"Stories of Love and Eros"

No, Goethe fans, this post will not be about Goethe's love life, although there is much to be said in that connection. As mentioned in an earlier post I have been reading this summer, among other writings, Goethe's Roman Elegies, and at some date I will do a post on the subject. In a few days I will be leaving this island on which I have spent the summer. This will be the last post before I am back in New York in early September. For this post, something new.

 Many of you know that I have published fiction in the past, including in my relative youth, two mystery novels. Over the years I have written a number of short stories on the above-titled theme, for which I am hoping to find an agent and publisher. Two of the stories have recently appeared as an eBook. For those interested in purchasing it, here is the Amazon link.

And now a description of the two stories:

Love and eros know no bounds, especially for Ching-mei and Laura, two women living in very different times and places.

“The Treasure of the Poet” tells of eroticism and creativity on the eve of the Mongol invasion of China in the 13th century. Ching-mei, who aspires to be a great calligrapher, has had the misfortune of dying too early in a previous life. Is her fortune about to change on meeting the poet Li, whose own dream is to travel to the City of Flowers, one dedicated to the highest ideals of art and poetry and music?

“The Perfect Lover” takes place on Axel Isle, a planet known for its beautiful women, especially the Companions, who are created for men according to their own specifications. So, too, Laura, who appears one day in the life of William Babilot. William discovers in Laura the perfect lover, but the poetry she writes presents complications on one of the best functioning planets in the universe.

Happy Birthday, Goethe!

Yes, August 29 has rolled around again. And, again, another mention on this blog of Goethe's birthday. This year, however, it struck me that Goethe was a Virgo. And yesterday was the annual Virgo Party on this small island. Above some of the Virgos present, including myself, along with a few friends. The party, held at the end of August or beginning of September, marks the end of my stay out here, as I will be heading back to New York within the next couple of weeks. Above a photo of yesterday's party-goers, taken at Bere Point. As always, click to enlarge.

Goethe and plants

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I planned this summer to concentrate on Goethe’s pre-Weimar writings, having brought with me Karl Eibl’s two-volume edition of Der junge Goethe. (The five-volume Fischer-Lamberg edition was too much to carry.) But as often happens when following up one thing on Goethe, I become diverted. In any case, I never thought I would be making my way this summer through Goethe’s writings on the metamorphosis of plants. It was in particular the poem “Metamorphose der Pflanzen” from 1779 (nice translation here) that interested me initially because of the use of the diptych poetic form. And that was only because of a review I was writing of a translation by John Greening of several poems by Goethe that includes stanzas from the Roman Elegies. (See previous post.) So I led myself through a tutorial, so to speak, on the diptych, “the segmented structure of two lines and caesuras” (this is from Karen Schuler’s article on the form in the Goethe-Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts). Which led me to look at the MM poem, likewise written in that meter. Well, it was not as easy a read as the Roman Elegies, not by a long shot.

Lamb's quarters

Anyway, during this my annual summer visit to an island in the Northwest Pacific, with the beach right before my windows, I like to walk on the rocky shore when the tide is out. In connection with Goethe’s writings on plants, I turned my attention to studying the seaweed, which flourishes in what is called the intertidal zone. Goethe of course does not consider seaweed in his study of the development of plants, although he does mention underwater plants (“water buttercups”) in paragraph 24 of his metamorphosis essay. My Goethe Society colleague Heather Sullivan has written an article on this essay by Goethe, which appeared in the Goethe Yearbook in 2019. I was intrigued by her use of the term "Pflanzen-Ozean" (plant ocean) in connection with Goethe's vision of the earth as a vast landscape of green life.

Rockweed

Fortunately, the small museum in this small town offers for sale a pamphlet entitled A Field Guide to Seaweeds of the Pacific Northwest by Dr. Bridgette Clarkson, which inaugurated my enlightenment concerning seaweed. Unlike the plants that Goethe describes, seaweed has no roots, flowers, or seeds. It does have a form of rootedness, which in the language of seaweed is called “holdfast.”

Sea lettuce

There are also three varieties: green, brown, red. Being a totally urban person, I will not risk trying to sound like I know anything more. The identifications on the images here were supplied by a friend who grew up in this part of the world. Annie has generously sent me the descriptions, which appear at the end of this post. As she mentions, there have been many changes in the nomenclature (the scientific names) that have likely occurred since she worked in the field. In contrast, as she says of the common names here, they are "a little more flexible and forgiving." Thanks, Annie! As always, click on the photos for a larger view.

