Thanks oh Anny and Andrew and
*entrelacements*
ah, such an interesting word to be reminded of, Martin, and, yes, as always, one
is threading one's way through a thicket (an image I prefer to that of a mined
field, though I expect the second is more accurate in some senses!) I agree
about the great lyric beauty of "Bread and Wine". Hamburger's translation of the
"unparaphraseable lines" you quote (and it's Hamburger's translations in
_Friedrich Holderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments_ , the Penguin Classics
which I'm quoting):
Such is man; when the wealth is there, and no less than a god in
Person tends him with gifts, blind he remains, unaware.
First he must suffer; but now he names his most treasured possession,
Now for it words like flowers leaping alive he must find.
The syntax seems a bit awkward there, no? much in the sense that you
characterize in your postscript post. And the poem, preoccupied with that
question which in Heidegger's _Being, Thought, and Poetry_ is translated as
"And what is poetry for in a destitute time?" though Hamburger has the lines:
Always waiting, and what to do or say in the meantime,
I don't know, and who wants poets at all in lean years?
And it's interesting those purple violets in the fragmented poem 'to the Virgin',
though the poem in its beginning has also the lily
Yet, heavenly one, yet you
I'll celebrate and let no one
Reproach me with
The beauty of native speech,
Now that alone
I go to the field
Where wild
The lily grows, fearless,
To the inaccesible
Primordial vault of the forest
That "fortified song of flowers" is everywhere in Holderlin, the phrase itself
taken from the fragmented "For from the abyss..."
But a wild hill looms above the slop of
My gardens. Cherry-trees. A sharp breath, however,
flows around the holes of the rock. And there I am
all things at once. But wonderfully
Over well-springs there slenderly bends
A nut tree and Berries like coral
Hang on the shrug above wooden gutters
From which
Originally of corn, but now to be confessed, fortified song of flowers
which goes on to end:
and read me, gather me O
You flowers of Germany, O my heart is turning
To crystal that cannot lie, in which
The light is tested when Germany
And perhaps if "restitution' is as you say, "we say ...that certain words do
'justice' to a theme" perhaps, though I suppose this morning, I am suffering
from the usual Holderlin effect which is that, whatever the argument, I am when
I go to the poems so drawn into them that I go wandering off in the pages, for
there is a way in which for the reader, this one anyway, his words are a kind of
restoration, or as he ends "Greece":
Sweet it is then to dwell under the high shade
Of trees and hills, sunny where the road
Is paved to church. To travellers, though,
To him whose feet, from love of life,
Measuring all along, obey him,
More beautifully blossom the roads,"
So to all, roads that blossom,
Best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 14:49:41 +0100
>From: MJ Walker <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Hölderlin/reply to Martin
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>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
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