Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  Him whom most they had loved, lost, though with joy he drowned;

  Often a virgin will bear his

  Kindly song in the distant boughs.

  The metre is asclepiadic, an intricate pattern of iambs and dactyls broken by caesurae in the longer first two lines of each four-line strophe. Hamburger renders Hölderlin’s versification faithfully, and although one might quibble with certain word choices (‘flimsy’ might be replaced with ‘light-bodied’, for instance, and ‘grows dim’ would be better than ‘turns blue’), the musical effect he achieves in English is ravishing, capturing exactly the tone of hope, tentative yet vibrant, with which Hölderlin confronts defeat, a tone that characterizes both his grasp of his vocation and his vision of history.

  ‘If I had not … found it necessary to imitate Hölderlin’s metres … then many of my translations would have become smoother and more acceptable to English ears,’ writes Hamburger.29 He is scathing about what he sees as the unadventurousness of English prosody – its prejudice against classical metres and its unthinking preference for the iamb. At the risk of seeming ‘pedestrian and pedantic’ he takes it upon himself ‘to reproduce even those peculiarities of [Hölderlin’s] diction, form and way of thinking which are alien both to myself and to English conventions obtaining either in his time or in ours’. His method works, he believes, as long as the English reader is prepared to approach his renderings ‘as poems necessarily different from any written in [the reader’s] own language, in his own time’.30

  The peculiarities of diction and form that Hamburger alludes to are not just Hölderlin’s use of Greek metres but his practice of varying poetic diction in accord with a system of ‘tonal modulation’ that he developed out of hints in Schiller and outlined in a cryptic essay entitled ‘Wechsel der Töne’. Hamburger is one of only two translators of Hölderlin who, to my knowledge, have taken the system to heart seriously enough to embody it in their own versions (Cyrus Hamlin is the other).

  The sternest test comes in Hölderlin’s late poems, where the music becomes more impetuous and the poetic logic – hinging on conjunctions (denn, aber, nemlich) used as if they were Greek rather than German – more enigmatic, and where lines of verse are interspersed with what read like memos from the poet to himself (‘This river seems / to travel backwards and / I think it must come from the East,’ he writes of the Danube. ‘Much could / Be said about this’). (p. 583) Here Hamburger’s determination to avoid building his own interpretation into the poem issues sometimes in a lifeless literalism. Compare the following two translations of a passage from Hölderlin’s poem on the Danube. The first is by Hamburger, the second by Richard Sieburth.

  But here we wish to build.

  For rivers make arable

  The land. For when herbs are growing

  And to the same in summer

  The animals go to drink,

  There too will human kind go.

  This one, however, is called the Ister.

  Beautifully he dwells. The pillars’ foliage burns,

  And stirs. Wildly they stand

  Supporting one another; above,

  A second measure, juts out

  The roof of rocks. (p. 581)

  Let us settle here.

  For the rivers make the land

  Arable. If there be vegetation

  And animals come to water

  At the banks in summer,

  Here men will also go.

  And they call this the Ister,

  Beautiful his dwelling. Leaves on columns

  Burn and quiver. They stand in the wild,

  Rising among each other; above which

  Surges a second mass,

  The roofing of rock.31

  The words ‘build’, ‘herbs’, ‘dwells’ in Hamburger’s version literally translate the wording of the original. ‘Beautifully he dwells’ sounds as odd in German as in English (it is in fact a Graecism). Sieburth, on the other hand, sees no harm in nudging words until they sit more comfortably in English or clarify the logic of the passage. Thus ‘herbs’ becomes ‘foliage’, ‘build’ becomes ‘settle’.

  The divergence of approach between the two translators becomes more pointed in the image with which the passage closes. The last three lines clearly refer to rocky crags above the tree level of the valley floor. Sieburth feels free to write ‘a second mass / The roofing of rock’, even though Hölderlin’s word Maß (‘Ein zweites Maß … / Von Felsen das Dach’) means ‘measure’ rather than ‘mass’. Hamburger, perhaps because Maß is such a key term in Hölderlin (not only the measure of verse but the Greeks as a measure of ourselves), cautiously retains the sense of measure, plane, dimension, and thus comes up with a less vivid rendering.

