Biography as Poetry, Poetry as Biography
Zsuzsanna Ozsváth
Goethe’s lyrics constitute the most splendid treasure of all German poetry. There may be German-language authors whose poetic work has larger scope, but none has produced as much poetry that remains vivid even now or that is as magnificent as on the first day; and none has poems that are more tender and ingenious, more colorfully dazzling and versatile, more contemplative and vivacious than his.1
Our translations of Goethe’s poetry concentrate on a relatively small portion of his lyrical achievement—especially if we include works such as Faust (1771–1832) and Iphigenia in Tauris (1785) as part of his poetic oeuvre. Yet we believe that our selection provides a starting point, since it contains a significant number of the author’s major poems, representing his most important artistic phases of creative expression and powerful imagination. In addition, it attempts to capture both the musical structure and the vitality of the originals.
Growing up in Frankfurt: 1749–1765
Born on August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt am Main, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the son of enlightened, well-educated, prosperous parents who were dedicated to their children and raised them in a highly intellectual, artistic milieu. Goethe was just a boy when he started to read and write poetry, and he was enchanted by the lyrics, stories, and plays to which he was exposed. In his early teens, he saw every new performance at the Frankfurt Theater and composed poetry, using new metaphors, ideas, and images. By the time he was sixteen and enrolled as a student at the University of Leipzig, he was well-known among his peers, who considered him an authority in the field of poetry.
Student Life in Leipzig: 1765–68
At first, Goethe looked forward to enrolling at the University of Göttingen: he hoped to study classical philology. But he eventually accepted his father’s wish that he become a lawyer and enrolled in law school at Leipzig University. Yet while taking classes in his major, the poet did not give up his interests in art and literature. In fact, his desire to become an active member of the literary community intensified. He continued to follow his childhood passion, remaining fascinated by the world of the theater and seeing every new play performed in town. In addition, he not only regularly attended lectures on the development of various aesthetic approaches to literature, but he was also eager to hear and read about the discussions on art and poetry going on among the famous German writers and artists of the time. At this point in his life, he knew that he wanted nothing as much as to create and think, argue, and write about new art and literature. His interest created serious concerns in his family and intensified the tension between him and his father. He tried to suppress his feelings as much as he could—to no avail. The conflict between father and son deepened.
Back in Frankfurt: 1768–1770
After three years studying law in Leipzig, Goethe fell ill. He left his studies and returned to his parents’ home, where he spent eighteen months recuperating.2 During this time, he read widely and became familiar with some of the leading intellectual and religious movements of the time—among them Pietism, a reform movement in German Lutheranism. The young poet learned about this mystical, devotional movement, emphasizing the subjective aspects of faith, striving to revive piety over religion, orthodoxy, and ritual. Not quite twenty years old, Goethe was at first truly exalted: he turned his interest toward several mystical philosophers, whose beliefs and ideas influenced his thinking. It was obviously part of Goethe’s “deep search for faith” that inspired him to begin reading about hermeticism, alchemy, and the history of the heretics. But after a while, Goethe turned away from both mysticism and Pietism alike. Most critics—among them the editors of Faust—believe the reason for this change lay in Goethe’s rejection of the concept of the sinfulness of human nature. They claim that: “It must have been [the Pietists’] fundamental assumption, which Goethe couldn’t share, that made him turn his back on the movement altogether.”3
Law School in Strasbourg: 1770–71
After much soul-searching, Goethe enrolled at Strasbourg Law School. In addition, he found intense literary and cultural stimulation in this town, coming from several major writers and scholars of the period—among them Johann Gottfried Herder, a highly influential figure in German intellectual circles of the early 1770s. Besides Homer, Pindar, and Shakespeare, Herder studied the Bible and embraced German national history. These interests influenced Goethe’s life and his emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic development. Also, the poet recognized the importance of Herder’s call for the resurrection of the German national past; much of Goethe’s early poetry illustrates this development.
Using the native tradition of the folk song as a basic approach for one of Goethe’s best-known early lyrics, the poem “Wild Rose” (1770) captures the tragic outcome of true passion suffered by a young girl, whose life is destroyed by a boy who seduces and leaves her:
Once a boy a wild rose spied,
Rosebud in the heather;
Young and fresh as morningtide,
Ran to see, all eager-eyed,
Joyful, gazing thither.
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,
Rosebud in the heather.
Then the boy said: I’ll pick you,
Rosebud in the heather!
Rosebud answered: I’ll prick you,
I’ll not be forgot by you:
I’ll not bear it either.
