Hi Martin,

Ah, well, I hope you haven't been drinking tea, or only tea, during this while I've
not replied. I've been gone to the Stonecoast writing program, so bitterly cold in
Maine that Boston, with its drifts of snow left from the Christmas storm, seems
positively balmy, though for all the cold, it was wonderful in that gathering of
poets and fiction writers, and I came back with a bouquet of flowers from my
students, with which they surprised me today, and which seems the most
improbable of things, a small meadow for one's hands, while walking through a
drift of snow, so startling bright and fragrant. Thanks for your thoughts and
your translations of Holderlin and, too, your search for that line Sebald quotes.
Well, this in particular

>This actually makes more poignant Sebald's interpretation of a Hölderlin
>foreknowing those "to whom the greatest injustice was done", since
>unlike himself they have no restitution through such an achievement, no
>peaceful silence, lest in memorializing words; his "Seele, der im Leben
>ihr göttlich Recht/Nicht ward" seems to dedicate the poem to all such
>restless victims of injustice (this was in 1798, when he left the
>Gontard house forever, even before the *Elegie* -1799 - and the
>Stuttgart elegy - November1800, in the May of which year he had seen
>Susette Gontard for the last time. It was in 1802 that he returned from
>Bordeaux, unkempt like a tramp, and heard in Stuttgart of Susette's death.)
>I hope these offhand notes are not too unclear.

strikes me. I do so love Holderlin's work and it seems to me he was a poet of
great joy. He begins "Stuttgart" with "Once again a joy has been lived. The
dangerous dryness recovers/ And the sharp edge of light singes no leaf and no
flower." or in part 2

Could it be, you think, that for nothing the gods have thrown open
Gates that were closed and in vain opened a pathway for joy?
That for nothing the kindly ones add to the plentiful banquet
 Not only wine but more, berries and honey and fruit?
Give us the crimson light for festive music and, cool and
Calm for discourse more deep, friendship's, the blessing of night"

And many other passages from other poems, he was so often a fire, a winged
joy, even in his wandering solitudes and sadnesses.

>Sebald's interpretation of a Hölderlin
>foreknowing those "to whom the greatest injustice was done",

However, I don't know as it was so much Hölderlin's foreknowing of those so
much as a foreknowing of himself, a foreshadowing of his own fate, which was
to become that of many. In a way it seems to me anyway that a great
injustice was done to him, not as great as being hanged from a
lamppost, but that broken mind, that broken state of being, in which he lived
the rest of his life was driven by perhaps many of the same social forces, the
same cultural patterns, that were to result in that "greatest injustice" being done
to many later.

That joy in him, in all of its intelligibilities, was broken
by a sort of unremitting series of shame and humiliation, the being attacked by
Susette's husband, and on grounds of class distinctions, of being unworthy,
unsuited, the loss of his job, the being berated by his mother who had his
inheritance under her control and refused to give him a cent, his requesting
help from Goethe among others and being met by refusal, the tramping through
the Alps in winter for a tutor's job, whatever happened on that trip, the shame
and humiliation of his 'psychological treatments', the being submerged in the
ice water tank, the Authenreith mask. Perhaps he had a foreknowing of what
would happen to him as in "Menon's Lament for Diotima" "up my mind roves
and down/ begging for rest; so a wounded deer will flee to the forests/ where
he used to lie low, safe in the dark toward noon' and in section 2 of that same
poem he seems to see the forces that have caught him, those gods of death

And indeed, gods of death, when once you have utterly caught him,
Seized and fettered the man, so that he cringes, subdued,
When you evil ones down into horrible night have conveyed him
Useless it is to implore, then to be angry with you,
Useless even to bear that grim coercion with patience,
Smiling to hear you each day chant him the sobering song

Here, a sense of its being impossible, useless, to even beg for
mercy, even forbearance and patience is useless against the sobering song that
the gods of death chant 'each day' and it is the sobering song that means to kill
the winged song in him. Though here he's still able to refuse, as he says a line
or two later

