The insular Theodor Storm

Theodor Storm wrote on a small scale - novellas and short tales, and lyric poems, mostly set in and around the country where he grew up. He was a regionalist, and a miniaturist. So were most of his German-language contemporaries, or at least the ones who are still read, or at least the ones I have heard of. Gottfried Keller and Jeremias Gotthelf in Switzerland, for example, or Adalbert Stifter in Austria, or Eduard Mörike in his corner of Germany, or Annette von Droste-Hülshoff in hers. I'm leaving out one or two key figures - give me a minute.

I don't think this is a coincidence. It's some sort of reaction to the earlier generation of German Romantics. The fairy tale weirdness of E. T. A. Hoffmann and many others is being domesticated; the visonary worlds of Novalis and Hölderlin are being cut down to a human scale; the incomprehensible achievements of Goethe are being sifted by more ordinary geniuses. Reduce the scale, make it small, look carefully at what is right around you - every one of these writers picked up that message somehow.

Thinking about Storm and his peers reminded me of the recent comments of Horace Engdahl, secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, to the effect that American readers, or writers, or literature, or all three, are "too isolated, too insular," and that they don't "participate in the big dialogue of literature." I can only guess what he might have meant. But Storm, Gotthelf, Mörike - these guys were insular. They did not write the big books (Keller's Green Henry may be a bit of an exception).

I'm not sure what the "big dialogue" of literature is, exactly, or why I should attach a special value to it. Immensee is not a big book, in scope, ideas, or ambition. It is merely perfect. Gotthelf's The Black Spider is imperfect and small, but it takes a wild leap into the unknown. It's a marvel. Insular has its good side. My position is strongly pro-insular.

The two mid-century German exceptions to the rule: The contemporary fame and current reputation of Heinrich Heine dwarfs that of every other writer I have mentioned here. Heine was the great cosmopolitan, the citizen of the world, politically engaged yet a lyric poet of the highest caliber, a master of multiple genres. He would have been a sure thing for the Nobel Prize if he had only lived another fifty years, to the age of 110 or so. My other position is strongly pro-non-insular.

The second exception: Theodor Storm's first published book was a poetry anthology that he shared with two brothers, friends at the University of Kiel, Theodor and Tycho Mommsen. Theodor Mommsen did live long enough to receive, at the age of 85, the second Nobel Prize in Literature, not for his youthful poetry but for his 1854 History of Rome. Mommsen is more or less the founder of the modern study of Roman history. I don't know if that counts as insular or not. I don't think it's what Engdahl meant.

That was Heine!

That was Heine! and we,
Myriads who live, who have lived,
What are we all, but a mood,
A single mood, of the life
Of the Being in whom we exist,
Who alone is all things in one.

From Matthew Arnold's "Heine's Grave"

What to make of those lines of Arnold's? Not exactly in the spirit of the Heine poems I've been looking at all week, are they?

Heine spent the last seven or eight years of his life confined to bed, in severe pain, partly blind, victim of a degenerative illness. "The mattress-grave," he called it. I haven't read the poems from this period. Reading his autobiographical writing from this time, charming but sharp, mostly about his childhood, you (I) would never guess that he was so sick.

Later English poets loved this aspect of Heine.* They not only made hundreds of translations of Heine poems, but wrote dozens of poems about him, often titled "The Mattress Tomb" or something similar. Heine was the "Montmartre Martyr," a martyr to politics, to illness, to poetry. Much of this stuff seems overwrought to me. Heine was many things, sure, but let's not get too morbid about the author of:

And if you were my wedded wife
You'd be envied beyond measure,
Fun and frolic would fill your life
With nothing but joy and pleasure.

And if you scold or if you curse,
I'm the patient kind that bears it;
But if you fail to praise my verse,
It means divorce - that tears it!

Poem 72 of The Homecoming. That was Heine!

Sol Liptzin, The English Legend of Heinrich Heine (1954), has been very instructive on this subject.

* And our use of the word "Philistine" comes from Heine, through an essay of Arnold's. “James Thomson, the author of The City of Dreadful Night, wrote a lengthy article commending Arnold but expressing the belief that the latter had no need to introduce the terms Philistine and Philistinism from German. Thomson suggested popularizing the expressions Bumble, Bumbledom, Bumbleism.” (Liptzin, p. 79) Hats off to James Thomson!

Heinrich Heine and the dancing bear - Oh, the vanity of artists

Heinrich Heine had a sharp tongue. He found himself banned from Germany - from Prussia, really - for his political writing, and spent the last 25 years of his life in exile in Paris, which was less fun than it sounds.

