Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  Ossian is exactly the kind of poetry that we would expect a young man like Werther to go into raptures over; but it would be excessively subtle to say that the rendering of Ossian in Werther is designed to reflect the mind of Werther, as opposed to the mind of his author. Goethe claimed that he wrote the first draft of Werther in four weeks, in a somnambulistic trance. There is no reason to doubt him. But he achieved that feat only by absorbing into the text a body of pre-existing material: diaries, letters, and his own Ossian translations. At an aesthetic level, reproducing a monstrous slab of Ossian in so short a short novel is a misstep. The hold-up in the action while Werther delivers his aria is a steep price to pay for what the aria actually achieves: raising the emotional temperature, reducing Werther and Lotte to tears.

  Goethe outgrew his taste for Ossian. If the public took Werther’s enthusiasm for Ossian as an endorsement of Ossian, he remarked, the public should think again: Werther admired Homer while he was sane, Ossian when he was going mad.13

  Germany in the mid-eighteenth century was a loose federation of states of various sizes nominally ruled by an emperor. Politically it was disunited and riven with strife. Culturally it was directionless. The literature of the courts was imported from France.

  About 1770 a movement of young intellectuals coalesced under the name Sturm und Drang, rebelling against stifling social conventions as well as against French literary models. For his generation, said Goethe, ‘the French way of life [was] too restricted and genteel, their poetry cold, their criticism destructive, their philosophy abstruse yet unsatisfying’. English literature, with its ‘earnest melancholy’, was more to their taste. They revered Shakespeare (Hamlet in particular) and Ossian. For their literary credo they relied upon Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, in which the great soul, the genius, uses his semi-divine creative powers to transform experience into art.14

  Sturm und Drang foreshadowed full-blown Romanticism in its emphasis on originality as against imitation, the modern as against the classical, inspiration as against learning, intuition as against rules, as well as in its enthusiasm for philosophical pantheism, the cult of genius, and a return to the Middle Ages. Goethe was never more than a fringe member of the group; Werther is a more representative camp follower.

  Sturm und Drang did not last long: its social base was too narrow. But despite the twists and turns of his later career Goethe adhered to the core aspiration of the movement: to build a new national literature that would overturn ossified norms of conduct and thought. Even as he anatomized Sturm und Drang in the person of Werther, he offered, in Werther, a seminal contribution to that new national literature.

  The strongest philosophical influence on the young Goethe was Johann Herder, to whose anthology of folk poetry he contributed his Ossian versions. To Herder the spirit of a language is the spirit of the people. Thus any renewal of national literature had to go back to native sources. Here again the British showed the way with Macpherson’s Ossian and, in 1765, Bishop Thomas Percy’s collection of folk ballads Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

  In the Germany of Goethe’s youth there was still some reserve about the novel as a serious literary form. But Goethe grasped early on the potentialities of the novel of multiple perspectives perfected by Richardson and Rousseau; while from Sterne he absorbed the technique of illuminating the interior by bringing up fragments of involuntary memory. The first pages of Werther bear all the signs of Sterne’s mercurial narrative style.

  Rousseau, in particular the Rousseau of La Nouvelle Héloïse, was the shining exception to the strictures of Sturm und Drang on French literature of the day. Read simplistically as a plea for the rights of individual sensibility over convention, and generally for the privileging of feeling over reason, Rousseau’s novel was popular among the German public, to whom it offered Thränenfreude, the pleasure of tears. To Goethe it demonstrated how a narrative can evolve on the basis of a character’s gradual self-disclosure.

  The Sorrows of Young Werther has attracted many distinguished translators. As with all works from the past, the translator of Goethe faces the question of how the language of the translation should relate to the language of the original. For instance, should a twenty-first-century translation into English of a novel from the 1770s read like a twenty-first-century English novel or like an English novel from the era of the original?

