blending an assortment of thoughts and experiences for my friends, relations and kindred spirit

blending an assortment of thoughts and experiences for my friends, relations and kindred spirit
By Alison Hobbs, blending a mixture of thoughts and experiences for friends, relations and kindred spirits.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Hölderlin, Heine and Hesse

Friedrich Hölderlin
During my trip to Germany, I saw places where, at the beginning, middle and end of the 19th century, all three of these German romantic poets spent their time.

Friedrich Hölderlin lived for a long time in Tübingen. Here's a poem by him that I know and love:
Hälfte des Lebens (1805)

Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

Weh mir, wo nehm’ ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein,
Und Schatten der Erde?

Die Mauern stehn
Hölderlin's house by the Neckar
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.
A reasonable translation by Michael Hamburger goes like this:
The Middle of Life

With yellow pears the land
And full of wild roses
Hangs down into the lake,
You lovely swans,
And drunk with kisses
You dip your heads
Into the hallowed, the sober water.

But oh, where shall I find
When winter comes, the flowers, and where
The sunshine
And shade of the earth?
The walls loom

Speechless and cold, in the wind
Weathercocks clatter.
Hesse's bookshop in Tübingen
I believe I saw the descendants of those same swans he described, on the River Neckar, dipping their heads into the water around the Stocherkahne by the bank (that's the German word for punts, as found in Oxford and Cambridge), and then I quoted from the second verse to Klaus, the gentleman who was showing me old Tübingen; he knew the poem too.

Hermann Hesse worked at the Heckenhauer bookshop in that same town (from 1895-1899), publishing his first book of poems there.

On the wall of Heine's lodgings
Heinrich Heine
Heinrich Heine spent a year in Munich in the 1820s, co-editing a political magazine, but wasn't very happy, finding that city kleingeistig (small-minded) and longing all the while for Berlin. His Buch der Lieder was published while he lived there in the Radspielerhaus. Chris sings several of the songs by Schubert and Schumann that were settings of those famous poems: Der Doppelgänger, Ich grolle nicht, etc. Heine ended up living in Paris, by the way.
Hermann Hesse

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