Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  To these last years of precarious sanity belongs much of Hölderlin’s greatest work: the late hymns, the Sophocles and Pindar translations, the play The Death of Empedocles in its final version. He had hoped to use his time in Homburg to write an exposition of his philosophy of poetry, which had hitherto found only fragmentary expression in essays and letters; but, perhaps because he was losing the capacity for extended thought, the job was never done.

  One of Hölderlin’s biographers has argued that Hölderlin was only pretending to be mad to escape the law. But the weight of evidence suggests otherwise. Hölderlin had been dismissed from his last tutorships because fits of rage made him unfit to teach young children. His attention wandered; he alternated between bursts of activity and withdrawal; he was morbidly suspicious.

  In 1806, after his condition had deteriorated further, he was conveyed, kicking and struggling, to a clinic in Tübingen from which he was in due course discharged as harmless but incurable. A cabinetmaker with literary interests took him in and housed him in a tower attached to his home. Hölderlin’s mother paid for his upkeep out of his inheritance, assisted by a state annuity. He spent much of his time in his host’s garden, walking about alone, gesticulating and talking to himself.

  There was a trickle of visitors, who would usually be welcomed with courtly formality. A caller left a record of such a visit. From the elderly poet he requested a few lines ‘as a souvenir’. ‘Shall they be verses on Greece, Spring, or the Spirit of the Age?’ he was asked. The Spirit of the Age, replied the visitor. Hölderlin took out a folio sheet and penned six lines of doggerel, signing them ‘Obediently, Sardanelli. 24 May 1748 [sic]’.13 Under the name Sardanelli and other aliases, Hölderlin continued to write occasional verse until his death in 1843 at the age of seventy-three.

  The poet in the tower was not forgotten by the reading public. Editions of his poems appeared in 1826 and 1846. During his lifetime Hölderlin was sentimentalized by romantics as a fragile soul driven to madness by his daimon. Later he fell into neglect, remembered only as an eccentric nostalgist for ancient Greece. Nietzsche had a deeper appreciation of him; but it was not until the first decade of the twentieth century, when he was taken up and promoted by the poet Stefan George, that Hölderlin’s star began to rise again. With George commences the reading of Hölderlin as a specifically German prophet-poet that would later bedevil his image. ‘The great visionary for his people,’ George called him in 1919: ‘The cornerstone of the approaching German future and the herald of the New God’.14

  On the centenary of Hölderlin’s death a project was launched to publish all of his writings, a task that would take scholars forty years to complete. For this so-called Stuttgart Edition the principles of classical philology were applied to divide the surviving manuscript material into a core of texts and a secondary corpus of variants. This distinction between text and variant came to prove so contentious among Hölderlin scholars that in 1975 a rival and yet to be completed edition, the so-called Frankfurt Edition, was inaugurated on the principle that there can be no core Hölderlinian text, that we must learn to read the manuscripts as palimpsests of versions overlaying and underlying other versions. For the foreseeable future the notion of a definitive text of Hölderlin is thus in suspension.

  One reason for this contest of editions is that, in the ninety-two-page notebook that lies at the heart of the problem, Hölderlin went back and forth between new and old manuscript poems, using different pens and inks in an unsystematic way, dating nothing, allowing what one might at first glance call different versions of the same poem to stand side by side. A deeper reason is that in his last productive years Hölderlin seems to have abandoned the notion of the definitive, to have regarded each seemingly completed poem as merely a stopping place, a base from which to conduct further raids into the unsaid. Hence his habit of breaking open a perfectly good poem, not in order to improve it but to rebuild it from the ground up. In such a case, which is the definitive text, which the variant, particularly when the rebuilding is broken off and not resumed? Are apparently unfinished reworkings to be regarded as abandoned projects, or might Hölderlin have been feeling his way toward a new aesthetics of the fragmentary, and an accompanying poetic epistemology of the flashing insight or vision?

