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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press Classics
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Novelist, scientist, courtier, poet - Goethe's genius spanned disciplines in his lifetime, and has spanned the centuries since his death. Bringing together the stunning lyric poetry of the author of Faust, this fresh translation also gives us Goethe's life from childhood to old age, captured in his verse. With a gaze that embraces mountaintops and wayside flowers, warring gods and gingko leaves, this epoch-making poet unites us with life's humble beauties, sublime sorrows, and deepest meanings.
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‘The old Eternal Genius who built the world has confided himself more to this man than to any other… From him nothing was hid, nothing withholden’
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
‘I cannot speak of Goethe except with love… An artist of Goethe’s creative genius contrives somehow to smile upon life and keep faith with it’
THOMAS MANN
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For Catherine and Mark and in loving memory of Muriel and James and of our parents Muriel and Frank, Laura and Sydney to all of whom I owe so much
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Goethe’s Life in his Poetry
Goethe, undoubtedly Germany’s greatest poet, as Shakespeare is England’s. Born nearly 200 years apart, what else, if anything, might they have in common? Goethe’s younger friend and colleague Johann Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), poet, dramatist and philosopher, at first somewhat jealous of Goethe’s genius, believed that he saw a fundamental similarity in their works. He argued in an essay that primitive poetry is “naive”, spontaneous, reproducing the poet’s impressions of the world straightforwardly and without reflection. Greatly to simplify the argument of his essay, he claimed that, in this way, both Goethe and Shakespeare are themselves naive poets and thus, for Schiller, men of the highest genius, while Schiller justified himself as a poet, and others like him, as being “sentimental”, in the older sense of “reflective”, in their own approach to their art.
Goethe and I first met face to face at the back of a Modern Languages classroom at school, where his picture hung beside a door leading into the next room. The elderly gentleman, of benign and healthful appearance and holding some document, surveyed us if we, on occasion, had cause to pass this way from 16one room to the other, instead of going out by the main door into the school hall. Later, in the Sixth Form, we came to read a selection of his poems and discover a world of feeling, of love, of nature, of humanity, for Goethe’s verse, always accessible, was so often inspired by the recollection of some recent event or events in his life, and he seems to be saying to us: This was my experience. Do you perhaps recognize these same emotions in yourself? In later life he referred to his works as “fragments of a great confession”.
When I began work as a teacher of foreign languages, a selection of Goethe’s poems was frequently on the A-Level German Literature syllabus, and I did my best to convey to my students the enthusiasm I felt for poetry with such a variety of content, styles and rhythms. The rhythms began to take shape for me in English words corresponding to the German. My first attempt at a translation was of the earlier of Goethe’s two poems entitled “Wandrers Nachtlied” (“Wanderer’s Song at Nightfall”) (1776), the prayerful “Der, du von dem Himmel bist”. In translating eighteenth-century poems in particular, as well as adopting an older form of English for my translations, I have tended to use the singular forms thou and thee, where it seemed appropriate, corresponding to German du, dich, dir, and giving, I believe and others have agreed, something more of the “feel” of the original.
Wanderer’s Song at Nightfall
Der, du von dem Himmel bist,
Thou who art come down from Heaven,
Alles Leid und Schmerzen stillest,
Who all pain and sorrow stillest,
Den, der doppelt elend ist,
Him, to whom grief’s doubly given,17
Doppelt mit Erquickung füllest,
Doubly with thy comfort fillest,
Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde!
Oh, from wearying strife, release!
Was soll all der Schmerz und Lust?
What use all the pain, the zest?
Süßer Friede,
Sweet Peace,
Komm, ach komm in meine Brust!
Come, ah come into my breast!
While acknowledging that, in one sense, it is impossible to translate poetry—changing one word or the punctuation, of course, can alter what was the original intention—I offer the reader this sincere tribute to Goethe’s genius. And what a genius! Novelist, dramatist, philosopher and above all poet, a scientist with deep interests in nature, in particular the human body, forestry, geology, botany and light, a courtier and in later life considered a sage, he was also a very frequent and lively letter-writer, no mean artist, and a man who was able often, throughout his life, to renew and rejuvenate himself, working out many of his life’s problems through his writings.
