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).

Goethe and Physiognamy

Sointula evening sky

Goethe Girl is again this summer on a small island in British Columbia. This marks a decade, after her first visit in 2013 to give a talk at a conference on “Utopian Thought in the 18th Century.” It is wonderfully quiet here, not to forget the beautiful skies, and I am able to concentrate on my various literary projects, which this summer includes rereading almost all the writings of Goethe up through 1775. Ergo, “the young Goethe,” which has always been my subject of interest.

Right now I am investigating Goethe’s contributions to the so-called Physiognomische Fragmente: zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (PF) of Lavater, published in 1777, which proceeded from the assumption that facial features and body shapes were a key to an individual’s moral character. As I am learning from my research, Lavater brought back to life in the 18th century a physiognomic tradition stretching back centuries. Indeed, Aristotle had written on the physiognomy of animal skulls, a portion of which Goethe translated for the PF. According to Windows of the Soul: The Art of Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780, by Martin Porter, physiognomy had during the Middle Ages formed a part of sermons based on passages of Scripture, and early books were dedicated to the discussion of the meaning of physiognomical passages in the Bible. According to Porter the astrologer and natural philosopher Hagecius ab Hajek, who served at the court of Rudolf II in the late 16th century, wrote that lines on the forehead were “vestiges of the impression of God.” Sir Thomas Browne likewise spoke of the “characters” to be found in the human face, hands, and forehead: “The finger of God hath left an Inscription upon all his works, not graphicall or composed of Letters, but of their severall formes.”

In the last quarter of the 15th century, Italian humanists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola began translating Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, and Pythagoras, texts known as the Corpus hermeticum, and by the 17th century writers were attempting, according to Porter, “to reconcile and synthesize a dominant Christianity with Egyptian and pagan Neoplatonic philosophy.” Since this hermetic tradition was already known to Goethe before he encountered Lavater, it is perhaps not surprising that he joined forces with Lavater, assisting in PF’s publication as well as writing many of the “character assessments.”

The PF were controversial in their own day, and even some of Lavater’s acquaintances refused to be portrayed therein. Albrecht von Haller, for instance, the Swiss anatomist, wrote to Charles Bonnet, describing Lavater as a poet and placing no confidence in a man entirely so governed by imagination. Haller was of course a deeply devout man, but also a man of science, and it is interesting to consider that the rise of physiognomy in the Renaissance, its attempt to see a resemblance between “signifiers and things signified,” also coincided with investigations that sought to penetrate into the workings of nature. But, as Martin Porter notes, this resemblance was “far from the new geometry that Galileo had claimed was the language in which the ‘book of nature’ was written.’”

Whatever the case, what Goethe wrote in the PF bears looking at for what it tells us about Goethe. First off, all of his descriptions of the character of various subjects (Scipio, Titus, Tiberius, Brutus, Caesar) were drawn from his consultation of drawings, or, in the case of contemporaries, from silhouettes (Schattenrisse). In other words, not from direct encounter. While using the physiognomical vocabulary or grammar, Goethe was basically describing his perception of characteristics that, in turn, were the perception of an artist. Thus, his characterization of Titus : “Höchst edel und trefflich die Nase” (The nose is extremely noble and excellent). Of Caesar, he draws attention to “das verzogene, abgeschlappte Augenlid! der schwankende abziehende Mund! Im Ganzen eine eherne, übertyrannische Selbstigkeit” (the warped, worn-out eyelid! the faltering deducting mouth! All in all, an iron, overly tyrannical ego).

There are a few instance where he writes of less elevated individuals, for instance, of a “sehr kränkelnder, schwindsüchtiger, cholerischmelancholischer, einfältiger Schuster, …völlig ermangelnd an Leben und Quellgeist” (a very ailing, consumptive, choleric, melancholic, simple-minded shoemaker, utterly lacking in life and internal spirit). Pretty strong stuff.