  It is an open question whether Hamburger’s lifelong project was wisely planned – the project of translating into English a body of work whose textual foundation would grow less and less steady over the years, reproducing as far as possible its metrical patterning and play of levels of language. Hamburger seems not to have doubted himself, though the prefaces to succeeding editions betray an increasing defensiveness. There are signs that he does not welcome criticism: errors identified by Paul de Man in his versions of ‘Bread and Wine’ and ‘The Rhine’ were left untouched. Perhaps with the Nazi appropriation of Hölderlin at the back of his mind, he tends to treat words like Vaterland and Volk more gingerly than is necessary, in places translating Volk as ‘kin’ and Vaterland as ‘my country’ or ‘our country’. (pp. 261, 333)

  Hamburger’s achievement is nevertheless considerable. The 2004 edition of Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments contains about 170 poems, some in alternative versions, plus The Death of Empedocles in its second and third drafts, plus the so-called Pindar fragments – in other words, the bulk of Hölderlin’s surviving verse, including all the major poems of the years 1800–6. Empedocles is particularly well rendered; as for the poems, though Hamburger’s versions prove only intermittently to be touched with divine fire, they are a reliable guide to Hölderlin’s German and give an echo of his outlandish music.

  7. Heinrich von Kleist: Two Stories

  Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas, the son of a schoolmaster, one of the most fair-minded and at the same time one of the most terrible men of his day … The world … would have had every reason to bless his memory, if he had not carried one virtue to excess. But his sense of justice turned him into a brigand and a murderer.1

  Thus opens Heinrich von Kleist’s story ‘Michael Kohlhaas’. First drafted in 1804, it was given its final form in 1810; in one of many revisions Kleist changes the words describing Kohlhaas from ‘extraordinary and fearsome’ (ausserordentlich, fürchterlich) to ‘fair-minded [fair in his dealings] and at the same time terrible’ (rechtschaffen, entsetzlich). And indeed, the whole story turns on this paradox. The inborn sense which tells Kohlhaas what is just and what is unjust at the same time fortifies him against self-doubt and thus makes him a ruthless avenger of the wrong that has been done to him.

  The story opens with the fatal event that will turn Kohlhaas from a man of peace into an insurrectionist. A baron, Junker Wentzel von Tronka, sets up an unauthorized toll gate on the road into Saxony and extorts a pair of horses from the trader. Tronka’s men proceed to work the horses almost to death; when Kohlhaas’s groom tries to intervene he is mercilessly beaten.

  In his quest for redress for the lost horses Kohlhaas scrupulously follows legal channels until he has to face the fact that the administration of the law is in thrall to political forces beyond his influence. Kohlhaas is not a political animal; nor, as a member of the merchant class, is he in a position to assert himself against the big landowners. He is more at home in the sphere of pure justice, where his inner voice can guide his actions. This inner voice tells him to take up arms. As he explains to his wife, and later to Martin Luther, if he has no legal rights then he is in effect an outlaw, outside so
ciety and free to declare war on it.

  Kohlhaas takes to an extreme the Protestant notion that the individual conscience provides direct access to God. Since God is not a presence in Kleist’s fictional universe, we are left, in the case of Kohlhaas, to follow the ways in which an uninterrogated sense of rightness works itself out in the human sphere. Kohlhaas assembles a band of malcontents and, in the cause of getting redress for his grievance, terrorizes the Saxon countryside, setting fire to the cities of Wittenberg and Dresden. From the seat of the ‘provisional world government’ that he sets up in a captured castle he begins to issue decrees. At first the authorities treat his activities as mere brigandry, but as he attracts more and more supporters they recognize that he threatens to set off a popular uprising.