  Werther – the 1774 version – was first translated into English in 1779. The translation is usually attributed to Daniel Malthus, father of the economist Thomas Malthus, though there are grounds to doubt this. By today’s standards Malthus’s Werther is an unacceptable piece of work: not only has it been translated at second hand, through an intermediate French Passions du jeune Werther, but passages have been omitted, perhaps because Malthus thought they would offend his public. Nevertheless, Malthus’s version affords us a window into how Werther was read in the England of Goethe’s time. I cite one telling instance.

  In his very first letter Werther mentions a former woman friend, and – in the words of a recent English translation – asks rhetorically: ‘Could I help it that … a real passion was forming in poor Leonore’s heart?’ Malthus in 1779 rendered Goethe’s words as: ‘Am I to be blamed for the tenderness which took possession of her heart …?’15

  We are in the sphere of the tender passions, and the word at issue is eine Leidenschaft. Leidenschaft is, in every sense of the word, ‘passion’; but what is ‘passion’? Why does Malthus mute ‘passion’ to ‘tenderness’ (or why does his French intermediary mute it to tendresse)? We can only surmise that to Malthus the obscure feeling that invades the heart of the young woman in question, given how little we know of her (this is her sole mention in the book), is more likely (or more appropriately) a yielding feeling than a fiery one, more likely (or more appropriately) constant than erratic, and is therefore best rendered as tenderness.

  Our first impulse may be to say that Malthus mistranslates Leidenschaft; yet his choice of ‘tenderness’ cannot but be deliberate. It may be fairer to say that he here performs an act of cultural translation, translation informed by his embeddedness in the cultural norms of his society, including its norms of feeling (what one feels in one’s heart in given circumstances) and its norms of polite discourse (what one says or does not say in given circumstances).

  This, then, is what it comes down to: where we, observing the tender passions at work, see passion predominating, an educated Englishman of the 1770s saw tenderness. A translation of Werther that is true to our twenty-first-century understanding of Goethe, yet in which readers from the 1770s would have felt at home, is an unattainable ideal.

  6. Translating Hölderlin

  In the depths of the Second World War, in a London battered by German bombs, a young man named Michael Hamburger, who with his family had fled his native Germany to escape the Nazis, penned a lament in the voice of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin:

  Diotima is dead, and silent

  The island’s singing bird.

  The temple I raised from ruin

  Fallen again.

  Where is the flame I stoked …?

  Where are the heroes

  And my pulsing song?

  Nothing stirs on the lakes of time.1

  In German classrooms children were chanting Hölderlin too:

  O take me, take me up into the ranks,

  so that I do not one day die a common death!

  I do not want to die in vain, what

  I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound

  For the Fatherland, to pour out the heart’s blood

  For the Fatherland.2

  Who was Hölderlin, who could be made to speak for both a lost past and a National Socialist future?

  Friedrich Hölderlin was born in 1770 in the tiny independent duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany. His father – who died when the boy was two – was an ecclesiastical employee; his mother, the daughter of a clergyman, intended him for the church. He was sent to church
schools and then to the prestigious theological seminary in Tübingen.

  Württemberg was unusual among German statelets of the late eighteenth century: whereas most were ruled by absolute princes, in Württemberg the powers of the duke were constitutionally constrained by an assembly of non-noble families, the Ehrbarkeit, to which the Hölderlins belonged. The Ehrbarkeit ran the cultural and intellectual life of the duchy.

  Young men who passed the seminary’s stiff entrance examination were given a free education on condition they would thereafter serve in Württemberg parishes. Hölderlin was a reluctant seminarian: without success, he tried to persuade his mother to let him study law instead. His mother controlled his not inconsiderable inheritance: he remained dependent, until her death in 1828, on the meagre allowances she doled out.

