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On a spectacularly green, blue, and breezy day this past June,
I headed to Small World Coffee for a mid-morning cortado and some al fresco reading on the busy shores of Princeton’s Nassau Street. Over my last several cafe visits I had been happily re-reading The Accidental Connoisseur,
Lawrence Osborne’s superb wine odyssey memoir, but this day, perhaps due to the heightened potency of the outdoors, I reached for something different . . . and stronger. I
grabbed my copy of Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Richard Sieburth.
For quite some time now, I almost exclusively read nonfiction.
I can count on one hand the novels I’ve read in the last five years.
However well-crafted, fiction reaches me less and less; I just prefer reality. And if fiction has become a rare choice, poetry is rarer still–strange, you may think, since
I’m a poet, but I have my reasons.
So it was unusual that I’d bring a book of poems along, but I played a hunch. Still, I couldn’t have imagined how incredibly receptive
I’d be to re-reading those familiar lines. Within minutes, Hölderlin’s lyrical genius mastered me, bearing me along in a swoon of true poetic transport.
Not for nothing: on any given day, his wildly beautiful ode,
“The Rhine,” is my favorite poem.
You may not know Friedrich Hölderlin. In Germany he’s legendary and justly beloved, considered by many the greatest
poet in the language. He lived from 1770 to 1843, a central figure of German Romanticism. As a Romantic poet, he shared many similarities of outlook and endeavor with his English
contemporary William Blake (1757-1827). Like Blake, Hölderlin fashioned his own highly idiosyncratic cosmology, a mystical
conception of the world embracing God, gods, and demigods. And like Blake, he viewed Nature as holy, deserving of awe in the true sense: a blend of rapt regard and fear.
Rivers abound in Hölderlin’s poems–the Danube, the Ister (an ancient Greek name for the Danube), the Rhine, the
Neckar–because for him they are not mere bodies of moving water but demigods incarnate.
He makes pronouncements, his voice truly and fittingly oracular, though he never comes off as didactic. His power and
conviction transcend any questioning; he says it and you accept it, his purchase sure, unassailable. Here’s Hölderlin concluding “The Migration”:
But the handmaids of heaven
Are miraculous,
As is everything born of the gods.
Try taking it by surprise and it turns
To a dream; try matching it by force,
And punishment is the reward;
Often, when you’ve barely given it
A thought, it just happens.
And here, midway through “The Rhine,” he shares deep insights into the nature of deities:
But their own immortality
Suffices the gods. If there be
One thing they need
It is heroes and men
And mortals in general. Since
The gods feel nothing
Of themselves, if to speak so
Be permitted, they need
Someone else to share and feel
In their name; yet ordain
That he shall break his own
Home, curse those he loves
Like enemies, and bury father and child
Under rubble, should he seek
To become their equal, fanatic,
Refusing to observe distinctions.
His syntactical transitions are one of the most curious and
compelling aspects of his poetry. Using words like “still,” “but,”
“yet,” and “even,” he pivots, often to startling effect, juxtaposing one insight with another, leading you down marvelous twists
and turns. He learned this technique, at least in part, from Pindar, the ancient Greek poet of Thebes renowned for his odes
commemorating victories at the Olympic and Pythian games. Hölderlin was no mean Hellenic scholar and is still considered Pindar’s finest translator into German.
Here’s how Pindar comes out of the gate in his first Olympian Ode, the translation by Richmond Lattimore:
Best of all things is water; but gold, like a gleaming fire
by night, outshines all pride of wealth beside.
But, my heart, would you chant the glory of games,
look never beyond the sun
by day for any star shining brighter through the deserted air,
nor any contest than Olympia greater to sing.
And here’s Hölderlin in the penultimate stanza of his ode to the mighty river Rhine (and a passage I so dearly love that I’ve had it
memorized for decades.)
The eternal gods are full of life
At all times; but a man
Can also keep the best in mind
Even unto death,
Thus experiencing the highest.
Yet each to his measure.