Surfgrass

Lamb’s quarters is a terrestrial plant you would have found in the upper tidal zone, generally just above the high tide line

Rockweed,  sometimes called bladder wrack. There are different varieties of rockweed — some with shorter and rounder bulbs and some more like this one, with sharper, longer bulbs. These bulbs are filled with carbon dioxide, which keeps the plant floating and closer to the sun — helps with photosynthesis!

Surfgrass (as opposed to eelgrass) is a terrestrial plant with roots — transitional, as it is found in a marine environment. It has a narrower blade than eelgrass and is likely attached to a rock and not embedded in sand. (Won't venture to identify the red seaweed that is around the surfgrass. Might be Cryptosiphonia or Prionitis, but I can't really tell)

Sea lettuce is  often found in the mid tidal zone. It is quite edible when cleaned and dried.

The two bottom ones are of bull kelp, likely washed up in the big northwesterly blows we've had these past few days. The top photo of the two shows the stipe and fronds, while the bottom one, as best I can tell from the photo, shows a closeup of the fronds. The off-color areas in the middle of the fronds contain reproductive spores that will disperse in the water and float around as phytoplankton before settling to the bottom and growing into new plants in the spring.

Translating Goethe's poetry

Consider the following a book review of a very small volume (47 pp.) of translations of poems by Goethe entitled Nightwalker’s Song. I saw an ad for the book in the London Review of Books and wrote the publisher, Arc Publications, expressing my interest in writing about it for the blog. Arc kindly sent me a copy. The translator is John Greening, and the selection of poems, with German and English texts, is from Goethe’s early and middle years, from one of Goethe's most famous poems, “Wandrers Nachtlied” (Über allen Gipfeln; 1780) to the sonnet “Natur und Kunst” (1800; publ. 1809). In between are poems that have been a favorites of poets (among others, Christopher Middleton, David Luke, and David Constantine) who have tried their hand at reproducing Goethe’s rhythms, structures, and vocabulary : “Willkommen und Abschied,” “Prometheus,” “Harzreise im Winter,” “Römische Elegien” (I, V, XIV, XX), “Nähe des Geliebten,” “Der Zauberlehrling,” and “Faust im Studierzimmer.” Each poem is prefaced with a few lines of background.

John Greening himself is a considerable poet and writer about poetry. His poetry, from what I have gleaned online, can be recondite, at least for this American reader.  (A collection of his poetry for “American readers” has been published  by Baylor U Press.) Take a poem entitled “Heath XXIX,” from a collection “about an airport and its surrounding area.” The collection, a joint project with the poet Penelope Shuttle, “merges voices on the impact of Heathrow Airport on Hounslow Heath, and the things we’ve lost as a result of it.” It turns out the heath on which the airport is located has a long history in the west and southwest of Britain. The venerable Bede is among the ghosts of this history, along with the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Herewith the opening lines:

Richard Wilson, Hounslow Heath (ca. 1770)

Twenty-four thousand times in any year, lightning strikes
and kills. On the Heath, the timber shells, like bony Flemish spires,
point heavenwards in warning. The stags take note and bow their heads
at the sky’s first challenge, or hurl a bellowing peal back in defiance.

Besides his many books of poetry, Greening has published essays on poetry. One subject of interest is the poets of World War I. He is not a scholar of German literature, but he did spent time as a student in Mannheim, and even spent a summer in residence month living in the Heinrich Böll cottage in Dugort, Achill Island. In one of his essays, Greening addresses the issue of being a “European,” in which he takes on an “indigestible” essay by T.S. Eliot and considers his own bona fides on the issue. In this connection, he has translated Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Ernst Stadler and August Stramm, “poets who wrote about (or anticipated, in Heym’s case) the First World War.”

I am guilty of not having given much thought to the subject of translation, although, like many of us, any learning I posses is a result of having read works in translation, both in the Christian and the Western classical tradition — and in recent decades literature from non-Western parts of the world. Goethe himself was of course a beneficiary of all that inheritance, even as he was more fluent in Greek and Latin, not to forget French and Italian, than I ever was — not to forget being bibelfest. Whether it be the evidence of the Roman Elegies or the West-East Divan, Goethe certainly knew the value of this inheritance. In turn, Goethe’s language had an immense influence on the German language going forward, similar, as it is said, to the King James version of the Bible.
 
