genius of hölderlin

8/12/2019 Genius of Hlderlin

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The Hudson Review Inc

The Genius of HlderlinHlderlin: Poems by Michael Hamburger; Hlderlin: A Critical Study by L. S. SalzbergerReview by: R. W. FlintThe Hudson Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1953), pp. 308-313Published by: The Hudson Review, IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3847546.

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R. W. FLINTThe Genius of HolderlinHOLDERLIN: POEMS, translated with a critical introduction by Michael

Hamburger. Pantheon. $3.50. HOLDERLIN: A Critical Study by L. S.Salzberger. Yale University Press. $3.50.

ERE ARE THE FIRST LONG STUDIES of Holderlin published in this country.New Directions has put out some translations by Prokosch, and there is anEnglish edition of selected poems translated by J. B. Leishman, Rilke's translator.Nevertheless, it is safe to say that except for the departments of German and afew of humanities, one of the half-dozen best German poets and one of the twomost seminal poets of the German 19th century renaissance is still unknownin America. Except for Heine and Rilke, German poetry was largely ignoredby the best translators of the last generation, and Holderlin is a poet whosesmall but poignant quality consists in a particularly pure, direct relationshipto the language as such. As a mind, he was well read and strictly trained,but as a poet he entirely lacked that wit and/or urbanity which made Goethe,Heine, George and Rilke more readily accessible to foreigners. Even in Ger-many his emergence as a recognized master was slow and somewhat undercoverbecause of his failure to win the patronage of Goethe, a poet who recognizedno rivals in Germany and is only now beginning to be treated with anythinglike candor. He also lacked the clear international standing which put Heineout of Goethe's reach. It was Schiller whom Goethe patronized; Holderlin,who started by imitating Schiller and eventually surpassed him, had to waitnearly a century for recognition.But the mystery behind this goes deeper than personal rivalry. Hilderlincould never have matched Goethe in the way Bach, for example, matchedHandel. Though they were contemporaries (Holderlin was born in the sameyear as Wordsworth and Beethoven), he stands to Goethe as Leopardi to Danteor Keats to Shakespeare, as a poet who spoke from the center of his culturewith a perfect mastery of his own tongue but whose range, in comparison tothe greater poet, is very much narrower. Nothing in Goethe surpasses thebest of Holderlin, though his total achievement is richer. In himself, in termsof tone and stance, Hilderlin most resembles Wordsworth, and it is here, inthe great difference between the Wordsworthian lyric and prophetic mode

andGoethe's special mixture of deliberate worldliness and naYvete, that the mysterylies. As men-of-the-world, Goethe and Heine have more in common with eachother than either of them with Holderlin, who was never known to have jokeduntil he went mad.

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THE HUDSON REVIEWto judge, that he was "certainly the equal" of Hegel and Schelling as a technicalphilosopher. In other words, he wholly lacked, as a thinker, that superstitioussense of the value of philosophy per se which we sometimes, forgetting suchgenuine cases as Lucretius, Dante or T. S. Eliot, grudgingly recognize in callinga man a "philosophical poet". At the same time, he was wholly involved inthe post-Napoleonic awakening. One of his early friends described a meetingof the Tiibingen poetry club: "We were well supplied with Rhine wine, andwe sang our way through all the Songs of Joy in succession. Schiller's Songof Joy we had reserved for the punch-bowl. . . . The bowl stood steaming onthe table and we were about to begin the song when Holderlin begged usfirst to cleanse ourselves of our sins in the Castalian Spring. . . . We made ourway through the garden and washed our faces and hands. 'This song ofSchiller's', said Holderlin, 'no one impure may sing ' Now we sang. At thestanza, 'This glass to the Good Spirit', tears came into Holderlin's eyes; full ofenthusiasm he held his glass out of the window and roared, 'This glass to theGood Spirit' into the open air, so that the whole Neckar valley re-echoed."How was this cult of joy given poetic color and movement? First of all,surprisingly perhaps but also inevitably for a poet with Holderlin's capacityfor suffering, as elegy.

Wie mein Gliik, ist mein Lied.-Willst du im AbendrothFroh dich baden? Hinweg ists, und der Erd' ist kalt,Und der Vogel der Nacht schwirrtUnbequemvor das Auge dir'.

This elegiac note is purest in his well-known "Hyperions Schiksaalslied", butit also colors those memorable early poems in Alcaics, "Abendphantasie", "Andie Hofnung", "Der Abschied" (third version), "An die Parzen", "AnDiotima" (Diotima was Holderlin's pseudonym for his single, intense and tragiclove-affair, Susette Gontard, the wife of a banker whose children he tutored),and the grave, radiant "Menons Klage um Diotima" in hexameters. Ratherthan quote one of the long poems piecemeal, I will restrict myself to "An dieParzen", a poem which renders his quality as fully as anything he wrote.Nur einenSormmer6nnt, ihr GewaltigenUnd einen Herbstzu reifen Gesangemir,Dasswilliger mein Herz, vom siissenSpielegesattigt, dann mir sterbe

lI give Mr. Hamburger's translations; the German version is given in Holderlin's Swabiandialect. From "Die Kiirze",Like my joy is my song.-In the red summer's glowWould you bathe and be gay? Gone it is, cold the earth,And the bird of the night whirs,

Swoops down awkwardly to your eyes.This is one of Mr. Hamburger's least effective translations. It entirely misses the excitementof "schwirrt" followed by the expressive "unbequem"-uneasy, uncomfortable.

