Sehnsucht (Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt), D 310, D 359, D 481, D 656, D 877/1, D 877/4

Longing

(Poet's title: Sehnsucht)

Part of  Goethe: The second collection intended for Goethe  Goethe: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 

All translations into English that appear on this website, unless otherwise stated, are by Malcolm Wren. You are free to use them on condition that you acknowledge Malcolm Wren as the translator and schubertsong.uk as the source. Unless otherwise stated, the comments and essays that appear after the texts and translations are by Malcolm Wren and are © Copyright.

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This famous text is part of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Wilhelm is inspecting the handwriting of a letter from a woman when he falls into a reverie and hears two voices singing:

Er verfiehl in eine träumende Sehnsucht, und wie einstimmend mit seinem Empfindungen war das Lied, das eben an dieser Stunde Mignon und der Harfner als ein unregelmäßiges Duett mit dem herzlichsten Ausdrucke sangen.

He fell into a dreaming longing, and as if conforming to his emotions there came a song which at that very moment Mignon and the Harper sang as an irregular duet with the most heartfelt of expressions.

Although some composers (including Schubert in D877/1: ‘Mignon und der Harfner‘) have indeed set the lyric as a duet, most people have responded to it as an isolated voice, the cry of someone who is totally ‘cut off’. The paradox is that readers and listeners (even Wilhelm, in the novel, who simply overhears the song) cannot avoid identifying with these sentiments. Since only someone who is familiar with longing can understand the speaker, the listener instinctively responds as just such a person: we feel that this is our voice too. We know how s/he feels.

There are different types of ‘knowing’, of course, and these are partly reflected in the difference between the verbs ‘kennen’ (usually to know a person, or a place, to be on familiar terms with something or someone) and ‘wissen’ (to know a fact, to be aware of something) [Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt weiß was ich leide]. There is someone saying, “I know how you feel”, which could be a sort of instinctive sensitivity or emotional intelligence (though in all too many cases this might be just a formulaic platitude reflecting an inability to be fully open to what the other person is suffering). We think we know, but we need to know ourselves well enough to be aware that we might be deluding ourselves and allowing our own instincts for sympathy to get in the way of really understanding the other person.

So, if you haven’t experienced it, you can’t know what ‘Sehnsucht’ is like. The problem is, how do we know if we mean the same thing by the term? All the reference books and relevant websites tell us that ‘longing’ or ‘yearning’ are not fully satisfactory translations of the word ‘Sehnsucht’. It is never just about unrequited love (though sufferers from that condition might fairly ask, “What do you mean ‘just’?”); it is an awareness of a lack at the deepest level of our being. There is a sort of homesickness or nostalgia for a condition that never existed (or never could exist), yet is based on a fundamental conviction that we belong in that other place (and / or time). In the context of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre we can read the lyric as a summary of Mignon’s own frustrations. This is a character who is uncertain about his / her own origins (she is not aware that the Harper singing along with her is her father and that her mother, unknown to him, was his, the harper’s, sister), though she knows that she was abducted from her homeland when very young. S/he is also uncertain about her / his gender identity (and like so many people who are uncomfortable with normative heterosexuality and binary gender roles, s/he found some sort of solace or protection when performing as part of a theatre company). As the poem puts it, s/he is ‘alone and cut off from all joy’.

We surely don’t need to have had Mignon’s experiences to be familiar with what that is like. Knowing that the object of our desire is far off, or has left forever (or is totally unattainable), doesn’t prevent us from ‘looking into space’ (‘I look up into the firmament’) hoping to make a connection (this of course includes cyberspace nowadays, as we keep looking ‘in jene Seite’ – in a particular direction, at a particular site). We ensure that we are perpetually conscious of the absence, of our loss and yearning.

This can have extreme physical and psychological effects. The sense of self might give way and we become unbalanced and disorientated: ‘Es schwindelt mir’. This is another difficult phrase to translate into English: ‘I feel dizzy’ or ‘I suffer from vertigo’ take us some way towards what is being denoted, but the English subject + verb structure (‘I feel’ or ‘I suffer’) fails to capture the impersonality of the German, literally ‘there is dizziness to me’ or ‘there is a sense of vertigo for me’. Perhaps the term ‘labyrinthitis’ comes closer: an inner disturbance (in the labyrinth of the inner ear, as well as in the speaker’s psyche itself) is being manifested as confusion in the external world (the distinction between the self and the world seems to have been undermined).

‘Es brennt mein Eingeweide’ is a shockingly physical (literally ‘visceral’) expression of this psychological state of collapse. ‘There is burning deep inside me’ is probably too euphemistic as a translation, but some of the alternatives seem odd. ‘My internal organs are inflamed’ sounds inappropriately medical; we cannot really render it as ‘my guts are on fire’, since we might simply give the impression that Mignon has eaten a hot curry. ‘My abdominal organs are burning up’ is probably fairly close to the intended meaning, but we should also remember that Goethe probably intended his readers to make a connection between the word ‘Eingeweide’ (viscera) and the practice of soothsaying in Roman culture. It was the job of the priests to read the auguries, often by inspecting the abdominal organs of sacrificial beasts and birds. We are therefore being invited to think of Mignon seeing herself as a sacrificial victim, and her inflamed organs as some sort of omen or portent.

Do we know how she feels?

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Original Spelling

Sehnsucht

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Weiß, was ich leide!
Allein und abgetrennt
Von aller Freude,
Seh ich ans Firmament
Nach jener Seite.
Ach! der mich liebt und kennt
Ist in der Weite.
Es schwindelt mir, es brennt
Mein Eingeweide.
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Weiß, was ich leide!

Confirmed by Peter Rastl with Schubert’s source, Goethe’s Werke. Zweyter Band. Original-Ausgabe. Wien, 1816. Bey Chr. Kaulfuß und C. Armbruster. Stuttgart. In der J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung. Gedruckt bey Anton Strauß page 128; with Goethe’s Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand. Zweyter Band. Stuttgart und Tübingen, in der J.G.Cotta’schen Buchhandlung. 1827, page 118; and with Goethe’s Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand. Neunzehnter Band. Stuttgart und Tübingen, in der J.G.Cotta’schen Buchhandlung. 1828, page 67.

First published in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Ein Roman. Herausgegeben von Goethe. Zweyter Band. Berlin. Bei Johann Friedrich Unger. 1795, pages 265-266. The poem appears in Book 4, Chapter 11 of Goethe’s novel.

To see an early edition of the text, go to page 128 [136 von 350] here: http://digital.onb.ac.at/OnbViewer/viewer.faces?doc=ABO_%2BZ223421905

Carlyle’s English translation of Wilhelm Meister is available online at http://www.bartleby.com/314/411.html