German is an intransigent language to translate, even in prose. For those who do know German, I suspect their interest in translations of Goethe’s poetry will be attuned to issues of structure, rhythm, rhymes and meter, vocabulary, and the like, all of which render an inimitable musicality. That said, there is simply no way that English can match Goethe’s German, especially his musicality. For those who don’t know German, there remain some who might be interested in what the poetry has “to say.” For those potential readers, I suspect it is the content of his poetry, the “spirit,” that would be of interest. This has been called a “culture to culture” translation.

While aware of the semantic differences between German words and their English equivalents, Greening has sought to reproduce Goethe’s original meters. From my recent experience working on a translation of a German novella, rendering the different emotional expression that words convey is exceptionally frustrating. And German has these strange word formations, especially Goethe’s German.

Of course, a translator must render that content in a readable idiom. Here are a few lines from a stanza of “Willkommen und Abschied,” followed by Greening’s translation. The lines present a simple picture, easy to understand. We’re not talking Klopstock here. Someone with a couple years of German could recognize the different semantic values of the German vocabulary as well as the rhyme.

Der Mond von einem Wolkenhügel
Sah kläglich aus dem Duft hervor,
Die Winde schwangen leise Flügel,
Umsausten schauerlich mein Ohr.
Die Nacht schuf tausend Ungeheur,
Doch frisch und fröhlich war mein Mut:
In meinen Adern welches Feuer!
In meinem Herzen welche Glut!

The moon looked sadly through a veil
of cloud, the winds began to beat
soft whirring wings about me, till
my ears could no more bear, the night
revealed its thousand horror masks.
And yet my fiery spirits cheered,
hotly defying such grotesques,
from heart and veins the lava poured.

Greening has abandoned Goethe’s rhyme, and also the definitiveness of Goethe's couplets. In the process, however, the enjambment of the first five lines of his version intimates the flow of loving feeling between the speaker and his beloved. But, then, in the final three lines of the stanza, Greening abandons enjambment and follows Goethe: three stand-alone lines echo Goethe’s defiant response to the effect of the dark night and its accompanying grotesques.

Ernst Barlach, Harzreise im Winter (1924)

 This is only one small example of the many choices Greening has made, which he discusses in his introduction. I particularly liked his recommendations of G.H. Lewes’ biography of Goethe as conveying “the full scope of Goethe’s genius” (and as also the most entertaining book about Goethe) for English readers. Many non-specialists may feel inspired by the tale of his own path to Goethe, while Greening's translations also remind us scholars about what real poets appreciate about Goethe. Greening, for instance, wishes more attention were paid to the free-verse “Harzreise im Winter”: “It would be good to encounter this poem as often as one finds modern versions of, say, Rilke’s ‘First Duino Elegy.’” My favorites among his translations are “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “Faust in His Study,” and “Nature and Art.”

Images: The Tate; Art Net

Goethe and Time, updated

François Boucher, Pastor tocant per a una pastora

There is at least one important exception to what I wrote in the previous post, namely, the absence of Goethe's references to times of day in his early letters. In several letters to his Leipzig literary mentor, Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch, Goethe poured out his jealousy concerning Katherine Schönkopf. The letter dated  November 10–14, 1767, is composed of six installments, each headed with a specific time and/or a time of the day or night: Abends um 7 Uhr; um 8 Uhr; Mitwochs früh; Abends um 8; Freytags um 11. Nachts; Sonnabends.

I have recently finished an article that discusses this letter, but it is also the subject of excellent essays by Stuart Atkins and Albrecht Schöne. The letter is something like a first-person novelette detailing the depths of jealousy with its attendant sicknesses and fevers at the outset, to be followed at the end by the sweet pleasures of consolation and healing. As Schöne pointed out, in the next-to-final installment (Friday around 11 at night) Goethe remarks that he has reread what he has written and is astonished to discover its literary potential. It was in this same period that Goethe wrote the play Die Laune des Verliebten, in which the excessive jealousy of the shepherd Eridon threatens the harmony of the pastoral order. As with the play, both Atkins and Schöne discern in this and other letters of this period the development of Goethe’s apprenticeship in narrative prose, which will find its great expression in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.

That novel includes specific dates on each letters written to Werther's friend Wilhelm, beginning with May 4, 1771, but there is only one letter — Werther’s final letter to Lotte — that details the time of day. It is headed “nach eilfe,” after which he records his last thoughts before putting the pistol to his head. And then: “es schlägt zwölfe! So sey’s denn — Lotte! leb wohl! Leb wohl!”