Still, my soul, even now you cling to your habit of music,
Will not give in yet, and dream deep in the lead of dull sleep!
Cause I have none to be festive, but long to put on a green garland;
Am I not quite alone? Yet something kind now must be
Close to me from afar, so that I smile as I wonder
How in the midst of my grief I can feel happy and blessed

That sort of affliction that I think Simone Weil defines best, that it involves
physical suffering, social shame and humilation, and reduces a person to the
status of a thing, a worm cut in half. Or as he writes in "The Farewell"

Silent now let me be! Never henceforth let me know
This, my deadly disgrace, so that in peace I may
Hide myself where it's lonely
And the parting at least be ours.

Pass the cup, then, yourself, that of the rescuing,
Holy poison enough, that of the lethal draught
That I may drink with you, all things,
Hate and love be forgotten then.

To be gone is my wish...


Or at the beginning of "The Farewell"

So we wanted to part? Thought it both good and wise?
Why, then, why did the act shock us as murder would?
Ah, ourselves we know little,
For within us a god commands.

Wrong that god? And betray him who created for us
Meaning, life, all we had, him who inspired and moved,
Who protected our loving,
This, this one thing I cannot do.

But a different wrong, different slavery
Now the world's mind invents, threatens with other laws,
And, by cunning, convention
Day by day steals away our souls.

It seems to me that perhaps Holderlin knew this "different wrong, different
slavery,' and how one's soul is stolen away, and in a sense, these greater
injustices that occurred later, hanging many from lampposts among other
horrors, were also hinged upon that 'different wrong, different slavery' by 'by
cunning' and 'threatens with other laws.'

I've just used Michael Hamburger's translations here as my German is not good
enough to risk the original though there is a line or two that makes me wonder.
I don't know if Holderlin would have agreed with Sebald's idea of 'restitution'
that one passage where the cup 'of the rescuing' is a 'lethal draught' makes me
wonder if he would have. I don't know, was his a 'peaceful silence"? Though it is
true that some of those later fragments are beautiful like this part from "Home"

And no one knows.

But meanwhile let me walk
And pick wild berries
To quench my love for you
Upon your paths, O Earth

 So on that note, happy New Year,

best,

Rebecca

---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 18:59:32 +0100
>From: MJ Walker <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: An attempt at restitution
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>P.S. Back from tea, I find the original German of the speech on the net
>& discover that the translation given of Hölderlin's words, correctly
>quoted in the German text, is false. This is a pity because - in the
>original phrase quoted by Sebald - H's plea for a stranger becomes
>*both* powerfully universal & forebodingly personal, as Sebald
>recognizes. And Sebald's reference to the Parcae is from his *Elegie*,
>which I had forgotten, not the Ode I first thought of. But in that
>latter poem Hölderlin does explicitly mention the "Unrecht" Sebald
>speaks of - begging for one more summer, he invokes the soul that in
>life was not granted its divine right and cannot rest in Orcus, adding,
>however
>Doch ist mir einst das Heilge, das am Yet once I
>did achieve the holy
>Herzen mir liegt, das Gedicht, gelungen, Thing that my
>heart cherishes, the poem,
>Willkommen dann, o Stille der Schattenwelt! Welcome then, oh
>silence of the shadow-world!
>
>This actually makes more poignant Sebald's interpretation of a Hölderlin
>foreknowing those "to whom the greatest injustice was done", since
>unlike himself they have no restitution through such an achievement, no
>peaceful silence, lest in memorializing words; his "Seele, der im Leben
>ihr göttlich Recht/Nicht ward" seems to dedicate the poem to all such
>restless victims of injustice (this was in 1798, when he left the
>Gontard house forever, even before the *Elegie* -1799 - and the
>Stuttgart elegy - November1800, in the May of which year he had seen
>Susette Gontard for the last time. It was in 1802 that he returned from
>Bordeaux, unkempt like a tramp, and heard in Stuttgart of Susette's death.)
>I hope these offhand notes are not too unclear.
>
>cheers
>Martin