This poem was first published in Seckendorf’s “Musenalmanach for 1808” (cf. IV, 61ff.). It was probably composed around 1803–1804; only the last strophe is preserved in its handwritten form.
ANDENKEN
Der Nordost wehet,
Der liebste unter den Winden
Mir, weil er feurigen Geist
Und gute Fahrt verheißet den Schiffern.
Geh aber nun und grüße
Die schöne Garonne,
Und die Gärten von Bourdeaux
Dort, wo am scharfen Ufer
Hingehet der Steg und in den Strom
Tief fällt der Bach, darüber aber
Hinschauet ein edel Paar
Von Eichen und Silberpappeln;
Noch denket das mir wohl und wie
Die breiten Gipfel neiget
Der Ulmwald, über die Mühl’,
Im Hofe aber wächset ein Feigenbaum.
An Feiertagen gehn
Die braunen Frauen daselbst
Auf seidnen Boden,
Zur Märzenzeit,
Wenn gleich ist Nacht und Tag,
Und über langsamen Stegen,
Von goldenen Träumen schwer,
Einwiegende Lüfte ziehen.
Es reiche aber,
Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,
Mir einer den duftenden Becher,
Damit ich ruhen möge; denn süß
Wär’ unter Schatten der Schlummer.
Nicht ist es gut
Seellos von sterblichen
Gedanken zu seyn. Doch gut
Ist ein Gespräch und zu sagen
Des Herzens Meinung, zu hören viel
Von Tagen der Lieb’,
Und Thaten, welche geschehen.
Wo aber sind die Freunde? Bellarmin
Mit dem Gefährten? Mancher
Trägt Scheue, an die Quelle zu gehn;
Es beginnet nemlich der Reichtum
Im Meere. Sie,
Wie Maler, bringen zusammen
Das Schöne der Erd’ und verschmähn
Den geflügelten Krieg nicht, und
Zu wohnen einsam, jahrlang, unter
Dem entlaubten Mast, wo nicht die Nacht durchglänzen
Die Feiertage der Stadt,
Und Saitenspiel und eingeborener Tanz nicht.
Nun aber sind zu Indiern
Die Männer gegangen,
Dort an der luftigen Spiz’
An Traubenbergen, wo herab
Die Dordogne kommt
Und zusammen mit der prächt’gen
Garonne meerbreit
Ausgehet der Strom. Es nehmet aber
Und giebt Gedächtniß die See,
Und die Lieb’ auch heftet fleißige Augen.
Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter.
REMEMBRANCE
The northeasterly blows,
Most beloved of the winds
To me, for it promises fiery spirit
And good voyage to mariners.
But go now and greet
The beautiful Garonne,
And the gardens of Bordeaux
There, by the steep bank
Where the footbridge crosses and into the river
Deep falls the brook, yet over it
Keep watch a noble pair
Of oaks and silver poplars;
Still it thinks its way to me, and how
The spread of tree tops, the elm forest
Bows over the mill,
But in the courtyard grows a fig tree.
On holidays go
The brown women thereat
On silken ground,
In March time,
When night and day are equal,
And over slow footbridges,
Heavy with golden dreams,
Lulling breezes draw.
Yet may someone reach me,
Full of dark light,
The fragrant cup,
That I may rest; for sweet
Would be the slumber among shadows.
It is not good
To be soulless of mortal
Thoughts. Yet good
Is a dialogue and to say
The heart’s opinion, to hear much
Of days of love,
And deeds that occur.
Yet where are the friends? Bellarmine
And companion? Many a one
Is shy of going to the source;
For wealth indeed begins
In the ocean. They,
Like painters, bring together
The beautiful of the Earth and do not spurn
The winged war, and
To dwell in solitude, year long, beneath
The defoliate mast, where there gleam not through the night
The holidays of the town,
Nor the music of strings nor native dance.
But now to Indians
The men have gone,
There on the breezy headland
On vineyard slopes, where down
Comes the Dordogne
And together with the magnificent
Garonne the river
Spreads into the ocean. Yet what takes
And gives memory is the sea,
And love, too, fixes with intensity our eyes.
Yet what remains, the poets found.
§8. A word of warning about merely admiring the beauty of the poem
We might initially simply marvel and almost be overcome with admiration, for the wonder and the “beauty” of this poem are manifest. If, however, we were simply to persist in such an attunement, then despite our apparently being affected by the poem, we would in fact remain untouched by it. We would treat the poem only as an object that the creative effort of a poet has accomplished. We would be admiring a success; we would be lingering over one occurrence within the history of poetic achievements. We would be marveling at something we possess, taking joy in a “cultural” treasure.