  In Germany the Hölderlin centenary of 1943 was celebrated on a grand scale. Ceremonies took place across the country; hundreds of thousands of Hölderlin readers were printed and distributed to German soldiers. Why this philosopher-poet, elegist of the Greek past and foe of autocracy, should have been adopted as a mascot of the Third Reich is not immediately obvious. Initially the line followed by the Nazi cultural office was that Hölderlin was a prophet of the newly arisen German giant. After the tide of the war turned at Stalingrad, that line was amended: Hölderlin now spoke for European values being defended by Germany against the advancing Asiatic, Bolshevist hordes.

  All of this rested on a handful of patriotic poems interpreted in a slanted way, plus some tinkering with the text. Conveniently forgotten was the fact that when Hölderlin wrote of a Vaterland he as often as not meant Swabia rather than a wider Deutschland: in 1800 Deutschland was a cultural term, not a political one. The Nazis certainly did not absorb his warning, in the poem ‘Voice of the People’, against the ‘mysterious yearning toward the chasm’ that can overtake whole nations.15

  The fortunes of Hölderlin under the Nazis are intricately interwoven with his fortunes in the hands of his most influential interpreter, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s meditations on the place of Germany in history are carried out largely in the form of commentaries on Hölderlin. In the 1930s Heidegger saw Hölderlin as the prophet of a new dawn; when the Reich collapsed he saw him as the consoling poet for dark times when the gods withdraw. While in rough outline this account squares with the Nazi version, it does an injustice to the seriousness with which Heidegger reflects on each line of Hölderlin. To Heidegger in the ‘completely destitute time’ of the present (he was writing in 1946), when the relevance of poetry is everywhere in doubt, Hölderlin is the one who articulates most clearly the essential calling of the poet, namely to speak the words that bring a new world into being.16 We read Hölderlin’s dark poetry, says Heidegger, not so much to understand him as to keep in contact with him until that future arrives when he will at last be understandable. He quotes Hölderlin: ‘The bold spirit, like an eagle / Before the tempests, flies prophesying / In the path of his advancing gods’.17

  Among the liberal intelligentsia of Hölderlin’s Germany there prevailed not just an admiration for Athens as a model society where men devoted themselves to the quest for truth, beauty, and justice, but also a somewhat starry-eyed vision of a past when the divine was a living force in the world. ‘Where the gods were more like human beings / Human beings were more godlike,’ wrote Schiller in ‘The Gods of Greece’ (1788). This picture of Greece was based largely on a reading of Greek poetry, to a lesser extent on second-hand accounts of Greek sculpture. An elective affinity was claimed between Germany and Greece, between the German language and the Greek language. A new theory of literature was developed, based on Plato rather than Aristotle, in which key elements of modernist aesthetics are pre-figured: the autonomy of the art object, organic form, the imagination as a demiurgic power.

  Out of an idealized vision of Greece grew a movement whose agenda, as formulated by Kant, was to allow ‘the germs implanted by nature’ in humankind to develop fully, so that ‘man’s destiny can be fulfilled here on earth’.18 Beginning with the reforms to the Prussian education system effected by Wilhelm von Humboldt, reforms that made the study of Greek language and literature the core of the curriculum, philhellenic humanism rapidly came to dominate the education of the German middle classes.

  The project of remodelling Germany along Athenian lines was to an extent the brainchild of young men with little social capital save a schooling in the classics (Winckelmann was the son of a shoemaker, Schiller the son of a soldier) but with ambitions to wrest
control of cultural life from the Frenchified German courts and to give a new, nationalist meaning to German identity. Within a generation, however, the tincture of revolutionary idealism had been purged from the education system, as the career men and professionals took over. Though it continued to be associated with a lofty if vague liberalism, philhellenism in the academy had by the 1870s become part of a conservative establishment. The new radicals were the archaeologists and textual scholars, Nietzsche among them, to whom the neohumanist version of Greece – Winckelmann’s ‘noble simplicity and quiet greatness’, Humboldt’s ‘purity, totality and harmony’ – ignored too much of Greek reality, the violence and irrationalism of Greek religion, for instance.19

