Akhenaten's Dream In Plato's Mind

Hindemith's Cardillac [McIntyre, Soffel, Sawallisch (Video)]

2012-01-14T16:23:00.004-06:00

Operáticos en la Red - publicó un post con la opera Cardilac de Hindemith, aqui se los dejo por si alguien quiere bajarlos. La fantastica reseña que hace Operáticos en la Red de esta opera la pueden consultar aquí.

Cardillac, by Paul Hindemith, performed by Das Bayrische Staatsorchester, dir. Sawallisch

http://narod.ru/disk/36797950001/Cardillac%2085.part1.rar.html
http://narod.ru/disk/36923488001/Cardillac%2085.part2.rar.html
http://narod.ru/disk/36933439001/Cardillac%2085.part3.rar.html
http://narod.ru/disk/36943478001/Cardillac%2085.part4.rar.html
http://narod.ru/disk/36943900001/Cardillac%2085.part5.rar.html

Estos enlaces me los han pasado, no son mios, por tanto no sé cuanto tiempo estén disponibles. ¡A bajar rápido!

Paul Hindemith

Precision German Craftsmanship by Matthew Rohrer : The Poetry Foundation

2012-01-10T09:59:00.000-06:00

Precision German Craftsmanship by Matthew Rohrer : The Poetry Foundation

Precision German Craftsmanship

By Matthew Rohrer

It was a good day and I was about to do something important

and good, but then I unscrewed the pen I was using

to see the ink. Precision German craftsmanship.

The Germans are so persnickety and precise,

they wash their driveways. Their mountains and streams

dance around each other in a clockwork, courtly imitation

of spring. They build the Panzer tank, out of rakes

hoses and garden gnomes; they built me.

And I’ve seated myself above an avenue on the brink

of mystery, always just on the lip, with my toes over the lip

but my bowels behind.

When I replaced the ink the sky was socked in,

only one window of blue open in the north, directly over someone.

But that person was reading about Rosicrucians in the laundromat,

he was unaware as the blue window closed above him.

The rest of us are limp and damp,

I see a button in front of us that says “spin cycle.”

I’m going to push it.

Matthew Rohrer, “Precision German Craftsmanship” from Satellite. Copyright © 2001 by Matthew Rohrer. Reprinted by permission of Wave Books.

Source: Satellite (Wave Books, 2001)

The Munsters - The Complete First Season (S01)

2012-01-05T14:16:00.000-06:00

The Munsters - The Complete First Season (S01)
English | AVI | XviD 1282kbps | 640 x 480 23.98fps | MP3 192kbps | 8.79 GB
Genre: Comedy | Family | Fantasy
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057773/

The family, while decidedly odd, consider themselves fairly typical working-class Americans of the era. Herman, like many husbands of the 1960s, is the sole wage-earner in the family, though Lily and Grandpa make (short-lived) attempts to earn a little money from time to time. While Herman is the titular "head of household," Lily actually makes most of the decisions.

Despite superficial similarities of horror-movie characters incongruent with their communities and a generally gothic look, this and Addams Family were actually different in the style of series and characterisation. Overall, the characters of The Addams Family were wealthy eccentrics with a gothic look who generally stayed at home, while the Munsters were a blue-collar and generally outgoing family of legendary monsters.

The costumes and appearances of the family members other than Marilyn were based on the classic monsters of Universal Studios films from the 1930s and 1940s. Universal produced The Munsters, as well, and thus were able to use these copyrighted designs, including their idiosyncratic version of Frankenstein's monster for Herman. Other studios were free to make films with the Frankenstein creature, for example, but could not use the costume and style of makeup originally created by Jack Pierce for the 1931 Universal Studios film Frankenstein.

