I really like Theodor Storm as a poet because he seems to me to be incredibly conventional. There is almost nothing special about either the form or the content of Storm’s poetry, but these little pieces are (forgive the translations if they don’t convey this) perfectly crafted all the same. There is no danger of ambition getting in the way of the message. While it is true that Storm wrote longer poems that I haven’t translated here, even those are all limited in formal and thematic scope. It seems he understood his talents and never thought it was worth the danger of trying to move beyond them, something he did in the formal experimentation of his novellas.
Theodor Storm, author of poems and novellas, was born and lived most of his life on the shores of the North Sea. His most famous poem “The Town”/Die Stadt (not translated here), takes his hometown of Husum as its setting.
Storm was born in 1817 in Husum, a small town in the duchy of Schleswig, at that time ruled by the Danish crown, even though it contained a sizeable German population. He studied law further south, wrote poems and novellas (I’ve written on Aquis Submersus here, and Immensee here), and returned to Husum after it had come under Prussian rule following a brief war with Denmark. There is a political slant to his work at times, but this doesn’t come across in the selection I’ve translated. I don’t feel the patriotism translates well without notes and I’m not sure it’d be enjoyable with them either.
Storm died at the age of 70 from cancer, shortly after
completing “The Rider on the White Horse”, perhaps his greatest
novella.
The Poems
I’ve translated several of Storm’s poems. His topics within them range from life and love to death and decay. My only regret with them is that I haven’t yet translated his more nature-based poems. I find them particularly beautiful. But that means I’m harder on myself – I want to do them justice. Since I myself grew up by a grey and northern coastline, I’m especially fond of Storm’s poetry dealing with his homeland.
But anyway, here are the poems. Following them will be a few
comments.
Beginning of the End
It's just a point, not even pain - It's just a feeling you perceive - And yet it hangs around your thoughts, And yet it makes it hard to breathe.
And when you try to tell your friends, You find you cannot find the words. You tell yourself: "this is no end." And yet there's no peace from its birth.
And now the world becomes so strange, And quietly your hopes depart, Until you see at last - at last! - That death's dark arrow's found your heart.
Insomnia
I woke from dreams in worried fright - Why is the lark's song out in the night?
The day's gone by, the morning's still far, Down onto my pillow there shines a star.
Yet on and on there floats the lark's song - O voice of day, what has gone wrong?
Early Morning
Above the roof the sun's gold shines, And cocks begin to crow the time; The one crows here, the other there, Their call rings out from everywhere. Now in the distance dies the cry - There's nothing more to fill the sky. Oh brave old cocks, sing on your song! They are still sleeping, sleeping on.
A Whisper
It is a whisper in the night, And yet it set my peace to flight. I feel it's there, it wants to say Some thing but cannot find the way.
Is it love's words, their secrets thrown Into the wind, blown far from home? Or is it pain from future days That hopes to help me change my ways?
Husum, Storm’s birthplace and home for much of his life. It’s a lovely little town and the Storm Museum there is worth visiting if you’re ever in the area. Photo by Bernd Untiedt (CC BY-SA 3.0)
"One body and one soul..."
One body and one soul, as once we were, - Seen thus, how great your death to me appears. As you, alone, within the grave decay, So too feel I, myself, decay up here.
"A man held once..."
A man held once by loving arms, Need never ask in life for alms. If he must die far off, alone, Still yet he'll feel those blessed hours, When her mouth loved with all its powers, And now in death she'll stay his own.
Consolation Whatever happens, come what may! If you still live I'll love this day.
The feeling goes, the world to roam - Wherever you are, that's my home.
I see your lovely face before me, And know the future cannot hurt me.
Closing Remarks
If I had to write about these in an essay, I’d find more to say than I will say now. But essays are always unnatural; they just get in the way of enjoying the simplicity of the poetry. Storm’s poetry is often about love, about the changes in love brought by death and separation. In this he seems quite similar to another major German poet of the same period, Eduard Mörike. But Storm’s poetry, at least here, also has a much greater sense of apprehension and anxiety about it. Death is always just around the corner, and however beautiful the natural world is there’s also a sense that Storm is not always certain that he can correctly interpret the world’s symbols. The gap between perception and his understanding seems to torment him, as in “Insomnia” and “A Whisper” – both end in questions.
I hope you enjoyed my translations. If you have any comments, why not leave a comment? If you want more German poetry, I have a piece on Hugo von Hofmannsthal here.
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.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929). Don’t let his dates fool you – he wrote almost all of his poetry before the turn of the century, before settling down into gloom and reactionary politics.
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.
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born at almost the same time as Hofmannsthal, and into even more luxury. But unlike Hofmannsthal, whose “Some, of course” shows hesitation before action, Wittgenstein’s life contains many heroic attempts to connect with his fellow men and women.
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.