  In the end, effective justice in the earthly sense arrives in the person of the Elector of Brandenburg, who rules that Kohlhaas shall have his horses restored to him in their original condition and that the Junker who took them shall be punished. But he also rules that for his rebellion Kohlhaas must pay the ultimate price. It is a ruling that Kohlhaas, servant of justice, accepts without demur, baring his neck to the executioner’s blow.

  ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ was one of eight pieces of fiction that Kleist published in the course of his lifetime. He called it an Erzählung, a story, but nowadays we would call it a novella, that is to say, a work of medium length with a single action and a single main character, focused on a single topic. It is not hard to imagine ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ expanded to double its present length, with the circle of personages around the horse dealer more fully characterized and more space being given to the social matrix out of which Kohlhaas emerges as well as to the detail of his depredations – in other words, to imagine ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ as a novel, more expansive in its style than the highly condensed novella Kleist wrote.

  But expansiveness is not a Kleistian virtue. For his fiction Kleist developed a prose style that is uniquely his own, succinct and fast-moving. In Thomas Mann’s words, his prose is ‘hard as steel yet impetuous, totally matter-of-fact yet contorted, twisted, surcharged with matter’.2 The forward drive never relents; there is no time for physical description (thus we have little idea of what the personages in his stories look like) or for scene-setting; the focus is always on what happens.

  This condensed mode of narration derives in part from Kleist’s experience writing for newspapers, in part from his theatrical practice. A story by Kleist reads like a taut synopsis of an action that has recently taken place under the storyteller’s gaze. The final effect is of intense immediacy. In an essay entitled ‘On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts while Speaking’ Kleist questions the notion that the sentences we speak are encodings in words of thoughts we have formulated in our minds. Rather, he suggests, thought takes form in a continuous back-and-forth process as the word-stream unrolls itself. The essay helps us to pin down a paradoxical quality of Kleist’s narrative prose: the scene is captured in language of steely precision, yet at the same time it seems to be constructing itself before our eyes.3

  Kleist was born in 1777 and died on 21 November 1811, aged thirty-four, by his own hand. Although unhappy relations with his family, penuriousness, despair at the course of national affairs, and loss of confidence in his art all played a role, his suicide was ultimately a philosophical act: an expression of the autonomy of the self.

  The facts of Kleist’s brief life are as follows. He was born into a distinguished military family and designated for a military career. At the age of fourteen he was taken up as an ensign into a Prussian army regiment. After seven years he quit, sick and tired of the brutality of army life. To his family he explained that he needed to study. While nominally preparing for a career in the civil service, he travelled widely before abandoning his studies for an uncertain career as a writer. Along the way the foundations of his world view, inherited from the Enlightenment, were shaken by his encounter with the new sceptical philosophy of Hume and Kant.

  He went on to write plays, some of which were staged; he edited an ambitious review of the arts, which collapsed after twelve issues; he edited and wrote for a newspaper, which also failed; he published stories. In all these pursuits he depended on the generosity of his family and of the Prussian state (he himself had no head for money). His family – even his half-sister, to whom he was close – grew more and more reluctant to deal with him. After his scandalous end – which they regarded as a blot on the family name – they destroyed all letters from him that reflected unfavourably on them.

  As for his intimate life, Kleist had a lengthy engagement to a young woman from his family circle. His letters (hers have not survived) provide no evidence of any passionate feeling between the two; indeed we have no record of any passionate relations at all in his life, though he had many women friends and though he put an end to himself in a suicide pact with a woman suffering from terminal cancer.

  Kleist lived his whole adult life in the shadow of Napoleon Bonaparte’s grand plan to redraw the map of Europe and impose French models of administration on its peoples. He conceived a passionate hatred for Napoleon, looking forward to the day when someone would put a bullet through his head.

