Yes! all is over. I must only say that to myself quite often, must bind my soul with it so that it remains calm, does not become heated in senseless, childish endeavors.
All is over; and even if I could weep now, beautiful divinity, as you once wept for Adonis, my Diotima will still not return to me, and my heart’s word has lost its power, for only the breezes hear me.
O god! and that I myself am nothing, and the most common manual worker can say that he has done more than I! that they may console themselves, the poor in spirit, and smile and chide me as a dreamer, because my deeds did not ripen for me, because my arms are not free, because my time is like the raging Procrustes, who cast the men whom he captured into a child’s cradle and, so that they would fit into the little bed, hacked off their limbs.
If only it were not too utterly hopeless to fling oneself into the foolish crowd and to be torn to shreds by it! or if only a noble blood need not be ashamed to mingle with the blood of slaves! O if there were a flag, gods! under which my Alabanda might serve, a Thermopylae where I could bleed it to death with honor, all the lonely love that I may never again use! Certainly it would be even better if I could live, live, and in the new temples, in the newly assembled agora of our people, allay the great sorrow with great pleasure; but I remain silent about that, for I only weep out my strength completely when I think of everything.
O Notara! with me, too, it is over; my own soul is spoiled for me because I must reproach it for Diotima’s death, and the thoughts of my youth that I regarded so highly mean nothing more to me. Did they not poison my Diotima!
And now tell me, where is there still a refuge? – Yesterday I was on top of Aetna. There the great Sicilian sprang to my mind who, weary of counting the hours, intimate with the soul of the world, in his bold love of life flung himself down into the glorious flames – for the cold poet had to warm himself by the fire, a mocker said later.
O how gladly would I have taken such mockery upon myself! but one must regard oneself more highly than I do to fly so unbidden to the heart of nature, or whatever else you may call it, for truly! as I am now, I have no name for things and all is uncertain to me.
Notara! and now tell me, where is there still refuge?
In Calaurea’s woods? – Yes! in the green darkness there, where our trees, the intimates of our love stand, where, like a red sunset, their dying foliage falls upon Diotima’s urn, and their beautiful crowns bend toward Diotima’s urn, gradually growing old until they, too, collapse over the beloved ashes – there, there I could well dwell as I wish.
But you advise me to stay away, believe that I am not safe in Calaurea, and that may be so.
I know well that you will send me to Alabanda. But only listen! he is shattered! even the firm, slender tree is weathered, and boys will gather up the slivers and make themselves a merry fire with them. He is gone; he has certain good friends who will alleviate things for him, who are peculiarly skilled at relieving anyone upon whom life lies somewhat heavily; he has gone to visit them, and why? because there is nothing else for him to do, or, if you want to know everything, because a passion gnaws at his heart, and do you know for whom? for Diotima, whom he believes to be still alive, wed to me and happy – poor Alabanda! now she belongs to you and me!
He traveled to the east and I, I take a ship to the northwest, because chance will have it so. –
And now farewell, all of you! all you dear ones who have lain near to my heart, friends of my youth, and you parents, and all you dear Greeks, you sufferers!
You breezes that nourished me in tender childhood, and you dark laurel woods, and you cliffs of the shore, and you majestic waters that taught my spirit to sense greatness – and O! you images of mourning, where my melancholy began, you holy walls with which the heroic cities are girded, and you ancient gates through which many beautiful wayfarers passed, you temple pillars and you rubble of the gods! and you, O Diotima! and you valleys of my love, and you brooks that once saw the blessed figure, you trees where she found joy, and you springtimes in which she lived, the fair maiden with the flowers, do not depart, do not depart from me! yet if it shall be, you sweet remembrances! then you expire too, and leave me, for man can change nothing, and the light of life comes and departs as it will.
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
So I came among the Germans. I did not demand much and was prepared to find even less. I came humbly, as the homeless, blind Oedipus to the gate of Athens where the sacred grove received him; and beautiful souls encountered him –
How differently it went for me!