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,
Rosebud in the heather.
And the rude lad plucked her then,
Rosebud from the heather;
Rosebud pricked him, but in vain
Was for her all grief and pain,
She must ache forever.
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,
Rosebud in the heather.4
It is the tonality of traditional German verse that resonates in this poem, creating its compositional wholeness. Its rhymes and rhythms come from a distant past, revived by Goethe’s new aesthetic decision: to return to the approach, feelings, and mode of the ancient German folk song by using its form and poetic expression. Influenced by Herder, the poet decided to turn against the rococo style and the stifling artistic etiquette of his time, together with the neoclassical regulations of French verse-making, all of which had dominated German culture for many years.
One of the first examples of Goethe’s decision on the need to “return to the past” was formulated in his famous essay, “On German Architecture.”5 In it, the poet calls for a new vision and a new approach to art. Extolling the aesthetic power of the cathedral in Strasbourg, he describes the importance of recreating “the ancient German approach to architecture.” In addition, he emphasizes the need to bring back the art of the past and enlarges his own poetic vision and lyrical expression by reading Shakespeare, Pindar, and Homer.
Along with the cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic epiphany Goethe underwent in Strasbourg, he also experienced a major love affair. He met Friederike Brion, the daughter of a pastor in the nearby village of Sesenheim. He wrote to her several erotic love poems, whose lasting impact is still present in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German poetry.7 We have translated “Welcome and Farewell” (1770):
But ah, the sun, already rising,
Tightened the farewell in my heart:
What joy was in your kiss, amazing!
What pain was in your eyes, what smart!
I left, you stood there earthward gazing,
Then stole a moist glance after me;
But to be loved, what joy past praising,
And—Gods!—to love, what ecstasy!7
The relationship between Friederike and the young poet was never consummated, however, and in August 1771, the twenty-two-year-old Goethe withdrew from the young girl—as he would withdraw from almost all of his intensely passionate love affairs. Some of his biographers believe that he cut off his involvements because he feared they would result in stifled feelings or, even worse, he would be “permanently caught” by one of his lovers. Whatever the reason, the relationship with Friederike, as well as the couple’s separation, had a significant impact on Goethe’s life and a lasting influence on German poetry. Several of the poems published in the Sesenheim Songs bear witness to the extraordinary depth of this intense yet painful experience of love and to the poet’s expression of passionate emotion in poetry.
Goethe’s Rising Fame: Frankfurt—Wetzlar—Frankfurt, 1771–74
In the fall of 1771, after receiving his degree, Goethe moved back to Frankfurt and started a private practice. In May 1772, he moved to Wetzlar, where he worked as a lawyer for five months. During this period he composed some of his famous hymns, which changed the direction of German literature. Among them, “Wanderer’s Storm Song” created a new language for the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement, a language that contains motifs from the ancient Greek myths and the Bible. This poem also reflects Goethe’s belief in the divine power of the artist:
Not rain, nor storm,
Can shake his heart
Whom you have not forsaken, Genius.
Against the hailstorm,
Against the cloud-wrack
He whom you have not deserted
Will be singing
Like the lark, Genius,
O you on high!8
Besides new ideas that placed the artist-poet next to the gods, Goethe was inspired by both Shakespeare’s dramatic approach to literature and Herder’s urgings to discover national history in culture. At this point of his life, he felt the need to write about the German past. Reading the biography of a robber baron, a known character during the German Peasants’ War (1524–25), he decided to use that story for his major drama, Götz of Berlichingen (1773–74), a play that achieved immediate national fame. At this point, most German writers and poets regarded Goethe as the greatest literary genius of the period and a major figure in the creation of the new literary movement. This movement hailed stormy passions and highly emotional relationships as the foremost experiences of human life and was popular among most young German poets of the time. It emphasized intense feelings and irrationalism, while stressing the human need for emotional turbulence, passion, and subjectivity. Its followers viewed inner struggles, depth of feeling, individualism, and potential for passionate love as the highest, most tragic and chaotic, and, at the same time, the most vital driving forces of human experience, anticipating Freud’s observations of the id by more than a hundred years.
In 1774, two years after Götz, twenty-five-year-old Goethe published his epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, yet another tale born out of the Sturm und Drang movement.9 The book revolves around a young man, Werther, who suffers passionate yet unfulfilled love for a young girl who marries another. Goethe wrote this novel at a time when he, like his protagonist, was feeling the pain of rejected love. In real life, he had fallen in love with a young girl, Charlotte Buff, who was already engaged to (and then married) Goethe’s friend Johann Kestner. The novel ends with Werther’s suicide. It reflects Goethe’s own pain in his unrequited love for Charlotte and his identification with his young acquaintance Karl Jerusalem, who committed suicide after a tragic love affair. At this point, there was no longer any question about which profession the poet should choose. Werther made him world-famous.