We fall into error in believing that the very assessment that a German poem formerly achieved such “greatness” is itself what is great already. And it may remain an open question what it really means when we call something “great.” The secret of what is often called “great” in this manner indeed lies in the fact that it cannot be measured, which is precisely why the designation “great” is inappropriate. Moreover, this designation thinks what it thus names not in terms of what is itself great or in terms of what it is, and which can as a consequence first be called great by us. In referring to something great or even something “really great,” we always mean this––if we mean anything at all––from the perspective of what is small. Something deceptive is at work here, something connected with the extravagance of historiographical representation. One believes that simply in proclaiming something to be great, one already has a part in greatness oneself and is great.
Marveling at the “beauty” of this poem can be genuine. Nonetheless, despite all our admiration for the poem, we remain outside of the domain of the poetizing word. In this way, what is poetized in this poetizing does not touch our essence. Our reception of the poem, however imbued with feeling and obsessed with taste it may be, together with our pronouncements concerning such “lived experiencing,” remain stuck in the realm of enjoyment. We merely circle around our own states of mind and deny our essence to that which is poetized itself.
But what is that?
§9. Establishing a preliminary understanding about “content” and what is poetized in the poem
That which is poetized is surely that which is said in the word. What is contained in the word we call the “content.” We can grasp this by “specifying the contents.” Even if the poem did have a “content” that could be specified and reproduced like the “content” of a scientific treatise or a “factual report,” we would then still need to ask whether this content of the poem coincides with what this poetizing poetizes. Does our “specifying the contents” already grant us a relation to what is poetized in the poem? We leave this question open. However, we must also concede that we cannot pass over all that is clearly talked about in the poem, above all, therefore, whatever belongs to the realm of what is factual and evident.
The poem names Bordeaux, the Garonne, and the Dordogne; it describes the people and places of southern France. We even know that Hölderlin traveled through Strasbourg and Lyon on his way to Bordeaux in the last days of 1801 in order to take up the position of house tutor there. Before his departure, he writes the following to his friend Böhlendorff on December 4, 1801 (V, 321f.):
And now, farewell, my dear friend, until you hear more from me. I am now full of parting. I have not wept in so long. Yet it has cost me bitter tears, resolving now to leave my fatherland, perhaps forever. For what do I have more precious in the world? But they have no use for me. I wish to, and indeed must, remain German, even if the exigencies of the heart and of nourishment should drive me to Tahiti.
The word pronounced here––“But they have no use for me”––would also apply to his stay in Bordeaux. Already at the beginning of May 1802, Hölderlin returned to Germany, presumably via Paris, and arrived back at his mother’s in Nürtingen in the second week of June. “But they have no use for me.”
Toward the end of this year, on December 2, 1802, Hölderlin once again writes to Böhlendorff (V, 327): “My dear friend! I have not written you for a long time, have been in France in the meantime and seen the sad, solitary Earth; I have seen the cottages of Southern France and individual beauties, men and women, who grew up amid the anxiety of patriotic doubt and hunger. The powerful element, the fire of the heavens and the reticence of the people, their life in nature, and their restrictedness and contentment, continually captivated me, and as one says of heroes, I can indeed say that Apollo has struck me.”
The two letters to Böhlendorff cited here grant us the richest insights into the poet’s still barely illuminated thinking around this decisive time. Initially, we have cited only those passages from them that attest to Hölderlin’s sojourn in southern France. In keeping with this, the poem we have just read is clearly a recollection of his sojourn in France. It reports on the basis of a “recollection” of a past “lived experience” and is therefore fittingly given the title “Remembrance.” Norbert von Hellingrath is of the opinion that, “in contrast to the hymns,” this poem has “the personal lived experiences of Hölderlin the man (not the poet) as its object” (IV, 300). Although it “approaches the poetic style of the hymns,” von Hellingrath includes this poem among Hölderlin’s “lyric” poems in the establishment of Hölderlin’s works in his seminal edition.
Still, we must ask whether this poem “Remembrance” merely recollects personal lived experiences, whether it refers to anything like personal lived experiences, whether “Remembrance” here simply means the equivalent of a recollection of something past. Perhaps the poem is neither “lyrical” nor “hymnal.” Perhaps we must set aside all such labels, so that they do not lead our view and our inner ear astray in advance. For we immediately catch ourselves talking “about” the poem once more, instead of letting its word speak to us.
Certainly the poem names Bordeaux; it “gives an account,” as it were, of the landscape there, of the sea and of the people there. Yet even if we just “take it in” quite superficially, we also encounter a question in the poem. The fourth strophe begins: “Yet where are the friends?” And in the third strophe we are told: “Yet good / Is a dialogue . . .” The concluding strophe says of the sea that it gives and takes “memory.” Passages and moments of pure lucidity and simple delight alternate with passages and moments of complete obscurity and hidden terror. In order to indicate, if only superficially, the rich oscillation and expansive character found in this poetizing, we may note that the poem entitled “Remembrance” concludes with the following line:
Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter.
