In this Mozart (and Schumann!) year some may have forgotten the 150th
anniversary of Heine's death and the 50th of Brecht's (the 100th of
Bonhoeffer's birth should also not be forgotten). It might be
interesting to consider Brecht's opinion of his great predecessor as
given in his *Arbeitsjournal* , 22nd August 1940:
the language cleansing i perform with the finnish EPIGRAMS naturally
makes me think of the development of lyric poetry. what a decline!
immediately after GOETHE the beautiful contradictory unity
disintegrates, and HEINE takes the purely profane line, HÖLDERLIN the
purely pontifical one. in the first line language becomes more and more
of a shambles with time, as naturalness has to be achieved by little
violations of the form. the wit is moreover always rather irresponsible,
and altogether the effect the poet extracts from the epigrammatic
character absolves him of the obligation to strive for lyrical effect,
expression becomes more or less schematic, the tension between words
vanishes, word selection altogether becomes careless from the poetic
point of view, for there is a specific poetic correlative for wit. the
poet now only represents himself.
He goes on to castigate George (pontifical) and Kraus (profane), both
counter-revolutionary *of course, and I presume both the anxiety of
competition and genuine aversion prevents his mentioning Rilke (who can
do witty and pontifical like Brecht himself, quite differently of
course). He might have mentioned (but probably scorned) the pontifically
acerb and reactionary Borchardt, who gets his (with due amused
reverence) in Thomas Kling's last (sadly he died after publication, not
yet 50) wonderful book *Auswertung der Flugdaten* (2005), which also
tenderly mocks Pound & praises Carson's Sappho. I wonder, a propos, how
many Anglo-American poets in the last couple of years have produced a
brilliant congeries of verse and wide-ranging, intense literary
reflection that manages to mention not only Pound, Carson or whoever but
also (say) Thomas Kling (among other German poets) with signs of being
completely conversant with German? Ann Carson in her book on love is not
that person - while giving every tiny fragment of Greek in translation
and its original form for an audience that can very largely not even
read out the Greek words, let alone understand them, she quotes Rilke in
a dull modern translation without the German! - Doesn't Brecht's view of
the disintegration of German poetry after Goethe remind you a little of
Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility"? Like Eliot, he ignores any
evidence to the contrary, though his characterisation of Heine *is
extremely perspicacious. The latter's early and bestknown poetry
received its sublimest incarnation in the music of Schumann, and
Heine's wit is perhaps best appreciated in such prose works as Die
Memoiren des Herrn Schnabelewopski. I have been most moved in this
Heine/Schumann year by R.Murray Schafer's *Adieu, Robert Schumann*
(1978), a work that deserves to be better known and proceeds from
Schumann's haunting setting (op.127/2) of Heine's "Dein Angesicht" from
the *Buch der Lieder* to a setting (haunted by recollections of
Schumann's music) of extracts from Clara Schumann`s diary (in English)
on the events leading to her husband's committal to Endenich asylum and
eventual death there. As to translations of Heine - those I have seen
are off-putting, except for a Lowell imitation or two.
cheers
mjay
--
"I was crazy to come to this country, because I was liked a free country." - Sacco
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