Barbarians from time immemorial who have become more barbarous through diligence and science and even religion, profoundly incapable of any divine feeling, spoiled to the marrow for the happiness of the holy Graces, offensive to every good-natured soul in every degree of exaggeration and deficiency, dull and inharmonious, like the shards of a discarded vessel – these, my Bellarmin! were my consolers.
It is a harsh word, and yet I say it because it is the truth: I can think of no people more divided within itself than the Germans. You see artisans, but no men, thinkers, but no men, priests, but no men, masters and slaves, youths and adults, but no men – is this not like a battlefield on which hands and arms and all other limbs lie dismembered in heaps while the spilled life-blood seeps away in the sand?
Everyone pursues his own trade, you will say, and I say it too. Only he must pursue it with his whole soul, must not stifle every power in him that does not conform precisely to his title, must not, with this meager fear, literally and hypocritically be only what he is called; with earnestness, with love, he must be what he is, for thus a spirit lives in his deeds, and if he is pressed into a trade in which the spirit may not live, then let him thrust it away with contempt and learn to plow! But your Germans are content with the bare necessities, and that is why there is so much botched work among them and so little that is free and genuinely pleasing. Yet that could be suffered if only such men need not be so devoid of feeling for all beautiful life, if only the curse of godforsaken unnaturalness did not everywhere rest upon such a people. –
The virtues of the ancients are only glittering vices, an evil tongue, I know not which, once said; and yet their vices themselves are virtues, for a childlike, beautiful spirit still lived among them, and of all that they did, nothing was done without soul. But the virtues of the Germans are a glittering evil and nothing more; for they are only expedients, wrung with slavish effort from the barren heart out of cowardly fear, and they leave without consolation every pure soul that seeks its nourishment from the beautiful, O! that, spoiled by the holy harmony in nobler natures, cannot bear the discord screaming in all the dead order of these men.
I say to you: there is nothing holy that is not desecrated, not degraded to a meager makeshift among this people; and what usually preserves its divine purity even among savages, this, too, these all-calculating barbarians pursue as one pursues some trade, and cannot do otherwise, for where a human being is once trained, there he serves his purpose, there he seeks his profits, he is carried away by enthusiasm no more, god forbid! he remains staid, and when he celebrates and when he loves and when he prays and even when spring’s lovely festival, when the world’s time of reconciliation dissolves all concerns and conjures innocence into a guilty heart, when, intoxicated by the sun’s warm rays, the slave joyfully forgets his chains and, soothed by the divinely invigorated air, the enemies of man are peaceful as children – when even the caterpillars grow wings and the bees swarm, the German remains confined to his trade and does not concern himself much with the weather!
But you will pass judgment, holy nature! For if only they were humble, these men, did not make themselves the law for the better among them! if only they did not disparage what they are not, and yet let them disparage, if only they did not mock the divine! –
Or is it not divine, what you Germans mock and call soulless? Is not the air that you drink better than your chatter? are not the sun’s rays nobler tha
n all you shrewd men? the earth’s wellsprings and the morning dew refresh your grove; could you do that? O! you can kill, but cannot bring to life, not without love, which does not come from you, which you did not invent. You worry, and scheme to escape destiny, and do not comprehend when your childish art is no help; meanwhile, the stars move harmlessly above. You degrade, you destroy patient nature where she tolerates you, yet she lives on in infinite youth, and you cannot banish her autumn and her spring, you do not spoil her ether.
O she must be divine, because you may destroy and yet she does not grow old, and in spite of you the beautiful remains beautiful.
It is also heart-rending when one sees your poets, your artists, and all who still respect the genius, who love the beautiful and cultivate it. The good souls! They live in the world like strangers in their own house, they are like the patient sufferer Ulysses when he sat at his door in disguise as a beggar while the shameless suitors clamored in the hall and asked: Who brought us the vagabond?