Yet what remains, the poets found.
Here there is talk of founding, of the grounding of something to come, not of the memory of something past. We are told of that which remains, not of that which passes and is past. If we now already ponder the fact that it is only at the end of Hölderlin’s poems that everything is gathered together, and that their authentic meaning quite often first comes to the fore in an unmediated way, then the relations between the poem’s end and its title––which after all is supposed to indicate the whole––become thoroughly enigmatic.
In addition to all of this, and prior to all the things that could be cited here concerning the “content” of the poem, there presumably lies a cohesion that initially remains concealed. Even the internal coherence of the five strophes is obscure. The beginning and end of the poem are opaque in their relation to one another. One does not first need to forcibly “search for mysteries” in this poem in order to be instructed about the fact that it is not “readily understandable.” It is not understandable, provided that we listen to the whole poem as a unity rather than delighting in individual “images” and relegating the remainder to some vague attunement. Why is the poem obscure? Because we do not know what is poetized in it, nor are we at first acquainted with any path leading to it. For this reason, we should not shun detours. For this reason, we must slowly lose the habit of looking for a “content” and being satisfied with specifying it.
This one, unifying thing, to which the poem presumably owes its hidden cohesion, we at first know of only in the form of the opaque relations between the strophes and lines. That which carries and determines the poem can be only that which is poetized. To be sure, one might indeed be inclined to the opposite opinion, namely, that what is poetized is surely tied to the poem as this linguistic construct that lies before us and is carried by the latter. Yet in that case we would once again be equating what is poetized with the content of the poem. We have already called into question this very move.
1. The wealth of the poetizing word
We are seeking that which is poetized in the word of Hölderlin’s hymnal poetizing. We say, by way of assertion: the poetizing word poetizes over and beyond itself and the poet. And we note: the poetizing word fulfills, moreover, the original essence of the word, because each genuine word, as word, already poetizes. The poetizing word preserves its own kind of wealth and lawfulness that we grasp only poorly, or not at all, if we label it as mere polysemy; for in this way we measure such wealth in terms of the univocity of linguistic usage. All practical discourse of a technical, juridical, or moral kind, and every scientific statement, in its own way demands such univocity.
However, the wealth of the poetizing word does not conflict with its simplicity. It is only ever the fulfillment of such simplicity. That which is simple admittedly takes manifold forms. One variation of the simple is that which is paltry or sparse. Yet what is paltry is not worthless; to the contrary, it is that which is authentically useful and can be used, whereas what is simple in the sense of the poetic is useless. The wealth of the poetic word, which has its own configuration, cannot be reduced to “definitions.”
Yet when we think the poetizing word and enter into its magic, we are not thereby thinking “inexactly”; for one can think inexactly only within a domain of the exact, insofar as it is there that one may find the lawfulness of the exact missing. Thinking the poetizing word stands entirely outside of the opposition between “exact” and “inexact,” and yet still has its own rigor; but it is also for this reason always surrounded by the danger of missing this rigor. Such missing has its own consequences. One of its peculiarities is that those who fall victim to such misconstruals of the essential word mostly fail to “notice” these misconstruals and their consequences their entire lives. By contrast, mistakes in the construction of machinery show up right away and with urgency. When the interpretation of Hölderlin’s poems goes astray with regard to what is authentic, this does not result in any damage in the same way as does the failure of a diesel engine, for instance, or the collapse of a bridge and the breech of a dam. If the interpretation of a thinker from the commencement of Western thinking thinks awry, then this is, as we say, “no big deal.” The “world” still runs its course.
2. Poetizing and thinking as historical action
Yet one “day,” on a day of our history, namely, something will indeed come to pass [sich ereignen] that is only the consequence of that inconspicuous going astray and that unnoticed thinking awry. Even then no one will take heed of this event [Ereignis] so long as poetizing and thinking are regarded only as matters of “culture,” and “culture” is regarded as the business of relaxation and edification, matters for which the “Americans” have for decades been the “model.” Western history resides in such a concealed undercurrent of undisclosed events that the Germans could one day resolve to finally leave the culture industry to that other “hemisphere.”
A unique space opens up here of a historical action that does not require “deeds” in order to be effective and does not require “effects” in order to be. This action is poetizing and thinking. And participating in such action has a corresponding inconspicuousness within a space that we all too readily assume is not there, because we are not familiar with it, since we evaluate everything only according to “success” and “degree.” If these sought-after things remain absent, then the world immediately appears empty, and we ourselves no longer know what to do with ourselves. Yet this emptiness makes itself known only because we have sought fullness in the wrong place, and have failed to recognize the space of authentic wealth that is granted us. Certainly, this space of such responsibility can never be reached by giving speeches about it. Yet a hint in that direction is necessary here.