  At the time of Kleist’s suicide Prussia was in effect a vassal state of France. The military defeat at Jena in 1806, when Prussian troops turned and fled from the French advance, had caused him deep shame. His pride suffered a further blow when the newspaper he edited in Berlin was emasculated by Prussian censors fearful of antagonizing their new French masters. He flirted with anti-French resistance groups and wrote a fiercely nationalistic play, Die Herrmannsschlacht, in which he proposed that Prussians should follow the example of the ancient Germani and take up arms against the invader (the play was not staged in his lifetime). He floated the idea of a patriotic pan-German paper, Germania, to be published out of Vienna (the scheme never came to fruition).

  Although Kleist’s stories are today regarded at least as highly as his plays, he himself thought prose fiction an inferior art. He took up fiction-writing only to fill the pages of the journal he was editing; according to friends, he felt humiliated by the step down. Nonetheless, his stories are carefully crafted and, in their structure, anything but simple. As a general rule, the narration is carried out by a more or less invisible or buried narrator whose interpretation of the action he relays is not necessarily to be taken as final. Thus – to give a simple example – the narrator of ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ at one point condemns Kohlhaas for the ‘diseased and deluded fanaticism’ of his manifestoes, forgetting that, as he has elsewhere observed, fanaticism is merely the obverse of a passion for justice. (p. 143) In truth, there is no solid ground in Kleist’s stories, no ultimate place where we as readers can take a stand and be sure of ourselves.

  The early Kleist, as we get to know him from his letters, was a singularly complacent young man. From his reading of Rousseau and the philosophes he got the idea of drawing up a life-plan (Lebensplan) to cover not only his own education (Bildung) but the education, under his tutelage, of his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge. Guided by such a plan, he told her, they could live lives of ideal consistency and coherence.

  If Kleist had succeeded in his aim – in planning and then executing a life-project dedicated to the pursuit of virtue by the light of reason – he would not be the writer we know. What happened to derail the well-planned life he envisaged was that he had to confront face to face the epistemological revolution wrought by Immanuel Kant, namely that final knowledge, not only of the world outside oneself but of oneself, is unattainable since what is knowable is constrained and conditioned by inbuilt faculties of the mind.

  Yet the so-called ‘Kant crisis’ of 1801, which undermined the very idea of a rational Lebensplan, is only a shorthand way of speaking about a much more complex change of course in Kleist’s life, whose causes are only partially visible to us but whose effect was to liberate him from the unpromising persona into which he was busy locking himself and to turn him into one of the
great questioning spirits of the age, a writer who used his art as a crucible in which to test the model of Man proposed by the Enlightenment.

  The people we encounter in Kleist’s mature work are torn between competing forces and impulses. The same is true of Kleist himself. Thus it has proved difficult to pin down his politics. In the 1930s he was embraced by the Nazis as an enemy of liberalism and a Prussian patriot. In our day, by contrast, he has been read as a radical critic of the aristocracy. The truth is that the mature Kleist is sceptical of all systems, indeed of the systematizing spirit that underlies the Lebensplan project; yet at the same time he does not wholly lose touch with his youthful enthusiasm for reason, clarity, and order. It is thus not surprising that he has proved too elusive (or too inconsistent) to be stuffed into any particular ideological box.

  Where Kleist got his story of the woman who gets pregnant without remembering how it happened is not known for sure: perhaps from Montaigne, perhaps from a Berlin newspaper. More important is what he did to his source, namely to translate it from its original low social context, in which it could be read as no more than a risqué comic anecdote, to a more elevated social context, a step that made its reception much more problematic. ‘Even to summarize the plot is to ostracize oneself from polite society,’ wrote a disapproving reviewer.4

  The scandalous plot concerns a widowed noblewoman of spotless reputation, the Marquise of O-, who finds herself inexplicably pregnant. Thrown out of the family home by her parents, she puts an advertisement in a newspaper asking the father of her child to come forward, promising him her hand. On the appointed day a man appears: a Russian count who happened to have an opportunity to rape her while she was in a dead faint, and who has subsequently fallen in love with her. With an unwilling heart, but faithful to her promise, she marries him.