Introduction: Hofmannsthal, the enfant terrible of Vienna
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is perhaps the greatest claimant to the title of the German enfant terrible, placing him alongside Mikhail Lermontov in Russia and, most famously of all, Arthur Rimbaud in France in the German canon. Like those two poets Hofmannsthal displayed precocious talents at a young age – in his case he frequented a literary salon from the age of about fifteen with his father accompanying him since he was too young to go alone. And like Rimbaud, Hofmannsthal also ceased writing poetry suddenly to concentrate on other parts of his life. The reason usually identified by the critics is that he lost his belief in language as a tool to convey thought and the reality he saw around him. This crisis is memorably expressed in his fictional “Lord Chandos Letter” to Francis Bacon, in which the former man (a surrogate for Hofmannsthal) explains how language has failed him.
I am no Hofmannsthal expert, but I have read through his small poetic corpus a few times and want to share two aspects of his poetry that make him an interesting poet to me. Though the crisis that ultimately turns him away from poetry appears to be a linguistic one, I think there are more tensions lying under the surface of his perfectly tuned poesy than just ones of language. As ever, unmarked translations are mine.
Language Dies with a Whimper
By the time Hofmannsthal in 1902 actually penned his imaginary letter complaining of his inability to write it was long since he had written anything substantial. In my copy of his poems there are collected those poems he did not see worth publishing in his 1922 Gedichte. Some of these aren’t very good, but interestingly enough as 1895/6 – the apogee of his talents – passed he began to write several little couplets, which are scarcely poems at all. Instead, they seem a halfway point between the faith in language expressed poems like “A Dream of Great Magic” and the collapse of that faith expressed in the “Lord Chandos Letter”. At only two lines long, they seem positively Beckettian in attitude – the attempt to salvage some kind of meaning from the gigantic void that language’s failure has left. Some of them are, though bitter, thought-provoking and beautiful. Hopefully my translations are too!
Names
“Visp’s the name of a frothing brook; another name is Goethe.
There came the name from the thing; but here the bearer created its clang.”
This poem is written by a poet who is very aware of words and their effects; but not only that these effects exist but how they have the capacity to be created and remade by a sufficiently talented person, like a Goethe.
Words
“There are some words that hit like hammers. But others
You swallow like hooks and swim on and do not yet know it.”
I love this one. It captures one of those inarticulable feelings you get when you read something truly superb. You know that the best works and their words will stay with you, but Hofmannsthal puts his finger on an image for how they do it. “Words”, here, is more specifically phrases, but I think that’s clear enough from the context and of little importance anyway. That title sounds better to my ear than “phrases” would.
The Art of the Storyteller
“Do you wish to depict the murder? Well show me the hound in the yard: /
Now show me at the same time in the eye of the dog the shadows of the killing.”
I think in this one the scepticism about language’s ability to reflect reality is clearly manifest. It was even clearer when I accidentally misread “murder” for “world” in the German because I wasn’t being careful. Nonetheless, Hofmannsthal is challenging our ability to depict the world in any meaningful way. Meaning here is removed by the successive impulse to get into smaller and smaller parts of reality – first the dog, then his eye, and then the shadows of the killing itself. It becomes too much, too detailed. We’re overloaded with information we cannot possibly manage to represent, and so representation itself becomes suspect. While the modernist fiction writers tried to go further and further into the subconscious, Hofmannsthal is expressing a feeling of futility in such an idea. It will never not fail at showing everything we are. This is the poem of one who will shortly give up on poetry.
Hofmannsthal’s Poetical (and Political) Guilt and Doubt
Late in life Hofmannsthal, the Austrian aristocrat, became a great reactionary. The loss the empire over which he and his fellow Viennese had ruled through military failure in the First World War was too much to bear for a soul like his, one already inclined by birth towards that which is conservative and noble in temperament. But we ought to give him his due – he was young once. And in his poems, there is more a tension between an artistic temperament that seeks to live creating art-for-art’s-sake, channelling a certain strand of Nietzsche, and an awareness of the responsibilities that he has for his people as a result of his position in society. A sense of his duty as a human being fighting against his sense of his duty as an artist. I think it is this tension that produces one of his most well-known poems, “Manche Freilich…”/”Some, of course…”:
Some, of course…
Some, of course, will have to die below,
Where the heavy rudders of the ship are striving;
Others live at the helm above,
And know the birds’ flights and the stars’ lands.