  At first glance, Hölderlin may seem a typical neohumanist of his generation: a déclassé intellectual alienated from church and state, aspiring toward a utopia in which poets and philosophers would be accorded their rightful due; more specifically, a poet constitutionally trapped in a backward-looking posture, mourning the passing of an age when gods mixed with men (‘My friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living, / Over our heads they live, up in a different world. / … Little they seem to care whether we live or do not’).20

  But such a reading underestimates the complexity of Hölderlin’s attitude toward Greece. To him the Greeks were not to be copied but confronted: ‘If one is not to be crushed by the accepted … there seems little choice but with violent arrogance to pit oneself as a living force against everything learned, given’.21

  Ramifications of this stance are explored in a letter of 1801. To the Greeks, says Hölderlin, ‘holy pathos’ and the Apollonian ‘fire from heaven’ came naturally. Intrinsic to Western thought, on the other hand, are ‘Junonian sobriety’ and ‘clarity of representation’. ‘Nothing is more difficult for us to learn than free use of our national traits … This sounds like paradox. But I repeat … in the advancement of culture [Bildung] the intrinsically national will always prove to be of lesser benefit’. The most striking achievement of Greek art was to master sobriety and clarity. Out of admiration for the Greeks, the Western poet may try to recreate Greek pathos and fire; but the profounder task is to master what comes naturally to him. This is why the Greeks are ‘indispensable’ to us: we study them not in order to imitate them but to understand how unlike them we are.22

  Not only does this letter belie the picture of Hölderlin as a dreamer lost in the past, it also underlines the originality and rigour of his thinking about art. What the modern poet most clearly lacks, he writes, is technical training (in his own case, long apprenticeship to Greek masters fitted him to domesticate Greek metres more fluently than any of his European contemporaries). We arrive at poetic truth not by giving utterance to our personal feelings but by carrying our individual sensibility (Gemüth) and individual experience across into ‘analogical material of a different [fremd] kind’.

  The most intensely inward feeling becomes vulnerable to passing away to the extent that it is not prepared to disown its actual [wahren] temporal and sensory connections … Precisely for this reason the tragic poet, because he expresses the deepest inward intensity, wholly disowns his own person, his subjectivity, as well as the object present to him, and carries them over [instead] into alien [fremde] personality, into alien objectivity.23

  The great subject of Hölderlin’s poetry is the retreat of God or the gods, and the role of the poet in the benighted or destitute times that follow their retreat. As he writes – with palpable diffidence – in the late hymn ‘The Rhine’:

  Since

  The most Blessed in themselves feel nothing

  Another, if to say such a thing is

  Permitted, must, I suppose,

  Vicariously feel in the name of the gods,

  And him they need.24

  But what can it be that the gods in their remoteness look to us to feel? We do not know; all we can do is put in words our most intense yearning for their return, and hope that, touched perchance by fire from heaven, our words may to some extent incarnate the Word and thus transform yearning into epiphany. (In his fitful faith in a Word that will use human agency to express itself Hölderlin comes closest to his friend Hegel’s historical idealism.)

  The Greeks, observed Goethe, did not pine for the infinite but felt at home in the world. A hankering for a lost ‘classic’ wholeness is the trademark of the Romantic. Hölderlin’s Romantic longing to be reunited with the divine comes to him not just from his early Neoplatonism but also from his Christian roots. In the overarching mythological-historical scheme he constructed, Christ counts as simply the last of the gods to tread the earth before night closes in; but the late hymns suggest the beginnings of a rapprochement, a new intimacy with Christ if not with the Christian religion:

  And yet, and yet,

  You ancient gods and all

  You valiant sons of the gods,

  One other I look for whom

  Within your ranks I love …

  My Master and Lord!