Clearly, Goethe’s life experience affected his poetry. He wanted to be free, but whenever he extricated himself from a relationship, he would endure unbearable suffering at the loss of the beloved. Such emotions are reflected not only in the story of Werther, but also in the tales of several other love affairs appearing in the poet’s oeuvre. In fact, as Denis de Rougemont has described in his book Love in the Western World, the close relationship between passion and death is a recurring theme underlying our culture.10 In this way, Werther recalls the tales of Lancelot and Guinevere, Orpheus and Eurydice, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, and other love affairs that play a major role in Western culture, portraying passion as a dangerous drive that promises happiness but brings suffering and death. Goethe also used this motif in his play Egmont. Here Klärchen speaks about her love in some of the most moving lines in world literature:
Joyful
And woeful
And brooding in vain;
Longing
And fearing,
Suspended in pain;
Sky-high elated
And dying with rue,
Happy alone
Is the soul that loves true.11
Publishing Werther, Goethe stayed in Frankfurt for one more year. In 1774, he composed many new poems, among them his famous hymns. Several of these appear in this volume: “Ganymede,” “Prometheus,” “Cousin Kronos,” and others, including another famous poem, “The King in Thule,” written in the style of a folk song. He also finished his dramas Götz, Clavigo, and Stella, and he wrote a number of short dramatic scenes and some of the major segments of Faust.
In 1775, near the end of his stay in Frankfurt and while continuing to write, the poet fell in love again. This time, he became engaged to Anna Elisabeth “Lili” Schönemann, a beautiful young woman from an influential family. But just before he left for Weimar, Goethe broke off the engagement: the relationship between him and the young girl ended abruptly.12
Goethe in Weimar: 1775–1786
The year 1775 was of great significance for Goethe. At the invitation of the eighteen-year-old duke Karl August, ruler of the small duchy of Weimar, the poet was appointed to a ministerial position within a few months of his arrival. Suddenly, he had a wide range of major administrative obligations, including organizing the economic development of the duchy. He served as a member of the duke’s privy council and became the chief administrator of its army, taking on the service of both the war commission and the highway commission. He also oversaw the production of the duchy’s mines, fields, and forests. While studying the region’s botanical, zoological, and geological growth, the poet was intellectually and artistically inspired, developing new ideas and discovering new aspects of the natural world.
Walking the roads of the region and studying the countryside, he also composed poetry and some of the major scenes of his play Iphigenia in Tauris. We have translated two of his major lyrical compositions, revealing his reaction to natural changes and the underlying unifying principles of biological processes as expressed in the terms of his new poetic vision (“Metamorphosis of the Plants” and “Metamorphosis of the Animals”). As a reward for his dedication to the development of the duchy, the duke ennobled Goethe in 1782.
While attentive to the complexity of plants, their natural growth, and their development, Goethe hoped to understand the nature of spiritual change in human culture as well, studying languages and their expression, especially in poetry. He learned English, French, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and other languages to become better acquainted with the cultures of various countries. And, as he walked among the villages, he would often stop on his way and talk to the peasants working in the fields, learning from them some of the ancient German folk songs. Among many other poems, his breathtaking “Elf-King” (Erlkönig), set to music by Schubert, shows the ways in which he mastered the connection between the music of the words and the events the text projects. The wild riding of the father with his sick son emphasizes the parent’s desperate fight for the child’s life against the threat of death, manifested in the poem’s breathless flow; meanwhile, the words themselves carry the fear of the trembling father, the anxiety of the little boy, and the seductive power of the ghost, with their words underscoring the rhythm of the galloping horse. Four voices resound at times; at others, there are two or three:
Who rides so late through wind and night?
A father with his child so white.
He holds the boy within his arm,
Hugging him fast to keep him warm …
“My son, why hide your face in fear?”
“D’you see the Elf-King, Father dear,
The Elven-King with cape and crown?”
“My son, ‘tis fog upon the down.” …
“Sweet child, come with me now away;
Such lovely games we two will play,
Such lovely flowers upon the strand,
And golden robes from my mother’s hand.”
