turn from the dark Symbolist world to the light. The poet and Pierrot Giraud's imagined identification of himself with his protagonist is complete; it is, in fact, often difficult to determine whether the subject of a given poem is Pierrot or Giraud. (To distinguish a "narrator" here is probably to make too nice a distinction.) The "I" that makes occasional appearances claims relation to Pierrot "through the Moon"; he lives, like Pierrot, "by sticking out. . ./[His] bleeding tongue at the Law" (13: "To my Bergamask Cousin"). Also like Pierrot, he "discovers drunken landscapes" in absinthe (22: "Absinthe") and savors the "morbid and mournful charm"—"Like a bloody drop of spittle/From a consumptive's mouth"—of melancholy music (26: "Chopin Waltz"). Both are nostalgic for Pierrot's past, that "adorable snow" of yesteryear, when the zanni of the old comedies was a "lyre-bearer,/Healer of wounded spirits" (31: "Plea"). And both are staunch in their commitment to an anti-materialistic idealism, Giraud seeing in the whiteness of Pierrot—and of snow, swans, and lilies—a "scorn of unworthy things" and a "disgust for weak hearts" (40: "Sacred Whitenesses"). Art they hold in worshipful regard: Giraud's book, his "poem", is "a ray of moonlight stoppered up/In a beautiful flagon of Bohemian glass" (50: "Bohemian Crystal"). But, paradoxically, both, as artists, are self-estranged: ironically, the interior quest for "sacred whitenesses", for a purity of soul, is synonymous with the assumption of a falsehood, a mask—one of theatrically clownish extravagance that borders on madness and fatal excess. In 39: "The Alphabet", an apparent anomaly in the cycle, in which Giraud imagines himself as Harlequin, not Pierrot, the poet recalls dreaming, as a child, of "a multicolored alphabet,/In which each letter was a mask", a dream that agitates his "foolish heart" today. It is a revealing confession: an admission that the agents of his creations as an artist, the alphabet, are ideally not agents of self-expression but of self-fabrication under the mask of an Other. And this Other—Pierrot—is himself a fabrication, a mercurial puppet in a "chamber theater" of the mind (1: "Theater"). Pierrot lunaire offers a performance, not an expression, of the self—a fact in which much of its "modernity" resides. Settings in various media In 1892, the poet and dramatist Otto Erich Hartleben published a German translation of Pierrot lunaire; he retained the rondel form of the poems, but he attempted no rhymes, altered line lengths, and made other substantive