  Though the seminary offered a first-class training in classical languages, theology, and divinity, there was also a stress on obedience to church and state that students found irksome. Hölderlin spent five restless years (1788–93) there, dreaming of an alternative career as a man of letters. Intellectual stimulus came not from his teachers – whom he looked down on for their obsequiousness to authority – but from fellow students, who in his cohort included G. F. W. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. He himself stood out: ‘It was as if Apollo was striding through the hall,’ a classmate recalled.3

  In the seminary Hölderlin wrote enthusiastic, rather strident poems of a pantheistic bent celebrating the universe as a living whole infused with divinity. Their immediate model was Friedrich Schiller, but their philosophical underpinning was ultimately Neoplatonic. As his motto Hölderlin adopted the Greek phrase en kai pan, one and all: life constitutes a harmonious unity, our goal must be to merge with the All.

  Then burst the bomb of the French Revolution. At the two centres of learning in the duchy, the university and the seminary, revolutionary societies were founded, French newspapers pored over, revolutionary songs sung. Students joyfully endorsed the Declaration of the Rights of Man. When in 1792 the European autocracies launched attacks on France, it was the French armies for which they cheered. The Duke of Württemberg condemned their enthusiasm for ‘anarchy and regicide’.4 What the young philosophical radicals in fact hoped for was the birth of a republic of Württemberg, or of a wider Swabia, under the protection of French arms; they were dismayed when the Terror gathered momentum in France.

  There is no doubting Hölderlin’s revolutionary sympathies – ‘Pray for the French, the champions of human rights,’ he instructed his younger sister – but his poems say nothing direct about politics.5 To a degree this was because he had no models for political poetry; but it was also because of a strong tradition among Germany’s intellectual class of not involving itself in politics.

  The writer with the strongest following among young idealists was Schiller, and Schiller’s political line after 1793 was that the consciousness of the people needed to evolve before true political change could take effect. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1794–5 Schiller argued that the human spirit could best be enlightened and liberated by participating in aesthetic play. For proof, one need look no further than ancient Athens, a democratic society that prized the life of the mind.

  Hölderlin approved the leading role that Schiller gave the artist, but was disappointed by Schiller’s anti-revolutionary stance, as he was dissatisfied with the sceptical divide between politics and ethics maintained by Immanuel Kant: political reform might be desirable, said Kant, but only as an aid to the more important goal of individual moral growth. For a while Hölderlin found in Johann Fichte a guide more to his liking; but in the end even Fichte was not strongly enough committed to a utopian future.

  The issue was human freedom and what freedom consisted in. The idealism of Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling in their revolutionary phase rested on a conviction that ideas could change the world, that the inner freedom envisaged by Kant, Schiller, and Fichte could be extended, that there could again emerge such a thing as a free society along Athenian lines. If Schiller, following on from Johann Winckelmann, represented a second generation of German philhellenism, Hölderlin, Hegel and Schelling formed a third wave: young men who saw in Greece a model to be emulated and even surpassed, not just in art and philosophy but in democratic practice too.

  Similarly with the French Revolution in its glory days. The revolution, said Hölderlin, gave an intimation of how the gap could be bridged between idea and practice, between the realm of the divine and the world. En kai pan: what had once been whole and good, and had then fallen apart, could be put together again. To search out traces of lost unity in the chaos of appearance we have the aesthetic sense to rely on; to philosophy and poetry falls the task of healing what was broken.

  Nevertheless, the self-betrayal and defeat of the revolution left its mark on Hölderlin as on many other disappointed young Europeans of his generation. ‘It would make terrible reading,’ wrote his younger contemporary Achim von Arnim in 1815, the year when the autocracies of Europe reasserted their sway, ‘to count off all the beautiful German souls who surrendered to madness or suicide or to careers they detested’.6

  Graduating from the seminary with the degree of magister, fighting against pressure from his mother to look for a parish, Hölderlin established a toehold in literary Jena. An extract from his novel in progress, Hyperion, was published in a magazine Schiller edited; with Schiller himself Hölderlin established a quasi-filial relationship. At first Schiller accepted the role genially enough, giving Hölderlin advice about his verse-writing – notably to avoid large philosophical subjects – which Hölderlin ignored. What Hölderlin was really after was a more complicated and indeed Oedipal relationship than the older man cared for – ‘I am at times in a secret struggle with your genius, to protect my freedom against it,’ Hölderlin confided – and in the end Schiller stopped answering his letters.7

  In need of an income, Hölderlin took on the first of a series of appointments as resident tutor in the homes of well-to-do families. None of these lasted long – Hölderlin had no particular rapport with children – but the second, with a prominent Frankfurt family, affected his life decisively. He fell in love with his employer’s wife, Susette Gontard, and she with him. Forced to resign, he for a while continued to meet Susette clandestinely. But in 1802, at the age of thirty-four, she contracted tuberculosis and died.