At the same time, Goethe did recognize the subjective nature of his observations. In “Von den oft nur scheinbaren Fehlschlüßen des Physiognomisten,” he writes as follows: “Wie die Sachen eine Physiognomie haben, so haben auch die Urtheile die ihrige, und eben daß die Urtheile verschieden sind, beweist noch nicht, daß ein Ding bald so, bald so ist.” (Just as things have a physiognomy, so too with our judgments, and the very fact that judgments differ does not prove that a thing is sometimes this way, sometimes like that). He introduces the example of a book that portrays the joys and miseries of love in all its lively and manifold colors, a book that young people rave about, but that older people dismiss. Who is correct? No one! It is the role of the physiognomist to step in and remind opponents that words like excellent and terrible lead to “confrontation.” Everything is relative (verhältnismaßig) in the world. Only God know the relationship between things.

Sterbender Schmertz

It strikes me here that Goethe is expressing, avant la lettre, exactly what Kant wrote (in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View) about the subjectivity of “taste.” Herewith this quote from Porter: “Physiognomy is the art of judging what lies within a man, whether in terms of his way of sensing or of his way of thinking, from his visible form and so from his exterior.” Our reaction, however, is a matter of subjective judgment, by which we rationalize our pleasure or displeasure with men, and such a judgment “cannot serve as a guiding principle to Wisdom, which has the existence of man with certain natural qualities objectively as its end (which, is for us, quite incomprehensible) …” Kant does agree with the subtitle of Lavater's book, namely, that physiognomy had the potential for improving human relationships.

The drawing above (click to enlarge), “after Fusseli,” portraying the pain of a dying man (sterbender Schmerz),  again underlines the connection between Goethe, Lavater, and Fuseli, about which I have posted in recent months.

Goethe, Fuseli, and von Humboldt

 

Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt with Schiller and Goethe in Jena

After having finished the previous two posts, I have been brooding on certain commonalities of the three. All were “geniuses,” in the 18th-19th century sense of that term, and all of German-speaking background. From youth onward, their path forward in life would have been to follow in the path of their father. Fuseli would become a pastor, Goethe a lawyer, and Humboldt a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Prussian civil service. Nothing of the sort happened. All three might be said to have followed their own star.

As I mentioned in the post on Fuseli, that his life took such an unanticipated turn, that he became a great and original painter in England, rather than in Switzerland or Germany, was the result of a youthful imprudence, engaged in with Lavater, who did return to Switzerland and did become a pastor. As I mentioned in that post, the amount of scholarship on Fuseli is very sparse, but the alacrity with which he accepted the offer to travel to London in 1764 with the British ambassador to the Prussian court is perhaps an indication of a desire to mark out a new path.

About Goethe and von Humboldt, however, we know from their own writings how adverse they were, from a young age, to following in the well-trod path of their own fathers.

Goethe’s father, Caspar, had studied law as a young man in Leipzig and Strassburg, and followed up his studies with a grand tour that included Italy. He had inherited quite a fortune from his father, and it seems to have been the time of his life. Professionally, however, he made a wrong step on his return to Frankfurt in 1742, which left him without a position in the city’s administration.  He married into a prominent and old Frankfurt family, which raised his status considerably, but with a lot of time on his hands, he appears to have devoted it to the education of young Goethe and his sister Cornelia. Cornelia of course married, while his son was supposed to follow in his footsteps. So it was that young Goethe studied in both Leipzig and Frankfurt and was supposed to go to Italy before becoming a lawyer.

Johann Caspar Goethe

Well, Goethe did study law in Leipzig and Strassburg, and he even studied (as had Caspar) at the imperial court in Wetzlar, but between Leipzig and Wetzlar other things intervened, The Sorrows of Young Werther of course being the most notable. Already in 1768, however, when Goethe was still only nineteen, he wrote to a friend of his “efforts to become, and his fairly well founded hopes of becoming, a good writer.” (Mein feuriger Kopf, mein Witz, meine Bemühung und ziemlich gegründete Hoffnung, mit der Zeit ein guter Autor zu werden.) Nicholas Boyle in his biography of Goethe writes that Goethe “was no Rimbaud” (Goethe’s earliest surviving poetry gives evidence of that), but Rimbaud (b. 1854) came of age in a far different literary milieu. The French language was a well-formed literary language by the time of his birth, whereas Germany in 1749, the year of Goethe’s birth, was not even a united nation, while its writers were in the process of forging a common literary language. So, too, Goethe’s earliest efforts were a pastiche, a hodgepodge, a babel, a collage: imitation on a wide scale. It took him several years to get his feet on the ground, so to speak, and craft his own inimitable idiom.