Complete Season 01: 38 Episodes

Screenshots

Download (FileSonic):

Code:

http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998285754/The.Munsters.Season1.part01.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998274504/The.Munsters.Season1.part02.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998302244/The.Munsters.Season1.part03.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998274534/The.Munsters.Season1.part04.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998294264/The.Munsters.Season1.part05.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998279904/The.Munsters.Season1.part06.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998302294/The.Munsters.Season1.part07.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998316414/The.Munsters.Season1.part08.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998298224/The.Munsters.Season1.part09.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998298244/The.Munsters.Season1.part10.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998305834/The.Munsters.Season1.part11.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998301744/The.Munsters.Season1.part12.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998327324/The.Munsters.Season1.part13.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998320584/The.Munsters.Season1.part14.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998317574/The.Munsters.Season1.part15.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998311954/The.Munsters.Season1.part16.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998316954/The.Munsters.Season1.part17.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998334404/The.Munsters.Season1.part18.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998321684/The.Munsters.Season1.part19.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3998326044/The.Munsters.Season1.part20.rar

Mirror 1 (Filejungle):

Code:

http://www.filejungle.com/f/xhXtWY/The.Munsters.Season1.part01.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/rPjW8a/The.Munsters.Season1.part02.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/fA6GFp/The.Munsters.Season1.part03.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/HjhnjQ/The.Munsters.Season1.part04.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/4VjT5B/The.Munsters.Season1.part05.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/yXznpc/The.Munsters.Season1.part06.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/UDWV95/The.Munsters.Season1.part07.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/ENrpYK/The.Munsters.Season1.part08.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/K79m5d/The.Munsters.Season1.part09.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/n3umuP/The.Munsters.Season1.part10.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/BsReyx/The.Munsters.Season1.part11.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/hHCsyr/The.Munsters.Season1.part12.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/AYu5bT/The.Munsters.Season1.part13.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/kJXY4e/The.Munsters.Season1.part14.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/m8Xvwh/The.Munsters.Season1.part15.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/58z92q/The.Munsters.Season1.part16.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/MrxACx/The.Munsters.Season1.part17.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/PDwXS6/The.Munsters.Season1.part18.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/jpvUpq/The.Munsters.Season1.part19.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/uKUKke/The.Munsters.Season1.part20.rar

Mirror 2 (Fileserve):

Code:

http://www.fileserve.com/file/FezztVE/The.Munsters.Season1.part01.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/hjmt9Bf/The.Munsters.Season1.part02.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/M4xnfEq/The.Munsters.Season1.part03.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/4edvVTv/The.Munsters.Season1.part04.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/SDX9tkr/The.Munsters.Season1.part05.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/9gbkA49/The.Munsters.Season1.part06.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/MGEbnpN/The.Munsters.Season1.part07.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/FShNhnK/The.Munsters.Season1.part08.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/jX3QnqA/The.Munsters.Season1.part09.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/pbcfbTa/The.Munsters.Season1.part10.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/PXxBHms/The.Munsters.Season1.part11.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/UDpmhQa/The.Munsters.Season1.part12.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/ybe8Jka/The.Munsters.Season1.part13.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/J2nmff4/The.Munsters.Season1.part14.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/5cXxWVe/The.Munsters.Season1.part15.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/zVcqRJ9/The.Munsters.Season1.part16.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/nVTnKq7/The.Munsters.Season1.part17.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/wNM2Hqv/The.Munsters.Season1.part18.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/xF4KFkb/The.Munsters.Season1.part19.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/h3FFSdz/The.Munsters.Season1.part20.rar

Paul Strathern "in 90 Minutes" series

2012-01-05T12:43:00.000-06:00

Aristotle in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Descartes in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Hegel in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Hume In 90 Minutes (AAC)
Kant in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Kierkegaard In 90 Minutes (AAC)
Marx in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Nietzsche in 90 Minutes (MP3)
Plato in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Rousseau in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Sartre in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Schopenhauer in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Spinoza in 90 Minutes (AAC)
Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes (MP3)
Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes (MP3)

Code:
http://rapidshare.com/files/163621693/Aristotle_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163622666/Descartes_In_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/3754244800/Heidegger_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163623794/Hegel_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163625080/Kant_In_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163626227/Marx_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163627734/Nietzsche_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163628879/Plato_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163630307/Rousseau__in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163631665/Sartre__in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163632511/Schopenhauer__in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163633299/Spinoza_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163634027/Thomas_Aquinas_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163635177/Wittgenstein_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/164572688/Hume_In_90_Minutes.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/164574153/Kierkegaard_In_90_Minutes.rar

