Im wunderschönen Monat Mai
In May, the magic month of May,
When all the buds were breaking,
Oh then within my heart
The fires of love awakened.
In May, the magic month of May,
When birds were merry-making,
Oh then I told my darling
Of how my heart was aching.
Why, it's May right now. This poem is almost relevant. That's the whole poem, another one from the 1820s. If you can pronounce German, in the first line, italicized above, you can hear why so many songs were built on Heine lyrics. Seven vowel sounds in eight syllables.* Aaron Kramer's translation also sounds like a song, but a quite different one.
Wenn zwei von einander scheiden
The last farewell of lovers
Is whispered as they stand
With tears they cannot conquer,
And hand in trembling hand.
But when we two were parted
We did not sigh nor moan.
We had all life before us
In which to weep alone.
This one may verge on the ridiculous. In some ways, Heine occupies a place in German comparable to Keats or Shelley in English, but I'm not sure either of those two, or anyone else, was such a prolific source of this kind of brief lyric poem, where the bittersweet substance of it just barely exists. Not pure music, but close.
Heine wrote a heap of poems like this, but it's hardly his only mode. Tomorrow, a look at the acid-tongued Heine.
* Hear how the types of vowel sound alternate in the German: i/u/e/ö/e/o/a/ai. The English can't replicate this, but can at least keep all of the "m"s.
I never know how serious to take the Heine of the Buch der Lieder. Knowing his acid-tongued version, I always suspect that it’s a joke, this combination of simplicity and levity, that he’s quietly making fun of the sentimentality and romanticism of his readers. But they lapped it up, so he continued producing.
ReplyDeleteYes, Heine is irony-soaked.
ReplyDeleteThe Sol Liptzin book I mention a few posts later, The English Legend of Heinrich Heine, was a huge help understanding the unironic Heine audience you mention.