Narrow and wide

Karl Wenzel Zajicek, Kärtnertortheater
Karl Wenzel Zajicek, Kärtnertortheater

When Goethe attended a musical evening in Jena one evening in 1795 he heard a song by his friend Zelter. He clearly enjoyed the music but felt that he could improve on the words (by Friedricke Brun). He therefore proceeded to change Brun’s text, but retained the metre so that the new words could be sung to Zelter’s music. Brun’s first two verses were as follows:


Ich denke dein, wenn sich im Blüthenregen
  Der Frühling malt,
Und wenn des Sommers mild gereifter Segen
  In Ähren strahlt.

Ich denke dein, wenn sich das Weltmeer tönend
  Gen Himmel hebt,
Und vor der Wogen Wuth das Ufer stöhnend
  Zurücke bebt.

I think of you when in showers of blossom
Spring is depicted,
And when the gently ripened blessing of summer
Shines in the ears of corn.

I think of you when the resonant ocean
Rises up towards the sky,
And before the rage of the waves the shore staggers 
Backwards groaning.

Friedericke Brun, Ich denke dein

Goethe’s simplified version even managed to keep the original rhymes (strahlt / malt; hebt / bebt) of lines 2 and 4 of each verse whilst transforming the meaning totally.


Ich denke dein, wenn mir der Sonne Schimmer
Vom Meere strahlt;
Ich denke dein, wenn sich des Mondes Flimmer
In Quellen malt.

Ich sehe dich, wenn auf dem fernen Wege
Der Staub sich hebt,
In tiefer Nacht, wenn auf dem schmalen Stege
Der Wandrer bebt.

I think of you when I see the sun gleaming up at me,
Shining from the sea;
I think of you when the flickering of the moon 
Is reflected in fountains.

I see you, when, on distant paths
The dust rises up;
In the depths of the night, when on the narrow footbridge
The traveller trembles.

Goethe, Nähe des Geliebten D 162

The image of a traveller crossing a narrow footbridge echoes the work of Goethe the poet. He has set himself the challenge of writing within a pre-established structure yet he uses this very restriction to channel powerful sincerity. The constrained poet uses this ‘narrow bridge’ of verse to convey broad-mindedness and openness.

A few years later, in 1810, August Schlegel wrote Die gefangenen Sänger (The imprisoned singers), in which he explicitly comments on how such narrow restrictions can open up the mind. He uses the image of caged birds, whose songs emerge as a result of their confinement, allowing them to enter sympathetically into the life of other birds who are living in the open. Towards the end of the text Schlegel explains that poetry itself is an attempt to use confinement to ‘expand existence’, to open up our sensitivity. In the final stanza he insists that any poem produced in this way needs to channel both pain and joy, the full range of human experience. The greater the restriction, the broader the sympathy.


Hörst du von den Nachtigallen
Die Gebüsche wiederhallen?
Sieh, es kam der holde Mai.
Jedes buhlt um seine Traute,
Schmelzend sagen alle Laute,
Welche Wonn' im Lieben sei.

Andre, die im Käfig leben
Hinter ihren Gitterstäben,
Hören draußen den Gesang,
Möchten in die Freiheit eilen,
Frühlingslust und Liebe teilen,
Ach! da hemmt sie enger Zwang.

Und nun drängt sich in die Kehle
Aus der gramzerrissnen Seele
Schmetternd ihres Lieds Gewalt,
Wo es, statt im Wehn der Haine
Mit zu wallen, an der Steine
Hartem Bau zurücke prallt.

So im Erdental gefangen
Hört des Menschen Geist mit Bangen
Hehrer Brüder Melodie,
Sucht umsonst zu Himmelsheitern
Dieses Dasein zu erweitern,
Und das nennt er Poesie.

Aber scheint er ihre Rhythmen
Jubelhymnen auch zu widm
Wie aus lebenstrunkner Brust,
Dennoch fühlen's zarte Herzen,
Aus der Wurzel tiefer Schmerzen
Stammt die Blüte seiner Lust.