  O you, my teacher!

  Why did you keep

  Away?25

  Where Hölderlin’s explorations would have taken him had the light not gone out in his thirty-sixth year is anyone’s guess. There is one text from his afterlife in the tower that may suggest the direction of his thought. In 1823 his friend and biographer Waiblinger published a 700-word fragment of poetic prose that he claimed to have extracted from the poet’s papers. If we accept its authenticity, it suggests that, in times more destitute than he could ever have foreseen, Hölderlin’s fundamental hopefulness remained undimmed – his faith that our creative, meaning-making faculty will see us through. I quote from Richard Sieburth’s translation:

  Is God unknown?

  Is he manifest as the sky? This I tend

  To believe. Such is man’s measure.

  Well deserving, yet poetically

  Man dwells on this earth. But the shadow

  Of the starry night is not more pure, if I may say so,

  Than man, said to be in the image of God.26

  Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) was born in Germany. In 1933 the Hamburger family emigrated to Britain, where they integrated smoothly into the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Hamburger was a precocious student, winning a scholarship to Oxford at the age of seventeen to study French and German. His first book of translations, Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, appeared from a small press in 1943.

  These early versions he later more or less disowned. In 1952 a new, expanded set of Hölderlin translations appeared, followed in 1966 by what was intended to be a ‘definitive selection and rendering’. Though in 1990 some poems were added, the bulk of the augmented edition of 2004 dates from the 1960s.

  By this time Hamburger was very much the doyen of translators of modern German poetry. Yet in his memoirs he admits to some exasperation at being best known as a translator. As a young man he clearly had creative ambitions, and for a while poems of his were to be found in anthologies of modern British verse. Read as a whole, his Collected Poems tells a story of a writer of some gifts who never quite found his true subject and who, sometime in early middle age, gave up the quest and settled for occasional verse.

  There is a passage in one of Hölderlin’s letters that Hamburger quotes with clear reference to himself: ‘For this is tragic among us, that we leave the realm of the living quite calmly, packed into a container, not that devoured by flames we atone for the flame which we could not master’.27 For Hamburger the sacred flame he could not master went out early; the life of atonement as translator and scholar he regarded as a sad second best. (There is some irony here in the fact that Hölderlin himself reached audacious poetic heights as a translator.)

  In a succession of prefaces and essays Hamburger spelled out his aims as a translator. What he did wrong in 1943, he says, was to privilege literal accuracy over Hölderlin’s ‘beautifully singular’ way of writing: ‘No translation of Hölderlin’s odes and elegies can be close to the originals without re
ndering their metres or at least their cadences, and conveying something of their peculiar dynamism, their peculiar stillness, brought about by the tension between a strict form and an impulse beating against it’. He strove therefore for ‘the best possible translation of a certain kind’, in which word-for-word accuracy is weighed against the need to reproduce Hölderlin’s music. He dismissed the kind of free translation practised by Ezra Pound and fashionable in the 1960s under the name of ‘imitation’: ‘occupational therapy for poets partly or temporarily disabled’, he called it.28

  We get an idea of Hamburger’s ‘best possible’ in his version of the ode ‘The Poet’s Courage’, composed around 1800, substantially rewritten a year or two later, and then even more radically reworked under the title ‘Timidness’. Hamburger selects the first version.

  For, as quiet near shores, or in the silvery

  Flood resounding afar, or over silent deep

  Water travels the flimsy

  Swimmer, likewise we love to be

  Where around us there breathe, teem those alive, our kin,

  We, their poets; and glad, friendly to every man,

  Trusting all. And how else for

  Each of them could we sing his god?

  Though the wave will at times, flattering, drag below

  One such brave man where, true, trusting he makes his way,

  And the voice of that singer

  Now falls mute as the hall turns blue;

  Glad he died there, and still lonely his groves lament