For English-speakers he is probably best known as the author of Faust, a vast dramatic work mainly in verse which occupied him on and off throughout his long life. I should like to introduce you to his very personal lyric poetry in the form of these translations, as close to the original form, content and rhyme schemes as I can make them.
Here, in this selection of his poetry, is a representation of Goethe’s life from childhood to old age: “Geburt und Grab, ein ewiges Meer” (from Faust, Birth and the grave, an eternal sea).18
Family
Johann Wolfgang Goethe (he was later, in 1782, ennobled and became “von Goethe”) was born on 28th August 1749, in the city of Frankfurt-am-Main, to eighteen-year-old Katharina Elisabeth (née Textor) (1731–1808) and the, in his day and age, already rather elderly thirty-nine-year-old Johann Caspar Goethe (1710–82), a man with legal training but who lived the life of a “gentleman of means”, devoting his time to his various collections. Johann Caspar’s parents were Friedrich Georg Göthé (a master tailor and the son of a farrier), who gave his son a good education, sending him on the Grand Tour through Italy and France; and Cornelia Schellhorn (née Walther), Friedrich Georg’s second wife, a hotelier’s widow, who was thus able, on their marriage, to present him with one of the best inns in Frankfurt, the Weidenhof.
Johann Caspar’s wife was an extremely lively young woman with a fund of stories to tell. Her father, Johann Wolfgang Textor, a lawyer, after whom his grandson was named, had recently become Frankfurt’s Schultheiss, the city’s permanent head of the judiciary. In the street Grosser Hirschgraben, he and his wife, Anna Margarethe (née Lindheimer) lived together with their younger family in two big old houses, which, when his mother died, Johann Caspar reconstructed, making it into one for his own small family of four. Goethe had just one sister, Cornelia, a little over a year younger than himself. Several other siblings died young, that terrible scourge of previous centuries, and Cornelia herself lived to be only twenty-six years old and died at the birth of her second child. Goethe himself, on the other hand, lived well into his eighty-third year, which is nevertheless understandable, given that his parents and grandparents all lived into their seventies or eighties.19
From Father I this frame possess
From Father I this frame possess,
Life’s serious direction,
From Mother dear, my cheerfulness,
For tales a predilection.
Grandfather to the fair would hold,
It haunts me not a little;
While Grandmama loved jewels and gold,
And that my veins may kittle.
If from the sum one cannot say
How items could be shaken,
Within a fellow, then, what may
As underived be taken? (1827)
Leipzig and Some “Anacreontic” Poems
For three years, from 1765 to 1768, Goethe lived in Leipzig, ostensibly to study law, but really studying life. As a student he flirted with many girls, usually called, it seems, Lottchen, Kätchen or Ännchen, and indeed he fell in love with the daughter of the Schönkopf household, Anna Katharina, whom he refers to sometimes as Ännchen or Annette, though she is now remembered as Kätchen Schönkopf. Her parents took in lodgers and she served at table. Goethe was smitten, but he claimed to have a recurring nightmare in which a girl would beckon him to a door, then put him into a sack. He avoided marriage, for one reason or another, with all but one of the many female friends who came into his life. Kätchen herself married soon after Goethe left Leipzig to return to Frankfurt, but he wrote to her for some years.20
His verses at this time are in the style of the period, the so-called “Anacreontic”, quite brief, witty little poems on themes of love.
Strasbourg and Sesenheim
When Goethe returned from studying in Leipzig to Frankfurt in 1768 he was, strangely, both in good spirits and yet very unwell, with an illness which at this distance in time is seemingly difficult to diagnose. When he was somewhat recovered, his father sent him early in 1770, and ready for change, to continue his studies in Strasbourg, the principal city of Alsace.
Two people greatly influenced him in this new environment, and in Strasbourg he may be said to have found himself as a poet. In the autumn he met Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), just five years older but already an established writer, who tutored his younger friend in his own theories of art, the wonders of Homer and Shakespeare, the magnificence of the Gothic architecture of Strasbourg Minster and the significance of folk song.