Code:
http://www.fileserve.com/file/EvBnZv2/Aristotle_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/STwM4Et/Heidegger_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/bZyUnRS/Hume_In_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/MFj9aJk/Wittgenstein_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/ddWKeaQ/Kierkegaard_In_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/ccwrRSv/Spinoza_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Ns3SN3m/Hegel_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/tF5GWzH/Nietzsche_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/T9VVfc2/Sartre__in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/tMHmNDG/Kant_In_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/5tx5Xv6/Rousseau__in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/ACVRZNt/Schopenhauer__in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/dR4kNfM/Marx_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/9xBw64n/Descartes_In_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/mZn8yF2/Thomas_Aquinas_in_90_Minutes.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/j7H7Npe/Plato_in_90_Minutes.rar

Lost in Space: Three Seasons

2012-01-05T12:39:00.000-06:00

Imdb:

Code:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058824/

In the year 1997, Earth is suffering from massive overpopulation. Professor John Robinson, his wife Maureen, their children (Judy, Penny and Will) and Major Don West are selected to go to the third planet in the Alpha Centauri star system to establish a colony so that other Earth people can settle there. They are to go there on a ship of Professor Robinson's design, christened the Jupiter 2. However, Doctor Zachary Smith, an agent for an enemy government, is sent to sabotage the mission. He is successful in reprogramming the ship's robot, but in the process becomes trapped on the ship, and because of his excess weight, the ship and all on board become hopelessly lost and it now becomes a fight for survival as the crew tries to find their way back home.

Code: Seson #1

http://www.fileserve.com/file/UgDKuEf/Lost_In_Space_-_1x01_-_The_Reluctant_Stowaway.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/2vZyZwJ/Lost_In_Space_-_1x02_-_The_Derelict.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/eqg9Muc/Lost_In_Space_-_1x03_-_Island_In_The_Sky.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/qx4YadU/Lost_In_Space_-_1x04_-_There_Were_Giants_In_The_Earth.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/YzPXUgV/Lost_In_Space_-_1x05_-_The_Hungry_Sea.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/m5kceSS/Lost_In_Space_-_1x06_-_Welcome_Stranger.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/99qQCyy/Lost_In_Space_-_1x07_-_My_Friend_Mr_Nobody.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Tj6fHvg/Lost_In_Space_-_1x08_-_Invaders_from_the_Fifth_Dimension.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/7mdYeXj/Lost_In_Space_-_1x09_-_The_Oasis.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/N8UgXKA/Lost_In_Space_-_1x10_-_The_Sky_is_Falling.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/cHxGT2j/Lost_In_Space_-_1x11_-_Wish_upon_a_Star.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/tkDCbMr/Lost_In_Space_-_1x12_-_The_Raft.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Ndzgjy2/Lost_In_Space_-_1x13_-_One_of_Our_Dogs_is_Missing.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/SZUdws8/Lost_In_Space_-_1x14_-_Attack_of_the_Monster_Plants.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/T7jmVDX/Lost_In_Space_-_1x15_-_Return_from_Outer_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/VdzPsvw/Lost_In_Space_-_1x16_-_The_Keeper_%281%29.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/YEWnvxw/Lost_In_Space_-_1x17_-_The_Keeper_(Part_2).avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Rz3ntE5/Lost_In_Space_-_1x18_-_The_Sky_Pirate.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/4eBe9be/Lost_In_Space_-_1x19_-_Ghost_in_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/NqceeBe/Lost_In_Space_-_1x20_-_War_of_the_Robots.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/9wpEj7c/Lost_In_Space_-_1x21_-_The_Magic_Mirror.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/P47Gr2w/Lost_In_Space_-_1x22_-_The_Challenge.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/2wrvu5m/Lost_In_Space_-_1x23_-_The_Space_Trader.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/PxvwzmB/Lost_In_Space_-_1x24_-_His_Majesty_Smith.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/NR23ghd/Lost_In_Space_-_1x25_-_The_Space_Croppers.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/qMQQQ4z/Lost_In_Space_-_1x26_-_All_That_Glitters.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/NmU9xFM/Lost_In_Space_-_1x27_-_The_Lost_Civilization.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Yf2tEqN/Lost_In_Space_-_1x28_-_A_Change_of_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/YSSvCaH/Lost_In_Space_-_1x29_-_Follow_the_Leader.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Tmr8upa/Lost_In_Space_-_1x30_-_%28unaired_pilot%29_-_No_Place_to_Hide.avi

