Hi, Rebecca - what a response! Your mail does indeed give food for
thought. You obviously know much more than me on the subject of
Hölderlin's life & poetry, and I learned a lot from it, as others did. I
would agree with practically everything you say: Hölderlin, I'm sure,
did not himself believe in a material restitution of any kind for those
restless souls in Orcus - which I think of as pre- or unconscious
representations of the dead in us clamouring for, well, representation
in its manifold senses, for a justice that only language can enact (we
say, do we not, that certain words "do justice" to a theme) - and though
Mark denies this, his praxis as a poet belies his scepticism, I believe,
even though what anyone can achieve is what Beckett calls to "fail
better" - Ah, but a man's grasp should exceed his reach, or what's a
heaven for? (I should quote this, as an amateur poetaster at best!)
Sebald does, I think, to do him justice, imply that the foreknowledge
Hölderlin may have had applied firstly to himself, as you point out, and
then by extension to the wider society around him. One is treading a
heavily mined field of poetic & philosophical *entrelacements* here, of
course, and anything I say is tentative in the extreme. Interesting to
read the Hamburger translations - I started out a long time ago reading
H in the Penguin edition with Hamburger's prose versions, but over the
years, when I have returned, it has been to the German. Amazing how he
gets both the sense and the rhythmic-metrical gestalt - it takes
profound knowledge of prosody to do that. A slight feeling of discomfort
arises at times, when a sort of higher poetic Wardour St diction, as in
Spender & Leishman's Rilke, though much less so (what a terrible poet
Spender was!) can begin to infect the odd line (fusty fustian,
perhaps...) Hölderlin is more achingly musical, there is a rich mordancy
mingled with unbearable sweetness, intense thoughtfulness & the
dialectical tension between surrender & revolt- ach, Hamburger of course
knew it too well. I do find, by the way, in those faux-naif later rhymed
quatrains, something of that "peaceful silence" that has been mooted, as
in the beautiful fragment you quote. *Brod und Wein* is to me the
greatest lyric poem ever written (since I cannot read Greek), full of
sibylline simplicity, unparaphraseable:
So ist der Mensch; wenn da ist das Gut, und es sorget mit Gaben
Selber ein Gott für ihn, kennet und sieht er es nicht.
Tragen muß er, zuvor; nun aber nennt er sein Liebstes,
Nun, nun müssen dafür Worte, wie Blumen, entstehn.
Perhaps you can supply the Hamburger translation of that. It is
especially relevant to poets.
But my personal favourite is a syntactically ravelled fragment on the
Virgin from the Bad Homburg manuscript, one that resonates with the
purple flowers that Ted Hughes glosses in his Shakespeare book as rooted
deep in the legend of Venus & Adonis & the Boar, and contains a prayer
for our times, that we all, Christian or other (and you gotta serve
somebody) may repeat with most inward entreaty, thinking of those
"villeins" everywhere:
Vor allem, daß man schone Above all, that one
protect
Der Wildniß göttlichgebaut The wilderness
divinely built
Im reinen Geseze, woher In the pure law,
wherefrom
Es haben die Kinder They have,
children of the
Des Gotts, lustwandelnd unter God, joy-walking among
Den Felsen und Haiden purpurn blühn The rocks and meadows
blossom purple
Und dunkle Quellen And dark
springs
Dir, o Madonna und To you, oh
Madonna and
Dem Sohne, aber den anderen auch The son, but to the
others also
Damit nicht, als von Knechten, That they may
not, as from villeins,
Mit Gewalt das ihre nehmen Take their own
by force
Die Götter. - The
Gods.
Happy New Year to all
Martin
|