It is for this reason that we are, so to speak, attempting to “learn” the thinking of that which is poetized by “listening” to Hölderlin’s poem “Remembrance.” The poetizing of the poetry to which it belongs stems from an assuredness that announces itself in the word: “To find something great is much, yet much is still left . . .” (“Menon’s Lament for Diotima,” IV, 87, line 117).
3. The transformation of the biographical in that which is poetized
At first glance, the poem “Remembrance” appears only to bring Hölderlin’s “personal lived experiences” into the tones of a song. This “lyrical” impression is amplified still further when we seek to draw information from the two letters written to his friend Böhlendorff, the first shortly before his trip to southern France, the second some time after his return. The latter even contains anticipatory resonances and linguistic echoes of the poem “Remembrance.” We can use these letters as biographical and historiographical documents. There is no prohibition against doing so. Yet by doing so we run the risk of turning not only the poem into something biographical, but the two letters as well. We can, to be sure, exploit these letters as a repository of biographical curiosities, but we must then also admit that their fundamental trait remains concealed from us. For through these letters the poet speaks from out of a domain for which the biographical remains an occasion and opportunity, but only if it is integrated into the transformation accomplished by what is said. Of what use to us are biography, psychology, and historiography when we read in the letter from December 2, 1802 (V, 328):
After a number of disruptions and turmoils in my soul, it was necessary for me to settle down for some time, and in the meantime I have been living in my paternal hometown.
The more I study the nature of my homeland, the more powerfully it seizes me. The thunderstorm, not only in its highest manifestation, but precisely in this regard, as a force and shape among the other forms of the heavens, forming the light in its effects, nationally and as a principle and mode of destiny, of something being holy to us, its course in coming and going, the characteristic element of the woods and the coming together of various aspects of nature in one region, that all holy locales of the Earth are gathered together around one locale, and the philosophical light around my window—this is now my delight; that I might remember how I have come all this way, to here!
What else can we say, other than that perhaps even the “biographical” notes that we can hunt down in the letter speak a different language than simple reports recounting past “lived experiences”?
Admittedly, even the poem “Remembrance” in its first, second, and fifth strophes initially sounds like a mere thinking back to something that has vanished. The simple act of making present the “images” depicted here could lead us to seek the proper “content” of the poem in the way these images are shaped. Yet how, from this approach, are we to understand the transition from the second into the third strophe, or the fact that at the beginning of the fourth strophe a question is posed, and that at the end of the entire poem a word concerning “the poets” is found? Each of these things on their own, but also with respect to their interconnection, remain enigmatic and obscure. Does that which is poetized consist of images to which “thoughts” are attached, or does that which is poetized reside in thoughts that are embellished by images? Or are neither of these two suppositions valid, because the very distinction between “images” and “thoughts” does not hit the mark and can never be sufficient to “hit upon” the essential unity of the poem?
We must seek a path toward the unity proper to that which is poetized. In so doing, we should not shy away from detours.
§10. That which is poetized in the poetizing and the “content” of the poem are not the same
We go so far as to assert: That which is poetized in the poetizing is not its “content,” as though that which is poetized were like the water and the poetizing like the glass that it fills. That which is poetized is also not the “fruit” of the poetizing, as though that which is poetized were the apple and the poetizing the branch growing from the emergent tree. We can find absolutely no analogy for this relation. Yet this relation cannot be completely concealed and foreign to us either, if the word and language indeed belong to the essence of the human being. It may well be, on the other hand, that the relations of the word to the human being, and of the human essence to the word, have been disrupted. It could very well be that we know all kinds of things about poetic works in a historiographical manner, that all this knowledge has already become unsurveyable for us, and that, despite this, we are nevertheless not in a position––indeed for this very reason no longer in a position––to hear the poetizing word of this poetizing.
The assertion that what may perhaps be cited as the content of what has been poetized is not, as yet, what has been poetized in the poetizing should not in any way be taken to mean that listening to what the word of the poem indeed immediately says is something we could dispense with, as though we possessed a magic charm that could relieve us of the burden of carefully heeding the word in its immediacy. Our assertion that the content of the poem and that which is poetized in the poetizing are not the same thing implies only this: we may not allow that which we apprehended in our first hearing of the word to coagulate into a “content,” nor to regard this coagulum as the truth of the poetizing. We must, therefore, above all listen to the word in its immediacy, and perhaps with greater care than can be accomplished by tracking down a content. To this end, it is first of all necessary to attentively follow the unfolding of the five strophes, even at the risk that the illusion continues to persist that we thereby arrive at nothing other than a “specification of contents.” The “poem” initially still lies before us as a written and spoken construction from which we derive something; we do not yet stand within that realm which it, as word, is.