Then, on an excursion with a friend to the village of Sesenheim (or Sessenheim), some miles to the north of Strasbourg, Goethe was introduced to the Brion family. The father was the village pastor and the house seemed always full of visitors, related or not. The second daughter, Friederike (1752?–1813), and Goethe were soon very much in love. A great deal of fun was to be had here: games with forfeits, dancing, dressing up, sitting chatting or walking in the surrounding countryside. In his poems, Goethe gave the girls a variety of pseudonyms.
The late 1760s and early 1770s marked the beginning of the period in German literature which is now referred to as Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress). It lasted about twenty years, a precursor 21to the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. Goethe became its acknowledged leader. At the time it was called the Geniezeit (Time of Genius).
Frankfurt and Wetzlar
The Sesenheim idyll was over before the end of 1771. Friederike was heartbroken, and Goethe was greatly disturbed by the experience. From 1771 till 1775 Goethe lived mainly in Frankfurt, except for a few months in the town of Wetzlar in 1772, where his father sent him to learn the routine of the legal profession. Amongst new friends here he met Johann Christian Kestner and fell in love with Charlotte Buff. This presented him with difficulties, since Charlotte was already engaged to Kestner. Each of the three seems to have thought highly of the other two, but the awkwardness of the relationship, together with the suicide, from unrequited love, of a Wetzlar acquaintance, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, gave Goethe material for his immensely influential novel of 1774 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). The story of the young man, away from home, who falls in love with his best friend’s fiancée, borrows the friend’s pistols and shoots himself, became known as far away as China, and when Napoleon met Goethe he claimed to have read the book seven times. Henceforth, Goethe was known to all as “the author of Werther”. The book will be recalled in Goethe’s poetry later. However, Goethe now returned to the Rhine from Wetzlar by undertaking a walk down the River Lahn to the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, near Koblenz, where he visited the best-known woman writer of the time, Sophie von La Roche, whom he knew from Frankfurt, before continuing up the Rhine and so back to Frankfurt.22
Goethe, endeavouring to recover from the Wetzlar experience and ill at ease after his break with Friederike, took to walking by himself in the region, to such an extent that he declared that he had become known as “The Wanderer”.
Lili, and an Invitation
Anna Elisabeth (Lili) Schönemann (1758–1817) was, in early 1775, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do but now deceased Frankfurt banker. Goethe was invited one evening by a friend to a sizeable gathering at the mother’s salon. He stood by the piano as Lili sat down and played, and they were at once attracted to each other. Yet as they met again on other visits to the home he felt himself ill-suited to the society surrounding her, which included her older brothers, who at their cards had little time for him and other plans for her. Deeply in love, he felt throughout the ensuing months that he should escape but found that he could not, until in May he determined on a journey with other friends to Switzerland. Returning, he was still in thrall to Lili, who had told friends she was willing to go to America with him; but the Duke of Weimar’s invitation to visit him gave Goethe a new excuse to leave Frankfurt. In 1778 Lili became Baroness von Türckheim, the wife of another banker, and they lived in Strasbourg. After serious difficulties, bravely overcome, at the time of the French Revolution, she and her family prospered. Of course, she is the “Belinda” (an affectionate pseudonym) of the second “Lili-Lied”.
In October 1775 the young Duke (later Grand Duke) Karl August of Weimar (1757–1828), then only eighteen years old and having recently inherited his duchy, arrived in Frankfurt and invited Goethe to visit his court. Goethe accepted, despite his father’s opposition. However, on the day of Goethe’s departure 23Herr von Kalb, the courtier who was to accompany him, was delayed, and Goethe, not knowing what had happened and somewhat mortified, wandered the streets while waiting and found himself outside Lili’s house. He could hear her at the piano, singing his song “Warum ziehst du mich unwiderstehlich” (To Belinda). He stole away, not wishing to upset Lili by his presence, and on 30th October, exasperated, he set off for Italy. He reached Heidelberg before a courier, sent by von Kalb, overtook him, explained, and asked him to return. His mind was soon made up and he travelled to Weimar, ostensibly for a visit, but remained based at the court for the rest of his life.