The more the Elf-King talks to the child, the more frightening the run of the horse, the heavier the breathing of the father, and the more terrifying the threat against the boy, who dies at the end:
The father in horror rides like the gale
In his arms the moaning child so pale,
He comes to the house in toil and dread:
But in his arms the child was dead.13
Throughout the centuries, many of the great composers (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Mahler, and others) have set Goethe’s poetry to music. Several of these poems appear in our translations, and we have tried to recreate in English the music of the original.
Goethe’s musical approach is capable of integrating our auditory perception with our visual experience. In Wilhelm Meister (1796), he describes Italy as a place where:
… lemon blossoms blow,
Where in dark leaves the orange goldfruit glow,
Where the mild wind wafts from the azure sky,
The myrtle’s still, the bay leaf shines on high—14
Soon after his arrival at the court of Weimar in 1775, Goethe fell in love with Charlotte von Stein, who had been married for many years. Seven years older than the poet, she had already given birth to seven children. Still, he adored her. Thus began an all-consuming love affair based on resignation and self-sacrifice rather than urgent desire, flaming emotion, and happy expectation. He claimed that he loved her soul, while she calmed his passion in ways that characterize the relationship between sister and brother, husband and wife. He expressed this perception in the poem, “To Charlotte von Stein”—which, too, may be found among our translations:
Say, what fate is even now preparing,
Say, how first it bound us, life to life?
In some former age that we were sharing,
You were my sister, or my own true wife!15
Yet with all the success in work, the poet’s emotional life did not significantly improve. The years passed, and despite the depth of his frustrated passion for Charlotte—or perhaps because of it—and despite his friendship with the duke and his influence at court, Goethe grew tired of Weimar. Having served for ten years in the government of the duchy, he needed to escape. As Nicholas Boyle observes, “after 10 years in Weimar, [Goethe] was intellectually and emotionally on the verge of bankruptcy.”16 The poet left town in a hurry.
The Italian Journey: 1786–88
Leaving Weimar in 1786, Goethe spent almost two years in Italy, the country he loved and had yearned for all his life. The Italian trip brought him tremendous professional and emotional fulfillment. He decided to change his style in art, using a new approach based on the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome. After returning to Weimar in 1888, he followed up on his decision to reconceive, reinvent, and recreate the Italian Renaissance in Germany.
This new, radical idea affected another poet and playwright of the time, Friedrich Schiller. The two men created a new style in art and literature: German neoclassicism.
Goethe also found great emotional fulfillment and happiness in Italy. It is not clear whether he met an otherwise unnamed woman who appears as “Faustine” in The Roman Elegies (1788–1790, first entitled Erotica Romana), a collection of twenty-four poems, or whether this woman was actually someone else. All we know from this series of erotic poems is that Goethe had a passionate sexual relationship with a young woman in Italy and that he wrote about and celebrated this experience in his poetry. As he declares in the “Fifth Elegy”:
She being conquered by sleep, I lie there envolumed with thoughts;
Often within her arms, I’ve written the poem already,
Counted with fingering hand along the line of her spine
Softly the measured hexameter. She breathes in lovely slumber,
Breath that glowingly penetrates into the depth of my breast.
Amor trims the lamp and thinks of the many ages,
Musing upon the triumvirs, they whose will he once served.17
Goethe’s Return to Weimar: 1788–1832
In 1788, the poet went back to Weimar. Shocking the town, he lived openly with a young woman, Christiane Vulpius, until they married in 1806. The couple had several children, of whom just one, August, survived. But he, too, died young, two years before Goethe.
After he resettled in Weimar, significant changes took place in Goethe’s life. He freed himself from the official duties that had previously stifled him both emotionally and artistically. In 1789, he became the director of the recently founded Weimar Court Theatre, staging a number of new productions as well as creating a platform for his own classical dramas and those of Schiller. At this point in their careers, both poets had arrived at the height of the artistic style they called “Classicism,” turning decisively against the two major avant-garde literary movements of their time, Sturm und Drang and Romanticism—both of which they had helped to invent and develop. Soon after Goethe resettled in Weimar, he rewrote much of his unfinished work, completing both Egmont (1788) and Tasso (1790), reviving Werther, and publishing The Roman Elegies (1795).
In addition to his dedication to classical art and literature, the poet was deeply interested in some of the major aspects of science. He collected and studied plants, minerals, and animal specimens. He even discovered the intermaxillary bone in the human jaw (although not the first to note it, he made this discovery independently). And while his Theory of Colors has not been validated by the science of optical physics, his description of color has been recognized by neurobiologists as having inspired the origins of the neuroscience of vision.18
With many changes in style and approach over the years, Goethe wrote love poems throughout his life. In the period 1814–15, he became fascinated with Middle Eastern poetry, starting work on a series of poems entitled The West-East Divan. We have translated eight poems from this series. They originate from a collection of lyrics inspired by Goethe’s love affair with Marianne Willemer, a woman who had collaborated with him on this project and who had probably composed several of its major pieces.