Full of love and spirit and hope, its youths of the Muses grow up for the German people; one sees them seven years later and they wander like shades, silent and cold, are like soil that the enemy sows with salt so that it never sprouts a blade of grass; and when they speak, woe to him who understands them! who but sees, in their storming titanic strength as in their protean arts, the desperate battle that their troubled, beautiful spirit fights against the barbarians with whom it must deal.
Everything on earth is imperfect – that is the old song of the Germans. If only someone would once tell these godforsaken souls that everything is so imperfect among them only because they leave nothing pure uncorrupted, nothing holy untouched with their crude hands, that nothing thrives among them because they do not respect the root of thriving, divine nature, that life among them is stale and heavy with worries and overfull of cold, mute discord because they scorn the genius that brings strength and nobility into human deeds, and serenity into suffering, and love and brotherhood to the cities and houses.
And that is why they also fear death so much, and, for the sake of their life in a shell, suffer all disgrace, because they know nothing higher than the botched work that they have thrown together for themselves.
O Bellarmin! where a people loves the beautiful, where it honors the genius in its artists, there a common spirit wafts like the air of life, there the shy mind opens, self-importance dissolves, and all hearts are pious and great, and enthusiasm gives birth to heroes. The homeland of all men is among such a people, and the stranger may gladly linger there. But where divine nature and its artists are so insulted, O! there life’s best pleasure is gone, and every other star is better than the earth. There the men become ever more barren, more desolate, though they were all born beautiful; servility grows, with it impudence, intoxication grows with worries, and with plenty grow hunger and fear of famine; the blessing of every year becomes a curse, and all gods flee.
And woe to the stranger who wanders out of love and comes to such a people, and woe three times over to him who comes to such a people as I did, driven by great sorrow, a beggar of my kind! –
Enough! you know me, and will take this well, Bellarmin! I spoke in your name, too, I spoke for all who are in this land and suffer as I suffered there.
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
I now wanted to leave Germany. I sought nothing more among this people, I had been sufficiently stung by unrelenting affronts, did not want my soul to bleed to death among such men.
But the heavenly spring held me back; it was the sole joy that remained to me, it was my last love, how could I still think of other things, and leave the land where the spring, too, was? I had never experienced so fully that old, steadfast word of fate, that a new bliss rises in the heart when it endures and suffers through the midnight of grief, and that, like the nightingale’s song in the darkness, the world’s song of life first divinely sounds for us in deep suffering. For I now lived with the blooming trees as with Genii, and the clear brooks that flowed under them murmured the sorrow out of my bosom like divine voices. And this befell me everywhere, you dear man! – when I reposed in the grass and tender life grew green around me, when I climbed up the warm hill where the rose grew wild about the stone path, and when I boated along the river’s shore and around all the breezy islands that the river tenderly nurtures.
And when I often climbed in the morning to the summit of the mountain as the sick climb to the mineral spring, making my way through the sleeping flowers, but beside me, sated with sweet slumber, the dear birds flew out of the bush, reeling in the half-light and eager for the day, and the more lively air now bore upward the prayers of the valleys, the voices of the herds and the tones of the morning bells, and now the high light, the divinely clear light, came on the usual path, enchanting the earth with immortal life so that its heart warmed and all its children felt themselves again – O like the moon that still remained in the heavens to share the pleasure of the day, thus I stood, solitary too, above the plains, and wept tears of love down to the shores and the shining waters, and for a long time could not avert my eye.
Or in the evening when I strayed far into the valley to the cradle of the wellspring where the dark oak crowns rustled around me, and nature buried me in her peace like a holy dying man, when the earth was now a shadow, and invisible life whispered through the branches, through the peaks, and the evening cloud stood still above the peaks, a shining mountain from which heaven’s rays poured down to me like brooks to quench the wayfarer’s thirst.
O sun, O you breezes, I cried, by you alone my heart still lives, as among brothers!