Any thoughts of this specificity?

Goethe and Time

 

I picked up at the post office yesterday a copy of the July 14 issue of the TLS,  in which my review of a new biography of the poet Phillis Wheatley appeared. (Yes, I occasionally venture into other parts of the 18th century.) Since I am not at home in NYC this summer, the book review editor kindly mailed the issue to me, and I was able to peruse it this morning with my cup of hot tea. Nothing in the issue itself about Goethe or German literature, but a couple of the reviews brought up subjects that prompted me to think about Goethe. One was a review of a book about “time and medieval life. The reviewer (Pablo Scheffer) opens with quotes from Chaucer that reminded me of how entrenched was once the tradition of writing about nature. In the Prologue, Chaucer writes of “tendre croppes” bathing the breath of the West Wind and of little birds impelled to “maken melodye” when fields are filled with flowers. And here is young Goethe, in 1765, in a poem sent to his friend Riese. (All quotes following reflect Goethe’s own spelling at the time of writing.)

So wie ein Vogel der auf einem Ast
Im schönsten Wald, sich Freiheit ahtmend, wiegt,
Der ungestört die sanfte Lust genießt,
Mit seinem Fitigen von Baum zu Baum,
Von Busch auf Busch sich singend hinzuschwingen

Since the book under review is about time, we learn about how people kept time when “there was the problem of keeping it,” before the invention of the mechanical clock in 1300. The clergy, tracking the seven mechanical hours, relied on sundials, water clocks, candles, sand glasses, and astrolabes, while everyone else relied on the clergy. In this way, as the authors of the book point out, “the sound of liturgical bells at the canonical hours became part of the medieval soundscape, governing all sorts of secular activities from the opening and closing of city gates to the business hours of shops and taverns.”

Allegory of Good Government by Lorenzetti Ambrogio

In reading through the two volumes of Karl Eibl’s edition of Der junge Goethe, I am now struck by how specific notations of time are absent in Goethe’s letters. There is one letter, however, to Kester, dated Christmas 1772, in which Goethe marks the times of the day almost as if he were a medieval person. In the first sentence, he writes “Christag früh. Es ist noch Nacht lieber Kestner, ich bin früh aufgestanden um bey Lichte Morgens wieder zu schreiben,” and continues: “ich habe mir Coffee machen lasen den Festag zu ehren und will euch schreiben biss es Tag ist.” And, then, what I have just learned about medieval times: “Der Türmer hat sein Lied schon geblasen ich wachte drüber auf.”

Some lines follow (which include the mention of Lotte’s portrait on the wall near his bed), after which we hear again of the town watchman “Der Türmer hat sich wieder zu mir gekehrt, der Nordwind bringt mir seine Melodie, als blies er vor meinem Fenster.” This is then followed by a description of his activities of the previous evening and his impressions of the natural world on his return home as well as the sights at the market place (“viele Lichter und Spielsachen”). And, then, returning to the present, he notes the passage of time: “Das erste Grau des Tags kommt mir über des Nachbaars Haus und die Glocken läuten eine Christliche Gemeinde zusammen. Wohl ich binn erbaut hier oben auf meiner Stube, die ich lang nicht so liebe hatte als ietzt.” I can really see Goethe in his room here, especially with that cup of coffee beside him!

After some more words about Lotte and his “lieben Mädgen,” it is finally morning: “Der Tag kömmt mit Macht …”

Clearly Goethe came to reflect on time and became to some extent clock bound. The above image, "Comparative Table of German and Italian Time," appears in The Works of J. W. von Goethe (vol. 12, p. 131). It is the only image I could find on Google on the subject of "Goethe and time" and comes, I suspect, from his Italian journey. (I don't have the English edition with me, but if anyone has it and would liket to let me know about the image, I would appreciate it.) There is more that I could write about the issue of “temporal progress,” as it is certainly a subject in which Goethe devoted some thought. More anon.