Alexander von Humboldt’s father died when Alexander was still a child, but his mother undertook his education with the aim of outfitting him to occupy a role in the Prussian civil service. He did follow her orders for a while, went as far as becoming an inspector of mines, a very important position. Unlike with Goethe we have more evidence of his youthful unhappiness and of his many forays into different pursuits. For instance, he associated with members of the important Berlin salons. As Maren Meinhardt writes of Humboldt’s integration into this “new and mysterious world,” it offered him “the prospect of transformation, of being not quite who he was. The unknown, shimmering and colorful always seemed enticing to him.”

Guests at Henriette Herz's Literary Salon, ca. 1800

In the end, he didn’t even know what he would discover when he took off for South America in 1799: “no colonial power had sent him, nor did he represent any political or mercantile interest. Nor, for that matter, was anyone funding him. Instead, Humboldt put his own inheritance in the service of a scientific expedition for himself and his collaborator Aimé Bonpland, a journey that would last five years, the foremost purpose of which would be to satisfy his scientific curiosity.”

What Meinhardt writes of Humboldt could also be applied to Goethe’s early path in life: “his motivations were complex and the goal of his journey was to a very high degree unspecified.” Along with Fuseli, they were travelers, and their achievements came from uprooting themselves from familiar soil.

The influence of Goethe and Humboldt has been enormous, while the effect of Fuseli both during his life and afterward is still up in the air. While he occupied an important position in London literary and artistic life, his non-English background may have shortened his “outreach.”

 Image Credits: London Remembers; Schule.Judentum

Alexander von Humboldt (and a little Goethe)

 

Humboldt's Naturgemälde

Alexander von Humboldt has attracted some interest in recent years. (In what follows, I am assuming  that readers have heard of Humboldt’s famous five-year South American expedition, but, if not, I recommend the Britannica link.) First, in 2006, there was Daniel Kehlmann’s delightful novel Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt), in which Humboldt shared the stage with the mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss. It was followed in 2015 by The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf, an in-depth biography that offers a  “global view” of Humboldt and his scientific achievements. As Wulf writes early on, the individual disciplines we recognize today as “science” — chemistry, physics, astronomy, and so on — were taking on distinct form by the end of the 18th century, breaking away from natural philosophy, which subsumed natural phenomena within a metaphysical framework. Humboldt was an experimentalist par excellence (as Wulf writes, “a man who discarded a life of privilege to learn how the world works”), but was not content to examine natural phenomena in isolation (think of Linneus’s neat classification of plants), but sought to study them within larger relationships in which they were embedded. Humboldt’s conception is graphically on view in his famous Naturgemälde der Anden, a depiction of the volcanoes Chimborazo and Cotopaxi in cross section, with detailed information about plant geography. (Click on the image above to enlarge.) The illustration was published in The Geography of Plants, 1807, in a large format. Wulf also trace Humboldt’s influence on later generations, especially writers and others who are concerned with the effects of human habitation of the Earth  (e.g., Thoreau and Ernst Haeckel), including subjects like deforestation and climate change.

A third book on Humboldt, by Maren Meinhardt, appeared in 2018 -- A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things -- which I discussed briefly in a post several years ago. Meinhardt was probably in the process of writing her own book on Humboldt in 2015, as can be seen by a long article she published in the magazine Guernica that year. (Very readable, much to be recommended.) She must have felt blind sided by the appearance of Wolf’s book, but she has produced a very different kind of study. It is a “life,” and not, as in Wulf, “a global Humboldt.” One learns more about the man close up. Meinhardt’s notes, for instance, which include the bibliographic references, are only thirty pages (in contrast to Wulf’s walloping 120 pages), and are drawn for the most part from contemporary documents, including correspondence.

