⌢ — — — ⌢ ⌢ ⌢ ⌢ — — — ⌢ ⌢ ⌢ ⌢ — — — ⌢ ⌢ —

A picture which is not a frame from
March of the Fishes.

The English translation was, of course, set to music by John Cage, as 4'33", the best-known of his lieder.  A Google search for Fisches Nachtgesang reveals that the original German has had a number of musical adaptations as well, but inevitably all of them play fast and loose with the text.

Cage's piece, fittingly, is used as the soundtrack for the upcoming documentary March of the Fishes, narrated by David Attenborough in absentia.

¹Of course I can't resist commenting on the translation process here.  The fish in the original poem is a pike, a common character of Russian folklore but one you can't expect American children, say, to know.  Its predatory reputation helps pave the way for the cat that ends the poem.  To preserve that, it could become a shark, but sharks and mice don't really live anywhere near each other...  In the end, better to stick with a generic fish with a round, lippy mouth, which happens to be what I could most easily fit into the meter and rhyme scheme.