Image credits: Physics World

 

Goethe's "Belsazar" Fragment

 

As mentioned in my last post, I am on a small island in British Columbia, concentrating as usual on “der junge Goethe.” All the documentation of that era is to be found in the five-volume edition of that title by Hanna Fischer-Lamberg, which I own, but which I did not bring with me this summer. Instead, for my review of this early period, I carted along Karl Eibl’s two-volume set Der junge Goethe in seiner Zeit, which is hefty enough at 700-plus pages per volume. Unlike Fischer-Lamberg, which is chronological, vol. 1 of Eibl’s edition contains the plays, diaries and legal writings; vol. 2 the poetry, prose, and bibliography. I started with the poetry and have worked my way up to the “Iris” poems of 1774, but have decided to take a break and turn to the plays. The first two items in Eibl are fragments. One concerns the drama "Belsazar," the action of which seems to have been on Goethe’s mind already before he went to study in Leipzig in 1765. The second is a monologue entitled “Die königliche Einsiedlerin.” From there, Eibl continues with “Der Lügner,” “Tugendspiegel,” and then, coming to more familiar territory, Die Laune des Verliebten. These three were also Leipzig products.

Willilam Blake, Nebuchedensar loses his mind

Among my reading on this subject has been the Old Testament Book of Daniel, which begins with the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. It is the era of what is called the Babylonian Captivity, which included the deportation from Judah to Babylon of the smartest Jews, who become court favorites. Daniel was one of Nebuchadnazzar’s favorite soothsayers and was called to interpret  a dream that presaged his loss of royal authority. As the Book of Daniel has it: “You will be driven away from people and will live with the wild animals. You will eat grass like the ox” (Dan. IV, 31–32). This episode (recounted in Dan. V, 21) was the subject of the above painting by William Blake. Belsazar seems to have been more favored as a subject by later artists, and the OT account describes several episodes, including Daniel’s reading of the inscription on the Wall that so terrified Belzasar, the casting of Daniel’s friends into the blazing furnace, and Daniel’s sojourn in the lions’ den.

Rembrandt, Belzasar sees the writing on the wall

Goethe was what Germans call “bibelfest,” and the language of his oeuvre shows the influence of that acquaintance. As Roger Paulin writes in a very good article on the influence of Klopstock on Goethe, it was via Klopstock that the persons of the Old and New Testaments had achieved “ein zartes und gefühlvolles Wesen,” one that spoke to the young Goethe and many of his contemporaries. Thus Klopstock’s epic poem Der Messias (1748–1773). There were also other German-speaking writers who wrote such epics, e.g., Bodmer. (See my earlier post on Bodmer.) So it was that Goethe, as Paulin writes, for a time planned several works on Biblical themes. Besides the Belazar drama, there was to be an epic poem about Joseph and a tragedy on the successor of the Pharoah, the subject of which was the killing of the first born. Those drafts as well as of Ruth and Jezabel were destroyed in one of Goethe's auto da fés, excepting the two fragments mentioned here.

The two fragments of “Belsazar” are pretty strong stuff, even if they are written in the Baroque-favored alexandrine meter at which Goethe was so adept. In the first Pherat, a confident of the Persian king Cyrus, describes how the tyrant Belsazar will be killed. The death will be brutal, and blood will flow. Pherat views Belsazar as a tyrant, and the coup will free the city from its hard yoke and allow Cyrus to conquer Babylon (ca. 7th century B.C.). It is the feast day of “Sesach, the Babylonian god of wine,” when “rauchend Blut” will replace the wine that flows in Belsazar’s body and when “our sword will enter the darkness and spear him and transport him to death.”

Der König, und den Hof, mag erst der Wein erfüllen,
Dann wollen wir den Durst in seinem Blute stillen

Swords out for Belsazar

The second fragment is from Belsazar’s point of view and take place after the feast and his tired spirit is being lulled to sleep with sweet dreams. It begins with his feeling of contentment. Feeling himself equal to the gods (den Göttern gleich), he wishes only that “ungetrübtes Glück” continues to be his lot. But, like all these pagan rulers, he has a vision. A cloud approaches, and it is not a good omen. Belsazar foresees the end of his plan to enlarge his kingdom, of marching through the world “mit hohem Siegerschritt.” He seems suddenly to perceive the existence of a more destructive power. It is unclear to me whether Cyrus is meant here or the higher God that is the message of the Book of Daniel.

Im wetter eigehüllt, tritt er mit Macht hervor,
Der Donner bring sein wort in men betäubtes ohr.

Since Goethe worked pretty assiduously on the drama in Leipzig, I couldn’t help thinking that the two fragments also show his reading of Shakespeare during his early student days. In a letter to Cornelia, dated May 11, 1767, he reported that he finished the five-act Belsazar drama, with the fifth act composed in iambic meter, the standard meter of “Der Britte,” meaning Shakespeare. To my ears the content of the two fragments also seems to draw on plays concerning conspiracies to overthrow a tyrannical ruler (e.g., Julius Caesar, Macbeth).