foudebassan (foudebassan) wrote in gedichte, @ 2008-04-12 23:34:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | hoelderlin |
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin
(1770-1843)
Hölderlin’s father died when he was still an infant. His mother re-married very soon afterwards, but her second husband died quickly, so she brought him up single-handedly. He studied hard, and got into the Tübingen seminary, where he met Hegel. They influenced each other, and it is not impossible that Hölderlin should have been the one to introduce Hegel to Heraclitean dialectic. He did not want to become a priest, however, so he took the only alternative, ie became a private tutor, which left him some time to write. His first post was in Iena, where he was also at liberty to go to university himself. He may have had an illegitimate child with a maidservant there – and he met Isaac von Sinclair, who was to become his closest friend. He however showed himself unable to keep a situation for very long and travelled a bit to find new positions.
Most established writers and poets didn’t pay much attention to this young provincial, except Schiller, who happened to come from the same part of the province as him, and who had his novel Hyperion published in one of his publications.
Hölderlin fell in love with the (married) mother of one of his pupils, Suzette Gontard. Hyperion’s Diotima is her, thinly disguised for propriety’s sake. The husband eventually wisened up and he had to leave the country to become tutor to the son of the Hamburger consul in Bordeaux. He took his time to join that post, staying a while in Lyon, probably in the hope of meeting Napoléon, who was due in that city. But that wasn’t to be either, so he eventually had to get moving.
My favourite poem ever is by Hölderlin, but as far as I’m concerned it belongs to the things you’d rather not touch too closely for fear of them breaking down under your fingers, so instead here’s the (much shorter!) poem he wrote upon crossing the Garonne river, on his way to Bordeaux.
Hälfte des Lebens
Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.
Weh mir, wo nehm ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein,
Und Schatten der Erde ?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.
At the half of life
Full of yellow pears
And filled with wild roses
The land hangs in the lake
You, graceful swans,
Drunken by kisses
Dip your heads
In the holy and sobering (1) water.
Woe on me, where shall I take, when
Winter comes, the flowers, and where
The sunshine
And the shade of the earth ?
The walls stand
Speechless and cold, in the wind
The vanes (2) rattle.
(1) heilignüchtern (= holysobering) is I believe a neologism? Probably for scansion reasons, “heilig und nüchtern” being one syllable longer.
(2) Fahne is, stricto sensu, a banner (as in, the heavy flag armies carry into battle to distinguish their side from the other one). Eine Windfahne (shortened to Fahne because there’s the word wind just one verse before?), however, is a weathercock (girouette) – the metallic rooster-shaped device that points to wherever the wind is blowing. Now while “banner” makes sense in the general scheme of things (this was written in the early 1800s – Napoleonic wars lurk right behind the corner and Hölderlin, who was in France at the time, and a 1789 revolutionary enthusiast to boot, knew it), I find that, in the limited context of this poem, the parallel to the swans in the first strophe makes the allusion to a bird a must. I have no doubt Hölderlin meant it to be ambiguous.
The two halves of the poem face each other, not unlike the land being reflected onto the surface of the lake he alludes to - and the dichotomy is reflected in the title itself. While in the first half verses coincide with distinct word groups, in the second they are torn between verses, as if to reflect breathlessness. The summer / winter opposition could reflect all kinds of things, beginning with the political climate (war=winter necessary to re-establish the order of things before winter?).
Hier gibt es eine viel längere Erläuterung auf Deutsch.
Suzette Gontard died in 1802. We don’t know when the news reached Hölderlin, but he did come back from Bordeaux all in a sudden and was in such a state upon coming back that his friends hardly recognised him – probably early symptoms of dementia mixed with grief.
He came back home to his mother and the ever-present Sinclair found him a pretend job and gave him money in guise of a salary. At that point he wrote and translated Sophocles and Pindare. But in 1805 Sinclair was arrested and charged with high treason, which was pretty bad for him of course, but also had as a consequence that he became unable to care further for his friend. At this point Hölderlin became quite mad, to the point where his own mother had him interned against his will. It is not impossible that Hölderlin should have faked the mental illness to get out of being arrested himself, at least in part, but it is more likely that he was not quite sane either by then.
In 1807 a carpenter that lived nearby, Wilhelm Waiblinger, who devoted to Hyperion a fannish cult that would put many of us Potter fen to shame, offered to take care of Hölderlin so as to discharge the asylum. All parties accepted, and Hölderlin stayed in their guest room, with daily half-hour walks in their tiny garden, until his death in 1843, which gives a whole new meaning to hospitality. There Hölderlin wrote some more, reverting to a more classic form and abandoning, to a large extend, the attempts to use Greek scansion in German verse he had tried in his youth (of which today’s poem, like Patmos, are examples).