Code: Seson #2

http://www.fileserve.com/file/DqKfSyc/Lost_In_Space_-_2x01_-_Blast_Off_Into_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/vvX2wkJ/Lost_In_Space_-_2x02_-_Wild_Adventure.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/WBrFFrm/Lost_In_Space_-_2x03_-_The_Ghost_Planet.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/daqYdkM/Lost_In_Space_-_2x04_-_Forbidden_World.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/wBqquhP/Lost_In_Space_-_2x05_-_Space_Circus.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/kwjdGKm/Lost_In_Space_-_2x06_-_The_Prisoners_of_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/w9558Gy/Lost_In_Space_-_2x07_-_The_Android_Machine.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/M4DvmnD/Lost_In_Space_-_2x08_-_The_Deadly_Games_of_Gamma_6.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/5jds8f2/Lost_In_Space_-_2x09_-_The_Thief_from_Outer_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/TNUFUWK/Lost_In_Space_-_2x10_-_Curse_of_Cousin_Smith.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Z6XmcJ6/Lost_In_Space_-_2x11_-_West_of_Mars.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/hDNYxKC/Lost_In_Space_-_2x12_-_A_Visit_to_Hades.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/ABSdqdK/Lost_In_Space_-_2x13_-_Wreck_of_the_Robot.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/kNvfyBN/Lost_In_Space_-_2x14_-_The_Dream_Monster.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/EbRHQmS/Lost_In_Space_-_2x15_-_The_Golden_Man.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/TSGvSWM/Lost_In_Space_-_2x16_-_The_Girl_from_the_Green_Dimension.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/T57cZzr/Lost_In_Space_-_2x17_-_The_Questing_Beast.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/VDBw2ZE/Lost_In_Space_-_2x18_-_The_Toymaker.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/f37QNmK/Lost_In_Space_-_2x19_-_Mutiny_in_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/9CYXDUv/Lost_In_Space_-_2x20_-_The_Space_Vikings.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/q8xqacw/Lost_In_Space_-_2x21_-_Rocket_to_Earth.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/VhfEuZJ/Lost_In_Space_-_2x22_-_The_Cave_of_the_Wizards.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/aFPTuHA/Lost_In_Space_-_2x23_-_Treasure_of_the_Lost_Planet.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/vNJeSWx/Lost_In_Space_-_2x24_-_Revolt_of_the_Androids.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/YRVWd3T/Lost_In_Space_-_2x25_-_The_Colonists.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/srtaGYx/Lost_In_Space_-_2x26_-_Trip_Through_the_Robot.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/YMjuUzj/Lost_In_Space_-_2x27_-_The_Phantom_Family.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/vBg3ER9/Lost_In_Space_-_2x28_-_The_Mechanical_Men.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/9r9svGV/Lost_In_Space_-_2x29_-_The_Astral_Traveler.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/xBsQdHR/Lost_In_Space_-_2x30_-_The_Galaxy_Gift.avi

Code: Seson #3

http://www.fileserve.com/file/v5w49ch/Lost_In_Space_-_3x01_-_Condemned_of_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/HQGhf3W/Lost_In_Space_-_3x02_-_Visit_to_a_Hostile_Planet.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/NFAuGGc/Lost_In_Space_-_3x03_-_Kidnapped_in_space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/svrkAgZ/Lost_In_Space_-_3x04_-_Hunters_Moon.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/pEMQrs8/Lost_In_Space_-_3x05_-_The_Space_Primevals.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Rvs7zKh/Lost_In_Space_-_3x06_-_The_Space_Destructors.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/VVvXf8z/Lost_In_Space_-_3x07_-_The_Haunted_Lighthouse.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Ck3tZ8h/Lost_In_Space_-_3x08_-_Flight_into_the_Future.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/KhvyZN3/Lost_In_Space_-_3x09_-_Collision_of_the_Planets.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/P9Gx4kH/Lost_In_Space_-_3x10_-_Space_Creature.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/aVKJBZy/Lost_In_Space_-_3x11_-_Deadliest_of_the_Species.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/29AXQdB/Lost_In_Space_-_3x12_-_A_Day_at_the_Zoo.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Az2FErt/Lost_In_Space_-_3x13_-_Two_Weeks_in_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/WCXg6PY/Lost_In_Space_-_3x14_-_Castle_in_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/EzxMwn2/Lost_In_Space_-_3x15_-_The_Anti-Matter_Man.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/d8BFUUc/Lost_In_Space_-_3x16_-_Target_Earth.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/nFyyPTD/Lost_In_Space_-_3x17_-_Princess_of_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/GxkXra7/Lost_In_Space_-_3x18_-_Time_Merchant.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/9JvhWHF/Lost_In_Space_-_3x19_-_The_Promised_Planet.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/AHJMnfk/Lost_In_Space_-_3x20_-_Fugitives_In_Space.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/u68bFYr/Lost_In_Space_-_3x21_-_Space_Beauty.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/mX8SWNG/Lost_In_Space_-_3x22_-_The_Flaming_Planet.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/PjxMCKW/Lost_In_Space_-_3x23_-_The_Great_Vegetable_Rebellion.avi
http://www.fileserve.com/file/z3wuwr6/Lost_In_Space_-_3x24_-_Junkyard_of_Space.avi