Heine's early reputation in England was that of a nihilistic, radical atheist, a blend of the most dangerous elements of Byron and Shelley. How this was pulled even from his satirical writings is not clear to me. Thomas Carlyle described Heine as "(redacted anti-Semitic slur) - fit only to eat sausages made of toads."* In fairness to Carlyle, at the time he said this he was not only loathsome, but, as the English say, starkers.

Still, when we take a look at Heine's long poem Germany - A Winter's Tale (1844), we can get an idea of Heine's bite. The poet encounters the spirit of Hamburg, his home town. After mistaking her for a prostitute, she offers to give him a vision of the future of Germany. Just stick your head in that toilet, she says. The poet does, but won't tell what he saw, just what he smells:

It turns my stomach still to think
Of those odors blended together -
A cursedly vile foreshadowing smell -
Rotten cabbage plus Russian leather.

This is from Caput 26, p. 532 of the Hal Draper Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine. I do not believe that it requires much interpretive comment.

The slightly earlier satire Atta Troll stars the titular dancing bear. It's a rich, complicated poem, with witches, the Wild Hunt, and attacks on rival poets. Here's a sublime moment where Atta Troll, having escaped from his circus master, tells the other wild bears about his adventures:

Oh, the vanity of artists!
The old dancing bear is beaming
To recall the time his talents
Were dispalyed before the public.

Overcome with his vainglory,
He would like to prove in action
That he is no braggart
But a dancer of great prowess -

So he suddenly leaps up and
Rears himself upon his hindpaws,
And starts dancing, as he used to,
The gavotte, his favorite measure.

Mute, with muzzles gaping open,
There the bear cubs watch in wonder
As the father leaps and capers,
Prancing strangely in the moonlight.

Draper, p. 429.

Here are two other translations of the marvelous Atta Troll: from Google books, a 1914 version, complete with illustrations and the scanner's thumb, and a more recent attempt.

* Quoted in Sol Liptzin's The English Legend of Heinrich Heine (1954).

Heinrich Heine - besides that, he's a poet

from Seraphine

Night has come with silent footsteps,
  On the beaches by the ocean;
And the waves, with curious whispers,
  Ask the moon, "Have you a notion

"Who that man is? Is he foolish,
  Or with love is he demented?
For he seems so sad and cheerful,
  So cast down yet so contented."

And the moon, with shining laughter,
  Answers them, "If you must know it,
He is both in love and foolish;
  And, besides that, he's a poet!"

I was planning to move on to Heine's satirical poems, but I am enjoying the lyrics too much. This one at least has a joke at Heine's own expense. I don't have the German handy, so I have no idea what Louis Untermeyer may have done here - my guess is the translation is pretty free.

The metaphors are all simple, excellent examples of the pathetic fallacy: night's "silent footsteps", the waves' "curious whispers", the moon's "shining laughter." A lovely poem, and a good joke.

I've ignored Heine the ballad-writer, too. His complicated version of the Tannhäuser legend sparked the interest of Richard Wagner. Here's a simpler example:

There was an aged monarch,
  His heart was sad, his hair was grey;
Alas, poor fool, he took him
  A wife that was young and gay!

There was a handsome page-boy,
  Light was his heart and gold his hair;
The silken train he carried
  Of that queen so young and fair.

Dost thou know my story,
  So sweet, so sad to tell?
Death was the lovers' portion
  Because they loved too well.

I especially like Heine's refusal to tell the story. You already know it. Poetry can get away with this.

All tranlsations so far have been from The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine (1948), edited by Frerick Ewen, which uses a variety of translators.

Heinrich Heine - how my heart was aching

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.

Heinrich Heine's Schmerzensgewalt and a couple of thank yous

Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen

The night is calm; the streets quiet down;
Here lived a lass who was dear to me.
Long years ago she left the town,
Bu here is her house, as it used to be.

And here is a creature who stares into space
And wrings his hands in a storm of pain.
I shudder when I see his face:
It is my own self the moon shows plain.

You double! You comrade ghostly white!
Why have you come to ape the woe
That tortured me, night after night,
Under these windows - long ago?

Heinrich Heine, published in The Book of Songs (1827), tr. Aaron Kramer

A horrible moment of self-awareness? A memory, or an event? Does the poet see himself, or his double, in a vision, or in a reflection in a window? Is "a storm of pain" an adequate translation of "Schmerzensgewalt"? How could it be?

I'll spend the rest of the week with Heine. Maybe at some point I'll not only ask a question, but answer it.

***

A couple of thank yous, first to Nigel Beale at Nota Bene for hosting the Hamlet book chat last week. It was a great deal of fun for me, and I hope we can organize another one.

Second, thanks to the indefatigable, all-seeing Brontë blog, which linked to all of my Jane Eyre pieces last week. With any luck, I'll take a run at Wuthering Heights and Emily's poetry later in the year.