Humboldt and Bonpland at Mt. Chimborazo, Ecuador

In places this biography is uncomfortable reading. Humboldt’s obsessive quests for knowledge of the natural world seemed reflected in several relationships, apparently non-sexual, with various men. Meinhardt treats these, quoting from effusive letters, which may suggest homosexuality, but, interestingly, there was one man whom he would seem to have known closest, Aimé Bonpland, and with whom he inhabited the closest quarters during their American travels, but with whom apparently no sexual relationship occurred. Meinhardt, and Wulf to some extent, deals with the Humboldt mother-son relationship, which seems to have had little room for close emotional contact. In Meinhardt, however, one learns that Humboldt’s desire to understand natural phenomena in terms of relationships also extended to his views of those between humans.

Which brings me to Goethe, who plays a major role in both books. In fact, already the second chapter of Wulf’s book is entitled “Imagination and Nature: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Humboldt.” It is a very thorough discussion of Goethe’s scientific pursuits, which the relationship with Humboldt revivified on their first meeting in Jena in 1794. Wulf’s wealth of bibliographic sources allows her a closer look at their get togethers. (For instance, it was freezing cold in Jena in December of that year: “The frozen Rhine became a thoroughfare for French troops on their warpath through Europe.”) It was a period when Goethe’s scientific ideas found little resonance among contemporaries, including Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) or his essays on optics (Beiträge zur Optik, 1791), a preface to his theory of colors. Meeting Humboldt, a “sparring partner,” caused him to start working on his scientific studies more intensely. We also learn that the young Goethe who had stormed Europe with his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was now corpulent, “with a double chin and a stomach cruelly described by one acquaintance as ‘that of a woman in the last stages of pregnancy.’ His looks had gone — his beautiful eyes had disappeared into the ‘fat of his cheeks’ and many remarked that he was no longer a dashing ‘Apollo.’”

Chemical attractions in Elective Affinities

So be it. It is only in chapter 9 that Goethe gets his own chapter in Meinhardt, the title of which is “Chemical Attractions.” While discussing the coming together of Humboldt and Goethe and its electrifying effect on Goethe’s enthusiasm for scientific matters (Humboldt had by 1794, writes Meinhardt, “developed an almost obsessive interest in the idea of animal electricity, generally referred to as ‘galvanism’”), she focuses on the literary effect, namely, Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, in which the relationships between natural phenomena offer a model for those chemical and human relationships portrayed in the novel. As Meinhardt writes: “Goethe puts his characters in the positions of chemical substances in the course of an experiment.” Further, “the novel is strongly preoccupied with the equilibrium that needs to be maintained,” but that, in the case of the relationship between Eduard and Charlotte, is disturbed by new elements. “Chemistry, following its inevitable course, quickly goes beyond the experimental setting and draws the characters into a destructive maelstrom.” Wulf mentions the novel in her study, but only in passing. Similarly, Meinhardt’s focus on the milieu of the first meeting of Humboldt and Goethe brought out something I had not known, namely, the role Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander’s brother, played in “engineering” the course of events that led to the fabled encounter between Schiller and Goethe, which was followed by dinner at the home of Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt in Jena in July of 1794. The rest is literary history.

Another chapter in which Goethe plays a role takes place after Humboldt’s famous American tour, when he and a group of friends, despite the warlike conditions in Europe, plan a trip to Italy in 1797. It is entitled “Goethe’s Caravan,” and at some point, according to Meinhardt, Goethe actually considered joining the group. The group venture “went south,” so to speak, not to Italy, but by now, Humboldt’s renown as a scientist “smoothed his path wherever he went.” His brother Wilhelm and Caroline did go to Italy, however, where they were neighbors with the German-Danish writer Friederike Brun, about whom I wrote a blog post back in 2012 in connection with “Goethe in Venice” and have also written an essay on Brun that appeared in this volume.

Like Fuseli (see previous post), Humboldt doesn’t inhabit a single world, escapes easy classification. He was “one of the most captivating and inspiring men of his time” (writes Wulf) and the most famous scientist of his day. The 100th anniversary of his birth, September 1869, was celebrated all over the world. Imagine that the streets of downtown New York City were lined with flags, and posters with his picture appeared on building fronts. Today, of course, as Wulf writes, very few outside of academia have heard of him, although that is probably only true in North America and the European world. Humboldt's name is everywhere in Latin America and in several African countires. According to the Alexander Humboldt Foundation, mountain peaks, bodies of waters, and entire regions bear his name, including the Humboldt Current.

Image credit:  Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten / Hermann Buresch; Sofatutor