English Romantic Poetry [en Español]

2012-01-04T12:08:00.000-06:00

Lord Byron
(George Gordon Byron)
Inglaterra: 1788-1824

Poemas
Textos electrónicos completos

Acuérdate de mí
Adiós
Al cumplir mis 36 años
Camina bella, como la noche...
Canción del corsario
Cuando nos separamos...
En un álbum

Hubo un tiempo...¿Recuerdas?
La destrucción de Senaquerib
La gacela salvaje
La partida
No volveremos a vagar
Sol del que triste vela...

Biblioteca Digital Ciudad Seva
Cuentos
Poemas
Otros textos
Sobre el arte de narrar

John Keats
Inglaterra: 1795-1821

Poemas
Textos electrónicos completos

A la soledad
A quien en la ciudad estuvo largo tiempo...
A Reynolds
A Reynolds 2
A una urna griega
Al sueño
Al ver los mármoles de Elgin
Bien venida alegría, bienvenido pesar...
¡Brillante estrella! Si fuera tan constante
Canción de Folly
Canción de la margarita
Escrito antes de releer «El rey Lear»
Escrito en rechazo a las supersticiones...
Esta mano viviente
¡Feliz es Inglaterra! Ya me contentaría...
Historia en versos

La bella dama sin piedad
La caída de Hiperión (Sueño)
La paloma
Lamia
Meg Merrilies
Oda a la melancolía
Oda a Psique
Oda a Maia
Oda a un ruiseñor
Oda al otoño
Sobre el mar
Sobre la cigarra y el grillo
Sobre la Muerte
Ten compasión, piedad, amor!...
Versos a Fanny Brawne

Biblioteca Digital Ciudad Seva
Cuentos
Poemas
Otros textos
Sobre el arte de narrar

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Inglaterra: 1792-1822

Poemas
Textos electrónicos completos

A una alondra
El espíritu del mundo
Filosofía del amor
La serenata india
Prometeo liberado

Soy como un espíritu que mora...
Su voz tembló cuando nos separamos...
Temo tus besos
Vino de hadas

Biblioteca Digital Ciudad Seva
Cuentos
Poemas
Otros textos
Sobre el arte de narrar

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Alemania: 1749-1832

2012-01-04T11:58:00.000-06:00

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Alemania: 1749-1832

Poemas
Textos electrónicos completos

A la luna
La despedida
Elegías (1)
Elegías (2)
Elegías (3)
Elegías (4)
Elegías (5)
Elegías (6)
Elegías (7)
Elegías (8)
Elegías (9)
Elegías (11)
Elegías (12)
Elegías (13)
Elegías (14)
Elegías (15)
Elegías (16)
Elegías (17)

Elegías (18)
Elegías (19)
Elegías (20)
El pescador
El rey de los silfos
El Rey de Thule
El trovador
Ergo bibamus
Ganimedes
¡La encontré!
La fuerza de la costumbre
La hermosa noche
La novia de Corinto
La violeta
Meditación ante el cráneo de Schiller
Mignon
Secreto
Soneto

Biblioteca Digital Ciudad Seva
Cuentos
Poemas
Otros textos
Sobre el arte de narrar

Mendelssohn & Schubert - The Masterworks

2012-01-04T11:53:00.001-06:00

Links:

http://www.fileserve.com/file/rcnGD8u
http://www.fileserve.com/file/8asjjtQ
http://www.fileserve.com/file/CqJZtQg
http://www.fileserve.com/file/UYxFGsZ