Can you hear the nightingales' song
Echoing in the bushes?
Look, beauteous May has arrived.
They are all showing affection for their companions,
All the sounds meltingly declare
What happiness it is to be in love.

Others, who live in cages,
Behind the bars that fence them off
Can hear the singing outside;
They would like to hurry into freedom
To share in the pleasure of spring and love:
Oh, they are hemmed in by such narrow constraints there! 

And now filling the throat 
Out of a soul torn apart by grief,
The weight of its song wells up
But then, rather than flying into the swaying woods
To join in the undulating song, it hits the stone
Of a solid building and bounces back.

Similarly, imprisoned in this earthly valley,
The human spirit listens with anxiety to
The lofty melody of our brothers;
In vain he attempts to seek the cheerfulness of heaven
By expanding this existence,
And that is what he calls poetry.

But if he appears to use these rhythms
In the service of hymns of jubilation too,
As if from a breast that is drunk with life,
Then tender hearts will feel that
From out of the roots of deep pain
The blossoms of his delight will grow.

A. W. Schlegel, Die gefangenen Sänger  D 712

It is surely no coincidence that August Schlegel’s greatest skill as a poet was in his work as a translator. In making wonderfully accurate and powerful German versions of Shakespeare’s plays and Petrarch’s Sonnets (amongst other things), he knew what it was to cross Goethe’s ‘narrow footbridge’. Any poet has to use the constraints of form (metre, rhyme, verse structure etc) to channel diffuse thoughts and feelings, but a translator needs to add an extra level of restriction (the pre-existing text and all of its explicit meanings and less-explicit connotations) in order to produce a successful text. William Shakespeare himself (or at least his character Theseus) wondered at this paradox:


Hippolyta
Was diese Liebenden erzählen, mein Gemahl,
Ist wundervoll.

Theseus
Mehr wundervoll als wahr.
Ich glaubte nie an diese Feenpossen
Und Fabelein. Verliebte und Verrückte
Sind beide von so brausendem Gehirn,
So bildungsreicher Phantasie, die wahrnimmt,
Was nie die kühlere Vernunft begreift.
Wahnwitzige, Poeten und Verliebte
Bestehn aus Einbildung. Der eine sieht
Mehr Teufel, als die weite Hölle faßt:
Der Tolle nämlich; der Verliebte sieht,
Nicht minder irr, die Schönheit Helenas
Auf einer äthiopisch braunen Stirn.
Des Dichters Aug, in schönem Wahnsinn rollend,
Blitzt auf zum Himmel, blitzt zur Erd hinab,
Und wie die schwangre Phantasie Gebilde
Von unbekannten Dingen ausgebiert,
Gestaltet sie des Dichters Kiel, benennt
Das luftge Nichts und gibt ihm festen Wohnsitz.
So gaukelt die gewaltge Einbildung;
Empfindet sie nur irgend eine Freude,
Sie ahnet einen Bringer dieser Freude;
Und in der Nacht, wenn uns ein Graun befällt,
Wie leicht, daß man den Busch für einen Bären hält!

Hippolyta
Doch diese ganze Nachtbegebenheit
Und ihrer aller Sinn, zugleich verwandelt,
Bezeugen mehr als Spiel der Einbildung:
Es wird daraus ein Ganzes voll Bestand,
Doch seltsam immer noch und wundervoll.

From A. W. Schlegel's first Shakespeare translation, Ein Sommernachtstraum 1789


HIPPOLYTA 
 ’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.

THESEUS 
 More strange than true. I never may believe
 These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
 Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
 Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
 More than cool reason ever comprehends.
 The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
 Are of imagination all compact.
 One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
 That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
 Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
 The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
 Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven,
 And as imagination bodies forth
 The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
 Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
 A local habitation and a name.
 Such tricks hath strong imagination
 That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
 It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
 Or in the night, imagining some fear,
 How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

HIPPOLYTA 
 But all the story of the night told over,
 And all their minds transfigured so together,
 More witnesseth than fancy’s images
 And grows to something of great constancy,
 But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 5 Scene 1

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