Some have to lie down with heavy limbs
Among the roots of tortured lives;
Others find they've seats arranged
Up by the Sibyls and the queens,
And there they sit as if at home,
With easy bodies and easy hands.
But a shadow falls up from that life
Into the other life above,
And the easy are bound to the heavy
Just as they’re bound to earth and air:
I can’t remove forgotten tragedies
That plagued past peoples from my eyes;
Nor keep my frightened soul safe from
The silent fall of far-off stars.
Many fates are woven beside my own
And through them all a presence plays;
And my part is more than just this life’s
Slightest flame or slender lyre.
A German version of the poem can be found here
Analysis: a political poem?
I’m not entirely sure what this poem means, but I’ve learned it and had it going around in my head for a few months, so I’ve at the very least been thinking about it. The sticking point, critically speaking, is in the first line: “Some, of course, will have to die below”/”Manche freilich müssen drunten sterben”. It’s hard to know what tone this is written in. It seems at first to indicate a resigned attitude towards equality and social progress and, if not an endorsement of existing hierarchies, then at the very least a suggestion that the hierarchies ought not to be tampered with. But it could be read as anything from complete support to a more insidious, ironic tone. I, at least, can’t read it without hearing irony. The description of the ship is designed to show inequality, without being so political as to start demanding solutions.
Instead, the focus seems to be on the existence of inequality and the need, not for solutions so much as for understanding and a sense of personal responsibility. Hofmannsthal here is trying to feel what anybody in his position as an aristocrat, and indeed anybody in a position of relative wealth, can easily forget to feel – a sense of awareness of, and compassion and responsibility towards those who luck and other circumstances have not left as well-off as they have themselves. It is easy enough, I know from experience, to ignore the plight of others as being almost unreal, to dismiss the homeless as somehow deserving of their fate, and criminals as being exclusively bad people. Of course, there are bad people among the criminals, just as there are dangerous people among the homeless, but that cannot be justification to look away and hide from the obligation to pay attention.
Interconnectedness as solution
Hofmannsthal is keenly aware that he does not need to take any part in society whatsoever, except, if he wants, as an artist. A life of aesthetic and creative pleasure lies open to him in a way that it is for almost nobody else. He can, in the language of the poem, look at the birds and the stars, and sit and feast well into the early morning. But this life becomes, in contemplation of the reality facing him as a conscientious human being, inadequate – “my part is more than just this life’s slightest flame or slender lyre” – the lines reject making that life of luxuriant aestheticism the entirety of his world. Not only do the fruits of that life seem to be unworthy, Hofmannsthal also appears to feel a kind of guilt from it, suggested by “I can’t remove forgotten tragedies / That plagued past peoples from my eyes”.
He begins to see being fully aware of “the presence” / “Dasein” that runs through all things as the goal of his life. With that there comes a view of the world that sees all life as valuable for being a reflection of this central idea of its very existence. It’s not a religious idea per se, so much as the idea of our interconnectedness made clearer. Instead of seeing himself as isolated from other people because of his social status, Hofmannsthal here reworks his understanding of his position to allow himself the ability to feel keenly the value of other people, even as he doesn’t let it become a political statement. He disestablishes the hierarchies of his mind, instead of concerning himself with destroying the hierarchies of the world. In essence, he adds compassion to his conservatism. It is, I think, a somewhat heroic gesture.
Conclusion – Reasons to read Hofmannsthal
Hofmannsthal is a pretty cool poet. What I like the most about his poetry is how little there is of it, and how good what there is is. No matter how productively-minded you may be, there’s enough time to go back and reread things, and think about what they have to say. The German is attractive to the ear, and the topics that he deals with are usually interesting enough. That sounds like a lukewarm recommendation, and perhaps it is, but I think it’s difficult to capture a sense of beauty when you recommend something anyway. His poetry is beautiful and filled with pleasant turns and wondrous images. He is neither a great thinker nor a great soul in his poetry, but for a young man who stopped writing his poems only a year or two older than I am now, it’s amazing what he did achieve. Check him out.
For more German poetry, I’ve translated some pieces by Theodor Storm here.