Posted 25th July 2011 by Centro

Labels: Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn - The Masterworks (40 CDs)

http://www.fileserve.com/file/Wsqneur
http://www.fileserve.com/file/kF7DaW7
http://www.fileserve.com/file/9hrRbF8
http://www.fileserve.com/file/pvevDPK

Posted 17th June 2011 by Centro

Labels: Schubert

Schubert Masterworks - 40 cds

Schiller, Friedrich: Alemania: 1759-1805

2011-12-29T16:20:00.000-06:00

Friedrich Schiller
Alemania: 1759-1805

Poemas
Textos electrónicos completos

Amor y apetito
Éxtasis por Laura
La partición de la tierra

Reminiscencia inmortal
Tres palabras de fortaleza
Un funeral de fantasía

Biblioteca Digital Ciudad Seva
Cuentos
Poemas
Otros textos
Sobre el arte de narrar

This is just Tangerine Dream

2011-12-28T22:55:00.000-06:00

Anthology - The Tangerine Dream Collection Part 1 of 8 (1969 to 1980)
Electronica / Krautrock | MP3@192kbps-256kbps | Artwork included
119 albums and growing | studio/soundtrack/concert | 1.1 GB

For Anthology Part 1 (1969 to 1980) see here.
For Anthology Part 2 (1980 to 1984) see here.
For Anthology Part 3 (1984 to 1989) see here.
For Anthology Part 4 (1989 to 1992) see here.
For Anthology Part 5 (1992 to 1997) see here.
For Anthology Part 6 (1997 to 2003) see here.
For Anthology Part 7 (2003 to 2007) see here.
For Anthology Part 8 (2007 to 2008) see here.

Enjoy it!

Negra leche del alba por Yusef Luis

2011-12-26T23:40:00.000-06:00

Negra leche del alba
te bebemos al amanecer
Bebiendo a sorbos de muerte, la negra leche del alba,
estaba yo contemplando las rosas
que me han tocado en este mundo
y por las que Dios viene a la tierra,
sin el temor de perder el camino que lo llevará de vuelta
a las estancias donde sabe estarse quieto.
Allí, a la intemperie, contemplé la rosa suicida de Yukio Mishima,
la rosa de oro de Beijing,
y la rosa radiactiva del país de los soles rasantes.
Junto a los márgenes evidentes de la sobrevida,
estaba yo, pidiéndole una rosa verdadera
a Santa Teresita de los Cementerios
y le pedía, además, que me ayudara a creer siempre
en el gran Amor que Dios me tiene,
de modo que yo pudiera echar una mirada a mi alrededor
con la paz de los vencidos
y la fe de encontrar en las rosas que se me mostraban
la flor perdida, la innombrada rosa del Poeta muerto.
Pero, en su lugar, se me mostraban todas las rosas del mundo:
la rosa escrita de Amherst —la rosa de Emily Dickinson—
y la rosa de arena, la rosa de Beirut.
Abrían también a mis pies, la rosa imperial austríaca;
la rosa cruzada, la flor negra
y la rosa del Ponto Euxino, que alabara Ovidio en su exilio.
Otras, en cambio, se negaban a ser miradas,
como la rosa hermética de la Cábala
y la rosa mágica y secreta de los judíos.
Ya me marchaba a las horas brutales de la autocompasión,
cuando una rosa, al centro de la noche umbría,
se alzó como una estrella de sangre
sobre los coágulos de la aurora.
Y allí estaba frente a mis ojos,
resistiéndose al fuego sobre un montículo de cenizas,
la rosa de nadie, que resultó ser nada menos
que la rosa de Paul Celan.

II

Paul Celan aparta el coágulo de los labios,
la rosa de las ruinas;
sopla en la jarra donde bebe
y su aliento acompaña la mordida al fruto de los mudos,
al corazón que mastican sus asesinos, en silencio.
Abre las páginas del diario.
Apunta: “Una sombra sobre las aguas
del Sena es una imagen fácil de retener en el papel callado...”
Paul Celan proyecta a la masa líquida el cuerpo de un hombre.
Y ese hombre escribe cantos por doquier.
Cómo es posible escribir versos, Dios mío,
no antes o después sino durante la concentración de las almas,
cuando los días se pegan con un hilo gelatinoso al cráneo.

Por último, lee a Hölderlin:

“A veces el genio cae en la oscuridad

y se hunde en el oscuro pozo de su corazón”.