Weimar and Charlotte
A good deal of the poetry of the next eleven or so years, before Goethe’s departure on his Italian journey, was occasioned by his feelings for Charlotte von Stein (1742–1827), the wife of the Duke’s Master of the Horse. Her husband’s duties and general lack of concern for her left her in lonely isolation and, having given birth to seven children, four of whom died, in rather delicate health. The relationship between her and Goethe, seven years her junior, soon grew into a deep, spiritual love for each other, and her influence on the development of his mind was very great.
Italy and After; Christiane
For what was to prove the most significant experience of his life, in September 1786 Goethe set out for Italy, including visits to Rome and Sicily, without telling anyone, not even Charlotte, that he was leaving. He was away from Weimar for nearly two years, 24living for much of the time among artists, and arriving back, in so many ways a different and more mature man, in June 1788.
In July 1788, Goethe met Christiane Vulpius (1765–1816) in a park. She petitioned for assistance and patronage for her deserving brother, and Goethe tried to help. He also took Christiane into his home, to the scandal of Weimar society, and they were married only in 1806, a few days after Christiane had driven looting French soldiers from Goethe’s door following Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt. Goethe’s Roman Elegies were written in Weimar in 1788–90, with Christiane as well as Rome very much in mind. There is a delightful drawing by Goethe of Christiane asleep on a sofa (see “The Visit”). Goethe’s second, and less satisfactory, Italian visit, to Venice, took place in spring 1790, when he travelled there to escort the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia back to Weimar after her stay in the country.
The West-Eastern Divan (1814–19)
In the summers of 1814 and 1815, Goethe travelled, without Christiane, to his old home town, Frankfurt, and visited other Rhineland towns, including Wiesbaden and Heidelberg. Reaching the Rhineland area, he was imagining himself in fourteenth-century Persia. On his journey he had already written a number of poems (see “A Modern Copernicus”). And now he was to meet the inspiration for many more.
The East had interested Goethe from his childhood, through biblical stories, Oriental fairy tales and travel accounts that he had read, as well as his looking into the Koran. At this period Western Europe was much occupied with the Orient. We might think of Nash’s Brighton Pavilion, built and decorated in Eastern style for the Prince Regent.25
In 1814 Goethe was introduced, in the translations of the Austrian Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, to the world of the fourteenth-century Persian poet known as Hafiz (a title meaning “one who knows the Koran by heart”). Goethe was enabled to see the Persian as a kindred spirit, singing of love and wine at a time of great trouble and upheaval, just as Goethe himself was caught up in his own day in the Napoleonic conflicts, which were of course reaching a climax at this period. Hafiz, to give him the English version of his name closest to Goethe’s “Hafis”, had even met the great ruler Timur or Tamerlane (1336?–1405), Mongol conqueror of a vast area of Asia, as Goethe himself had met Napoleon.
In this context “Divan”, originally, in Persian, a small book, is a collection of poems. The Divan, an exuberant blossoming of Goethe’s poetic genius in his later sixties, is divided into twelve sections, though two of them contain only two poems each. Many of the poems in this selection of translations are to be found in the Suleika Nameh or Buch Suleika (Zuleika’s Book), a charming poetic record of the love of Goethe and Marianne von Willemer (1784–1860), to whom Goethe here gives the name of Zuleika, taking for himself the name of Hatem, another earlier Persian poet. Marianne Jung, as she still was when they first met, a girl of uncertain origins, had as a child been with her mother on stage in Austria. They had come to appear in Frankfurt, where Goethe’s old friend, Johann Jakob von Willemer, a twice-widowed banker, simply bought her from her mother and brought her up with his own daughters. At fifty-four he married Marianne, now aged thirty, shortly after Goethe’s arrival, but Goethe and Marianne were greatly attracted to each other and she not only inspired his writings in the Divan but contributed poems herself to the collection, a fact which was revealed only years after Goethe’s death. Although they were together for only a brief period in the late 26summers of 1814 and 1815 and never met again, they remained in correspondence for the rest of Goethe’s life. They vowed to remember each other especially at every full moon (see “Night of the Full Moon” and “To the Full Moon Rising”).
The Trilogy of Passion
In 1821, 1822 and 1823 Goethe spent his summers away from Weimar in the spa of Marienbad in Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), where he stayed in the first two years at a pension