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REVIEWS 311Die Seele,der im Leben hr gottlich RechtNicht ward, sie ruht auch druntenin Orkusnicht;

Doch ist mir einst das Heil'ge, dasamHerzen mir liegt, dasGedicht,gelungenWillkommendann, o Stille der SchattenweltZufriedenbin ich, wenn auch mein SaitenspielMich nicht hinabgleitet;einmalLebt'ich wie Gltter, und mehrbedarfsnicht.2

(I am sure the pun in the last line was unintentional.) Here is certainlya new note and a new diction in German, not the folkish pathos of "Du, du,liegst mir im Herzen . . ." but the sweet-tempered gravity and tight fluencyof Gluck's neo-classic operas, the interpenetration of classical form and amodern idiom you find in the best of Campion or Landor. It has moreweight in the perspective of German poetry than Campion or Landor havein English. Mr. Hamburger suggests what is to me a weak analogy to thepoetry of Chenier, Leconte de Lisle or Heredia. The French neo-classicistswere only such by virtue of subject; the single line was still their principalunit of meaning. Holderlin provides a new way to listen to the Germanlanguage.

From here to the looser prophetic poems in hexameters and Pindarics is notas long a journey as it might seem. He had to steer his way between a staticSchilleresque Schwirmerei on the one hand and over-abstraction on the other."I lack facility more than strength, nuances more than ideas, manifoldlyordered sounds more than a keynote, shadows more than light . . ." he wroteto a friend. It was not that he grew more philosophical as he grew older, butthat the tension implicit in his double allegiance to the Bible and the Classicsbecame increasingly available to him as experience and hence as poetry. Inhis prophetic poetry he assumes that the two can be poetically reconciled, notin the Miltonic manner, but in terms of a set of arbitrary symbols which oddlyresemble Kafka's avatars of divine power and grace. "Patmos" ts the mostambitious and successful of these poems, the most personal, most coherent,

2"To the Fates".Only one summergrant me, 0 mighty onesAnd but one autumn leave me for mellow song,So that my heart with its sweet playingSated more willingly then may perish.The soul to which in life its appointedrightsWere not vouchsafed in Orcus too cannot rest;Yet should what I deem holy, cherishMore than all else, should my verse grow perfect,Most welcome then, 0 stillness of shades belowContent I shall be, though music of my stringsDo not escort me down; for once ILived as the gods live, and that suffices.



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THE HUDSON REVIEWmost richly figured and best modulated. Like Wordsworth's Intimations Ode,it is strictly sui generis, the kind of poem that would be unimaginable unlessit existed, impossible unless it were also very good. As for its idea-scheme,a simple diagram should help.

CLASSICAL- ' >- IDEAL(gods, demi-gods, presences, etc.) (immortality, salvation, etc.)

JOHANINE-APOCALYPTIC - ' REAL(Christ, sairts, apostles, etc.) (the poet's experience, fate, etc.)

As I hope to have indicated, the traffic between symbol and idea is continuousand "contrapuntal". That is, Holderlin makes no simple equations betweenany two sets of his poetic counters, as, for example, between the ideal and theBiblical or the real and the Classic. His only certainty is that of the poemitself, its realized feeling and the prophetic conclusions it draws. ErichPryzwara, the Catholic theologian, in his useful study of Holderlin's ideas(still untranslated) shows how his step-wise system of values, Greece, Ger-many, the West and Asia, culminates in a vision of Christ as "das Abendlandin seinem letzten Geheimnis". This is Hopkins's Christ who "plays in tenthousand places . . .", the living principle of holiness suffering under God; Heis also the last of the classical divine presences, as much a destroying fire asa reconciler, the Heraclean figure of Michelangelo's Last Judgment. "WieFirsten ist Herkules, Gemeingut Bacchus, Christus aber ist das Ende." Heraclesis prince, Bacchus is common welfare, but Christ is the end.

Any critic might succumb to grandiosity in analyzing this really very sober,ingenuous and limited poet, and so end by offering the reader an irreproachablylifeless cultural monument, a shining knight of the Humanities. Like Words-worth he doubtless now and then engages in an almost indecent traffic withthe Right Attitudes. And, indeed, like neo-classicism in any form, of whatevercentury, whether it take Horace or Pindar as its model, he is only a phase, aformal experiment capable of great charm and great banality. If he had notbeen the most ingenuously German of poets who could make use of the folk-song tradition and its accepted naivetes, not as folk-song but in his own way,he would have been a considerable bore. The worst one can say of his hymnsand odes is that they sometimes fall into a "touching and artless piety" (Mr.Salzberger's words) that cannot engage us very deeply.

But that such a poet could have been the rejuvenator of German diction,who made possible the lapidary richness of George and the long, free, variedline of the Duino Elegies, is the prime interest for the critic. Without hisepithets, his feminine endings, his inversions, his fluency within the verseparagraph, his quantitative stretching and weighting of the line, and his precise

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