  Love affairs between ambitious but penniless young intellectuals and the neglected wives of businessmen are a staple of nineteenth-century romantic fiction. Hölderlin’s first biographer, Wilhelm Waiblinger, did his best to assimilate Hölderlin and Susette to the genre: Susette, ‘a young woman … of enthusiastic soul and fiery, vivacious disposition’, was ‘inflamed to the highest degree’ by Hölderlin’s ‘gallant, distinguished person, his fine eyes, his youth, his uncommon understanding and eminent talent’, as well as his skill in music-making and conversation.8 The reality transcended the clichés of fiction. Susette’s letters to Hölderlin have survived, along with a few of his to her. As one reads them, writes David Constantine in his 1988 biography, ‘one’s sympathy is continually moved towards that peculiar sadness and outrage which comes when one witnesses an irremediable harm being done’. ‘The thwarted relation of Hölderlin and Susette Gontard can properly be called a tragedy’.9

  To a large degree Susette made Hölderlin as a poet. She gave him back the confidence that Schiller had undermined. She guided him to earlier German poets, Klopstock in particular, as models. But above all she incarnated in his eyes the union of earthly beauty with pure mind to which his more mystical, pantheistic intuitions had pointed him – en kai pan – but in which he had lost confidence as he read Kant and Fichte. Susette appears in the two-volume Hyperion (1797, 1799) as Diotima, a sage and beautiful woman who guides the steps of Hyperion, a philhellene who has voyaged from his soulless German homeland – where, as he bitterly remarks, poets live like strangers in their own house – to help the Greeks in their struggle against t
he Ottomans.10

  Fichte had taught that consciousness is not part of nature but stands outside nature observing it. To Hölderlin the evolution of consciousness had seemed to foster only a dispiriting sense of alienation. Diotima-Susette brings Hyperion-Hölderlin to realize that consciousness can be an agency of spiritual growth, that it is possible to share at a fully conscious level in the divinity of the All. Specifically, the experience of beauty leads to the divine. Thus in his late twenties Hölderlin began to develop a philosophy with Platonic undertones and a strongly aesthetic orientation, coupled with a perspective on history in which the modern world is continually measured against the standard of the ancient.

  Hölderlin worked up the Greece of Hyperion out of travel books, thereby joining a line of distinguished German philhellenes who never visited Greece, a line that included Goethe and Winckelmann, author of the little book, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), that had sparked off the philhellenic craze. In Hyperion and in poems from the same period Hölderlin adopted Winckelmann’s Greece of ‘noble simplicity and quiet greatness’ as the theatre in which he would thenceforth play out his ideas. If in bygone times men had been free to pursue personal excellence and the life of the mind, then they might be able to do so again in some liberated Germany of the future.

  After the Gontards, Hölderlin took on two further tutoring jobs, and was dismissed from each for erratic behaviour. He tried to win a lectureship in Greek at the University of Jena, without success. A friend created for him a position as librarian at the court of Hessen-Homburg, a position that the friend secretly funded. But this happy solution to the problem of how the philosopher-poet might devote himself to what, in a letter to his mother, he called ‘the higher and purer activities for which God in his excellence has intended me’ came to an abrupt end when the friend was arrested on charges of treason.11 For a while it seemed that Hölderlin himself might be charged as a co-conspirator; but after a medical examination he was declared of unsound mind (his speech was ‘half German, half Greek, half Latin’, said the doctor) and allowed to go home to his mother.12