For misfortune is heavy
To bear, and fortune weighs yet more.
But a wise man managed to stay lucid
Throughout the banquet,
From noon to midnight,
Until the break of dawn.
You know, Hölderlin considered the poet’s role as that of an intermediary between gods and mortals, but–stay with me
here–if you’re familiar with The Godfather Part II I want you to imagine Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) saying the lines of that
stanza to Michael Corleone and the other guests as they sit out on the hotel terrace in Havana enjoying Roth’s birthday cake.
Give due credit to Richard Sieburth for preserving the intensely romantic musicality of the lines through deft use of rhyme, slant
rhyme, assonance, and alliteration (i.e. poetry’s fundamental tools; i.e. the same tools eschewed for years by our many prolific
poetasters.) And while he translates a work over 200 years old (Hölderlin began writing “The Rhine” in 1801), Sieburth avoids
rendering the poem archaic with inverted syntax or other anachronisms; the lines read fresh and direct.
The Rhine is a demigod unto itself, but Hölderlin will compare it to Hercules, its tributaries to thirsty snakes. And while he
dedicates the poem to his friend, Isaak von Sinclair (whom he addresses directly in the last stanza), Hölderlin also turns to
Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great champion of human nature who, appropriately enough, began his famous treatise, The Social Contract, with the declaration:
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” In Hölderlin’s visionary portrayal, the mighty river will find itself in the same predicament.
So here it is in full, my candidate for greatest poem of all time. Want to take a fantastic trip down a river without leaving your
seat? Want to glean wisdom without those attendant crow’s feet and white hairs? Turn off your cell phone and disable any of
those other electronic distractions the hucksters call “progress.” Now summon your kids, your favorite co-workers, your spouse,
or your mail carrier and tell them you have something you’d like to read to them….
The Rhine
To Isaak von Sinclair
I was sitting in the dark ivy, at the gate
Of the forest, just as the spring was visited
With the gold of noon pouring
Down the steps of the Alps
Which I call the fortress of the gods
In the ancient sense, architected
By the heavens, and from which
Many decrees are still mysteriously
Handed down to men; there,
Against all expectation, I grew aware
Of a fate, even as my soul,
Lost in its own conversation
In the warm shade,
Had already wandered off to Italy
And beyond, to the shores of Morea.
But now, within the mountains,
Deep beneath the silver peaks
And joyous green,
Where shuddering woods
And boulders, head over head,
Look down on him, days
On end, there, in coldest
Abyss, I heard the young man
Moan for deliverance,
Hurling blame at Mother Earth
And his father, the Thunderer,
And his parents felt compassion
For his raving, but mortals fled
The place, terrified by the demigod’s
Rage as he wrenched at his chains
In the dark.
It was the voice of the noblest of rivers,
The freeborn Rhine,
Whose hopes lay elsewhere when he left
His brothers, Ticino and Rhône, behind,
Bent on adventure, impatiently driven
Towards Asia by his royal soul.
But desire is foolish
In the face of fate.
Yet the blindest
Are sons of gods. For man knows
His house, animals realize
Where to build, but these others
Fail in their inexperience,
They know not where to go.
A riddle, the pure of source. Which
Even song may scarce disclose. For
As you began, so shall you remain,
And though need
And nurture leave their mark,
It all depends on birth,
On the ray of light
The newborn meets.
But where is the man
Who can remain free
His whole life long, alone
Doing his heart’s desire,
Like the Rhine, so fortunate
To have been born from
Propitious heights and sacred womb?
His Word is hence a shout of joy.
Unlike other children, he does not
Whimper in swaddling clothes;
For when riverbanks start
Sidling up to him, crooked,
Coiled in thirst,
Eager to draw him, unawares,
Into the shelter
Of their teeth, he laughs
And tears these snakes apart,
Plunging onward with the spoils,
And if no higher power tamed his rush,
He would grow and split the earth
Like lightning, as forests hurtled in his wake,
Enchanted, and mountains crashed to the ground.
