Love and merciless longing are the true mothers of art.
—Hermann Hesse, “A View of Italy”
Throughout the seasons of his life as a poet, Hermann Hesse had the courage to accept all his feelings—what he loved and what he longed for—as the drivers of his art. Hesse’s poetry is transformative. His quiet voice and simple observations of the world transform complex feelings into artifacts radiant with basic humanity.
Hesse’s transformative moments often appear in poems about the natural world: “And as I climbed the mountain in the rarefied air / above the clouds, my life came toward me.”1 Insight appears in poems about artistic performance: “A flautist stands and plays.… / The secret meaning of the world / in his breath was revealed.”2 Poems about the seasons evoke deep feelings: “And as the flowers die / so do we die, / only a death of redemption / only a death of rebirth.”3 Even poems about mixed emotions are transformational: “Out of dulled pain and ecstatic joy / my will has become cold and clear.”4 Transformations occur in poems about his studies, such as his reading of Thomas Aquinus: “Everything appears illuminated, Nature imbued with Spirit, / humans descending from divine and reascending.”5
The darker tones in Hesse’s poems depict lifelong feelings of alienation, depression, nostalgia for childhood, and a longing for his mother, his home, and simple religious faith. Like Homer’s Odysseus, homesickness drove Hesse to travel. Like Odysseus, Hesse found little satisfaction in his contemporary world. He lived through two world wars, and his days were plagued by sciatica and acute eye pain. Being a lone wolf, Hesse found marriage and domestic relations burdensome, and because he lived in Switzerland, Hesse’s relations with his German-speaking public were often awkward.
Some poems record how Hesse turned to friendships, wine, women, myths of the heroic past, dreams, thoughts of death and resurrection, and above all to nature, for consolation. However, Hesse’s poetic process goes beyond consolation. In the poems, transformation of the raw details of Hesse’s suffering take place in the presence of a spontaneous hopefulness, the sheer energy of which is transmitted through the poem to the reader. Where does this hopefulness come from? From Hesse’s own constitution, shaped by the Christian faith native to his family of evangelical preachers, which he enriched by his readings in Eastern (primarily Buddhist) philosophy; and from nature, both domesticated and wild.
The dynamic of transformation involves Hesse’s “doubting self”6 arriving at a point of confidence about beliefs he has harbored since childhood. For instance, a constant in his belief system is that “Nature [is] imbued with Spirit.”7 Similarly, humans are souls that are the habitation of that same spirit: “because in us too lives eternal spirit.”8 It is also Hesse’s belief that spirit is immortal: “It, not you or I, survives this day.”9 By survival, Hesse means that spirit “engages death and makes itself immortal.”10 Nature survives and souls are resurrected because both come from God. Nonetheless, Hesse’s longing for certainty about a permanent transformation akin to a resurrection remains in dynamic debate with his “doubting self” and never quite settles down. In one poem, he explores the image that we are clay in the hand of God and that the clay is “properly kneaded, but not fired into form” so that we never achieve “our eternal goal,” which is to be “solid as stone, to be one thing forever.” In the end, “what remains for us is fear and trembling / that never on our journey resolves into rest.”11 For Hesse, it is the hallmark of our basic existence.
“Fear and trembling” manifest in Hesse’s poems as a fugue of transformations. He sometimes expresses the belief that his life continues on as: “a leaf on the tree / of countless early folk who used to live / in forests. . . .”12 Sometimes he sees himself as an ubiquitous incarnate form: “Go here, go there, be human, beast and tree, / the world’s many-colored dreams without an end.”13 In “Deathsong of a Poet,” Hesse imagines himself as stepping off the wheel of rebirth entirely, “in the shadows, / remain in nonentity, remain unborn / where one can laugh about all these things.”14 In “With a Ticket to The Magic Flute”15 Hesse projects himself into three doctrines of return: the “eternal youth” of “holy spirits,” the eternal return of historical cycles, and the Götterdämmerung or death of the gods. It is in this constant shifting of his cosmic address that Hesse appears most nakedly human and most in touch with the artist he was.
In “To Beauty” Hesse prays for a classical death: “Oh mistress, will the dusky ferryman/be there to take me home?”16 In “Somewhere,” another poem of his “winter” period, Hesse dreams of death as a home, a place of permanent night where he can rest.17 Elsewhere, Hesse proposes some kind of resurrection through his poems: “My name dies with its master, / my poems will ring on.”18 However, Hesse’s surrender to death here is only a passing mood. In “First Snow” he welcomes “bitter” death because no matter “how many bitter deaths have I now died! / The wage of every death was resurrection.”19
Hesse did not permanently resolve the dynamic of death and resurrection in his work. But there is a poem titled “The Darkest Hours” in which he forces himself to look into “the depths of death,” and that experience “wipe[s] out what we know of consolation” and rips out the song concealed in his deepest heart. The weight of these hours, far from crushing him or sending him into a dream of resurrection, brings him into the present moment. This moment, he writes, “teaches us to be still and to be at rest / that we may ripen into poets and sages.”20
Stillness is the basic quality of Hesse’s work as poet and a sage. His mercurial shifts regarding faith and doubt are an aspect of the ability John Keats wrote that Shakespeare possessed in abundance, “negative capability,” which Keats defined as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Hesse’s lifelong courage to expose his torn heart, and the skill with which he transforms his distress into beautiful art, are themselves the wisdom of the sage that makes returning to Hesse’s poems again and again a transformative experience.
It is our hope that these translations, rendered in contemporary speech patterns and forms, will bring the beauty and sagacity of Hesse’s poetry to the English-speaking reader of the present age.
Stanley Fefferman
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2019