In his seventies, Goethe fell in love with Ulrike von Levetzow, to whom he wrote some of the most beautiful love poems in all world literature—many of which anticipate “modernist” poetry. Yet three summers after the affair started, the pair separated. Goethe was heartbroken. His response to this tragic breakup was the “Marienbad Elegy,” particularly, the second part of the “Trilogy of Passion,” which appears in this volume of our translations. Its lyrics are described by John R. Williams as “the most unequivocally and viscerally tragic lyrical expression of [Goethe’s] poetic oeuvre.”19
Goethe wrote about art and nature as well as about love and the artistic imagination, and he continued examining these themes until the end of his life. He finished the edition of his first Collected Works in 1787–1790; Egmont and Iphigenia in 1787–89; Torquato Tasso and The Roman Elegies in 1790; he wrote Xenien with Schiller in 1795; and published both Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Hermann and Dorothea in 1796. Among some of his major poems and many other pieces, he completed Faust Part I in 1806 and finished the novel Elective Affinities in 1809; he wrote the Theory of Colors in 1800–1810 and The West-East Divan in 1814–19. In addition, he finished Poetry and Truth, his discussions about his life and work, in 1812, and, in 1821, Wilhelm Meister’s Journey. Finally, in 1831, he concluded Faust Part II, which was published posthumously in 1832.
Losing Christiane in 1816, Goethe lived to see the birth of three of his grandchildren, and then, tragically, the death of his only surviving son, August, in 1830. Admired and loved by his contemporaries, the poet stayed in Weimar for the rest of his life. He died on March 22, 1832, and was buried next to Schiller in the Vault of the Princes (Fürstengruft).
The poems we have chosen to translate play a major role not only in Goethe’s oeuvre, but also in the development of modern German lyrical language. Starting with his early work, we have translated poems from the various periods of Goethe’s lyrical creation. All of them demonstrate the author’s freedom of expression, imagination, and unique musical achievement. We have also attempted to echo their composer’s sensuous, incantatory, and always powerfully emotional voice.
To introduce Goethe’s work in chronological order is a difficult enterprise. Because he sometimes arranged his collections according to theme, form, and genre, it is not always possible to determine a poem’s date of composition. In addition, he would sometimes substantially change the texts of his lyrics. Still, following the order of the publication of his work, we have tried as much as possible to group the poems chronologically. Our goal has been to translate Goethe’s poetry into English, approximating its musical, rhythmical, and visual achievement, and opening the door to this new world of treasures for English-speaking readers.
ENDNOTES
1. Herrlich wie am ersten Tag: 125 Gedichte und ihre Interpretationen, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel, 2009), 19. (My translation.)
2. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume I: The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 70–73. According to Boyle, Goethe suffered a serious hemorrhage and experienced one relapse after another.
3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, ed. R-M. S. Heffner, Helmut Rehder, and W.F. Twaddell (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), vol. 1, 105.
4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Heidenröslein,” in Gedichte: 1756–1799, ed. Karl Eibl (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 278.
5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst,” in Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, Hans Joachim Schrimpf, and Herbert von Einem (Hamburg: Hamburger Ausgabe, 1960), vol. 12, 7–15.
6. We have translated three poems from the time of the poet’s relationship with Friederike: “Welcome and Farewell,” “Maying,” and “Wild Rose.”
7. “Willkommen und Abschied,” in Gedichte, 283.
8. “Wanderers Sturmlied,” in Gedichte, 195–98.
9. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers, in Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe, und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1948), vol. 4.
10. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
11. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Egmont, in Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe, und Gespräche: Die Weimaren Dramen, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis Verlag), vol. 6, 53–54.
12. We have translated one of the poems that bear witness to Goethe’s lost love for Lilli: “On the Lake.”
13. “Erlkönig,” in Gedichte, 107–9.
14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe, und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1949), 155.
15. “Warum gabst du uns die tiefen Blicke,” in Gedichte, 229.
16. Boyle, 354.
17. “Fünfte Elegie,” in Gedichte, 405–6.
18. See Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience by Nicholas J. Wade and Josef Brožek in collaboration with Jiří Hoskovec, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey, 2001, 1–2 and passim.
19. John R. Williams, The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 46.