Yet a god would spare his sons
A life this rash and smiles
When rivers rage at him as this one does
From depths, intemperate,
Though hemmed by holy Alps.
In such forges the unalloyed
Is hammered into shape, and
It is a thing of beauty when he leaves
The mountains, content to flow
Quietly through German lands, his longings
Stilled in fruitful commerce, and
Works the soil, feeding the children
In towns he has founded,
Father Rhine.
But he shall never, never forget.
Human law and habitation would sooner
Perish and the light of man
Be twisted beyond recognition, than
He forget his origin,
The pure voice of his youth.
Who was it who first
Wrecked the bonds of love
And transformed them into chains?
Which led rebels to make
A mock of their rights
And the heavenly fire and,
Disdaining mortal ways,
Elect presumption,
Striving to become the equals of gods.
But their own immortality
Suffices the gods. If there be
One thing they need
It is heroes and men
And mortals in general. Since
The gods feel nothing
Of themselves, if to speak so
Be permitted, they need
Someone else to share and feel
In their name; yet ordain
That he shall break his own
Home, curse those he loves
Like enemies, and bury father and child
Under rubble, should he seek
To become their equal, fanatic,
Refusing to observe distinctions.
Hence happy is he who has found
A fate to his proportion
Where the memory of trials
And travels whispers sweetly
Against stable shores,
So that his roving eye
Reaches as far as the limits
Of his residence, traced
By God at his birth.
He rests, content with his station,
Now that everything he desired
Of heaven surrounds him
Of its own accord, smiling on him,
Once so headstrong, now at rest.
It’s demigods I think of now,
And there must be a way in which
I know them, so often has their life
Stirred my breast with longings.
But a man like you, Rousseau,
Whose soul had the strength to endure
And grow invincible,
Whose sense was sure,
So gifted with powers of hearing
And speaking that, like the winegod,
He overflows and, divine and lawless
In his folly, makes the language of the purest
Accessible to the good, but justly blinds
Those sacrilegious slaves who could not care,
What name should I give this stranger?
The sons of the earth, like their mother,
Love everything, and accept it all
Without effort, lucky ones.
Which is why surprise and fright
Strike mortal man
When he considers the heaven
He has heaped upon his shoulders
With loving arms, and realizes
The burden of joy;
So that it often seems best
To him to remain forgotten
In the shade of the woods,
Away from the burn of light,
Amid the fresh foliage of Lake Bienne,
Caring little how poorly he sings
Schooled, like any beginner, by nightingales.
And it is glorious to arise
From holy sleep, waking
From the forest cool, and walk
Into the milder evening light,
When He who built the mountains,
And traced the course of streams,
He whose smiling breezes
Filled the busy, luffing life
Of man like sails,
Now rests as well,
And finding more good
Than evil, Day, the sculptor,
Now bends towards
His pupil, the present Earth.
Men and gods then celebrate their marriage,
Every living thing rejoices,
And for a while
Fate achieves a balance,
And fugitives seek asylum,
The brave seek sleep,
But lovers remain
As before, at home
Wherever flowers exult
In harmless fire, and the spirit
Rustles around dim trees, while
The unreconciled are now transformed,
Rushing to take each other’s hands
Before the benevolent light
Descends into night.
For some, however, all this
Quickly passes, others
Have a longer hold.
The eternal gods are full of life
At all times; but a man
Can also keep the best in mind
Even unto death,
Thus experiencing the highest.
Yet each to his measure.
For misfortune is heavy
To bear, and fortune weighs yet more.
But a wise man managed to stay lucid
Throughout the banquet,
From noon to midnight,
Until the break of dawn.
Sinclair, my friend, should God appear
To you on a burning path under pines
Or in the dark of oaks, sheathed
In steel, or among clouds, you would
Recognize him, knowing, in your youth,
The power of Good, and the Lord’s
Smile never escapes you
By day, when life
Appears fevered and chained,
Or by night, when everything blends
Into confusion, and primeval
Chaos reigns once more.
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