Thus I surrendered myself more and more to blessed nature, and almost too endlessly. I would have so gladly become a child so as to be nearer to her, I would have so gladly known less and become like the pure ray of light so as to be nearer to her! O to feel myself for an instant in her peace, in her beauty, how much more that meant to me than years full of thoughts, than all attempts of all-attempting men! Like ice, what I had learned, what I had done in life melted away, and all projects of youth died away in me; and O you dear ones who are distant, you dead and you living, how intimately one we were!
Once I sat deep in the countryside by a fountain in the shadow of ivy-green cliffs and overhanging, blooming bushes. It was the most beautiful midday that I have known. Sweet breezes wafted, and the land still shone in morning freshness, and the light smiled serenely in its native ether. The men had gone home to rest at the household table from work; my love was alone with the springtime, and an unfathomable longing was in me. Diotima, I cried, where are you, O where are you? And I felt as if I heard Diotima’s voice, the voice that once cheered me in the days of joy –
I am with mine, she cried, with yours, with those that the errant human spirit does not recognize!
A gentle terror seized me and my thought fell asleep in me.
O dear word from holy mouth, I cried, when I had again awakened, dear riddle, do I grasp you?
And one more time I looked back into the cold night of men and shuddered and wept with joy that I was so blessed, and I spoke words, I think, but they were like the roar of fire when it flies up and leaves the ashes behind –
“O you,” so I thought, “with your gods, nature! I have dreamed it out, the dream of human things, and say: only you live, and what those without peace have compelled and conceived melts away from your flames like beads of wax!
How long have they dispensed with you? O how long has their crowd chastised you, called you and your gods common, your living, blessedly serene gods!
Men fall like rotten fruit from you, O let them perish, for thus they return to your root, and so shall I, O tree of life, so that I may again grow green with you, and breathe amidst your crown with all your budding branches! peacefully and profoundly, for we all sprouted up from the golden seed!
You wellsprings of the earth! you flowers! and you woods and you eagles and you brotherly light! how old and new is our love! – We are free, do not st
rive anxiously to be outwardly alike; how should the mode of life not vary? yet we all love the ether, and in the deepest recesses of our innermost being we are equal.
We too, we too, are not separated, Diotima, and the tears for you do not understand it. We are living tones, we harmonize in your euphony, nature! who rends it asunder? who may part lovers? –
O soul! soul! Beauty of the world! you indestructible, enchanting beauty! with your eternal youth! you are; what, then, is death and all the woe of men? – O! many empty words have been uttered by the strange beings. Yet all ensues from pleasure, and all ends with peace.
The dissonances of the world are like lovers’ strife. In the midst of the quarrel is reconciliation, and all that is separated comes together again.
The arteries part and return in the heart, and all is one eternal, glowing life.”
So I thought. More soon.
TRANSLATOR’S POSTSCRIPT
For over a century after his first works were published in the 1790s, Friedrich Hölderlin was little known. Though Hegel and Schelling, his fellow students and friends at the Lutheran theological seminary in Tübingen, perceived his genius, and Schiller helped launch his literary career, Hölderlin remained largely in obscurity throughout the nineteenth century. The limited attention he did receive was due mostly to fascination surrounding his mental breakdown, or Umnachtung, as his derangement was typically called in German. This expression, which literally means “benightedness,” evokes a soul overtaken by nocturnal darkness. Hölderlin’s condition, which confined him to a tower in Tübingen from 1807 until his death in 1843, conferred upon him the mythical appeal of the “mad poet.” Undoubtedly, this reputation eclipsed his work and its significance. Among the few to convey a deeper appreciation of his poetic power was Nietzsche, who lamented in a letter of 1861 that his “favorite poet” was scarcely recognized. In 1913, when the young German scholar Norbert von Hellingrath published the first volume of a critical edition of Hölderlin’s works, the poet’s prominence began to grow. Ultimately, he became widely regarded as a major figure in German literature and a unique poetic voice of the modern age, a writer who had been so out of step with his own time because he truly belonged to future eras.
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