III

Su corazón se hunde.
El otoño comienza a dictarle monótonamente una frase:
“Tiempo es de que sea tiempo”.
Y mira a la tierra con un dolor humano.
Es el tiempo en que deben florecer los almendros,
las piedras dar fruto suave,
conversar y luego escribir un poema,
sin levantar sospechas.

IV

Cómo escribir un verso.
Me aparto el hambre con un golpe de ojos
en la garganta y concluyo:
“Escribir un poema después de Auschwitz es bárbaro”
(Theodor Adorno).
Por eso no escribo,
dejo gotear la negra leche de los labios
negados a beber,
sincronizo los relojes,
decido por un tiempo
que habrá de llegar como un golpe de agua
o como el río
que devuelve sobre los bancos de arena a sus difuntos.

V

Santa Teresita de los Cementerios,
pido para nuestros muertos,
la rosa que habrá de acompañarlos
mientras duren los días de Paul Celan sobre la tierra.

Yusef Luis

Hölderlin: locura y santidad

2011-12-26T15:52:00.001-06:00

FRANCISCO SEGOVIA [tomado de aquí]

Hölderlin: locura y santidad*

Como el canto del ruiseñor, entre las
sombras, es en medio de los más profundos
sufrimientos donde suena divinamente a
nuestros oídos la canción de vida del mundo.
(Hölderlin, Hiperión)

Cuando estoy ausente, en vez de mí, hablan
las flores del cielo, las florecientes
constelaciones,
y las de la tierra brotan multiplicadamente.
(Hölderlin, Empédocles)

Me han pedido que hable aquí sobre "Hölderlin y el inconsciente". No sé si podré hacerlo. En principio, porque supongo que el tema que me han propuesto se refiere a las ideas de Hölderlin sobre el inconsciente, y no a mis ideas sobre el inconsciente de Hölderlin. Y en verdad, yo haría muy mal en hablar aquí de esto último —y especialmente de las causas de la locura de Hölderlin—, pues en ese caso ustedes estarían en todo su derecho de esperar de mí una versión más o menos enterada de los tecnicismos del caso. Pero estoy lejos de poder cumplir esa expectativa.

En el nivel psiquiátrico, por ejemplo, conozco —como quizá conozcan también algunos de ustedes— el ensayo que Karl Jaspers dedicó al "caso Hölderlin" en su Genio y locura,1 pero nada más. No acudí, por ejemplo, a la bibliografía psiquiátrica que él comenta, pues me parecía claro que ésta se dirigía más bien a los especialistas y, sobre todo, porque Jaspers mismo me convenció de que, en su mayoría, los psiquiatras entendían bastante bien "lo psiquiátrico" del "caso Hölderlin", pero casi nada de "lo poético", que es tanto como no comprender en absoluto el caso que tienen entre manos. Y no es que Jaspers se opusiera a que los poemas que Hölderlin escribió (cuerdo o en sus años de locura) fueran vistos como síntomas de su padecimiento; es que no podía dejar de fustigar los juicios que los psiquiatras emitían sobre ellos, pues en general daban por hecho sin mayor discusión que su valor intrínseco o estético no sólo les era indiferente sino que les parecía incomprensible, cuando no francamente trivial. Él se colocó, más humildemente, en el extremo opuesto:

A nada conduciría aplicar a la poesía de Hölderlin nuestros conceptos psiquiátricos —dice Jaspers—, por lo rudimentarios que son. En cambio, las cualidades de esta poesía acaso arrojen alguna luz sobre la personalidad esquizofrénica (o, mejor dicho, de uno de los numerosos tipos que pueden distinguirse entre los que padecen esta enfermedad), contribuyendo a que nos hagamos una idea clara de lo que hemos de entender bajo esa denominación.2

Jaspers no pretende pues sancionar la locura del poeta en sus poemas sino aprender de ella en ellos. Al cabo —dice—, "en este lamentable cuadro de desmoronamiento mental aún queda algo indefinible que nos dice que la víctima es Hölderlin y ningún otro".3

Pero Jaspers no es el único pensador que ha mostrado este respeto por la obra de Hölderlin en relación con su locura. Heidegger, por ejemplo, se toma tan a pecho la frase donde se dice que Hölderlin delata su esquizofrenia ("puedo decir que Apolo me ha golpeado")4 que ve en ella una suerte de iluminación. Y así dice, en Arte y poesía:

Si comprendemos [la] esencia de la poesía como instauración del ser con la palabra, entonces podemos presentir algo de la verdad de las palabras que pronunció Hölderlin, cuando hacía mucho tiempo la noche de la locura lo había arrebatado bajo su protección.5

Bajo su protección... Pero decir que la locura arrebata a Hölderlin "bajo su protección" ¿no supone reconocer en las palabras del poeta un rango superior al de las palabras comunes, aunque el poeta esté declaradamente loco —o más bien precisamente por eso? En otra parte, la extrema reverencia de Heidegger por la poesía de Hölderlin lo obliga a reconocer una grave falta al "hacer mal uso de su poesía como una fuente muy rica para una filosofía".6 Y no le faltaba razón, al menos según el parecer que muestra juguetonamente Hölderlin en una carta de 1798, cuatro años antes de perder la razón:

¡Ay! —dice Hölderlin—. Desde los albores de la juventud mi ánimo, asustado del mundo, se ha replegado en sí mismo, de lo que todavía padezco. Claro es que hay un hospital en donde todo poeta tan desdichado como yo puede refugiarse sin desdoro: la filosofía...7

No les hablaré, pues, del inconsciente de Hölderlin ni de las causas de su locura. Pero tampoco estoy seguro de poder hablarles sobre lo que es el inconsciente para Hölderlin. No, al menos, si concedemos al término inconsciente el valor que ha tomado a partir de Freud, y que se refiere a un dominio más bien técnico (el de la psicología o el del psicoanálisis) que no existía en tiempos de Hölderlin. Esto, sin embargo, no quiere decir que no hubiera ya entonces una noción parecida o análoga a la que hoy tenemos. De hecho, en cuanto tal noción, el inconsciente es producto justamente de la época de Hölderlin —como puede verse en El inconsciente antes de Freud, de Whyte8 — y hasta se dice que la primera aparición de la palabra inconsciente —más o menos en el sentido moderno— ocurre en una obra de Novalis, casi estricto contemporáneo de Hölderlin (por lo menos del Hölderlin cuerdo).

Dicho de otro modo: la idea de que hay en los seres humanos una conciencia que ellos mismos no advierten flotaba en el aire que respiraban los escritores románticos, particularmente los poetas y especialmente en Alemania. Cuando cobró cuerpo teórico, sin embargo, lo hizo entre los pensadores, y en tres versiones canónicas, que Paul Ricoeur llama "teorías de la falsa conciencia" —a saber, las doctrinas de Marx, Nietzsche y Freud. Estos tres pensadores coinciden en un punto: todos ven en ciertos actos humanos un impulso del que los mismos actores no tienen conciencia, y todos en algún sentido suponen que ese impulso inconsciente (ya se llame ideología, voluntad de poder o neurosis) se puede racionalizar.

Los poetas que precedieron a estos filósofos no llegaron a tanto. Ninguno supuso, por ejemplo, que esa conciencia fuera "falsa" de por sí, o por estar oculta; ni mucho menos creyeron que tuviera que ser desenmascarada. No pretendieron pues ni una praxis ni una clínica —por usar los términos marxista y freudiano—, pero no por eso fueron indiferentes a los actos a los que los convocaba su particular noción de "inconsciente"; es sólo que en general prefirieron enfocar el asunto en un ámbito poético o mítico —en el más amplio sentido, religioso. Por eso, quizá, Heidegger volvió especialmente emblemáticos estos versos de Hölderlin:

Lleno de méritos, pero es poéticamente
como el hombre habita esta tierra
y
¿Para qué poetas en tiempos de miseria?

Aunque no lo diga Heidegger, hay en los versos anteriores un fuerte anuncio de lo que luego sería Nietzsche. Pero ¿qué pueden decirnos ellos mismos sobre el inconsciente? Poco, en verdad. Y sin embargo apuntan a un ámbito desde el que se adivinan los vestigios de algo que los hombres hemos olvidado y que por lo tanto hoy está oculto a nuestra conciencia; apuntan —diría Hölderlin— a la huella que han dejado los dioses al apartarse de nosotros. Pues si este tiempo es de miseria, de penuria e indigencia, es porque los dioses ahora viven en el exilio —según diría más tarde Heine— y nosotros hemos olvidado casi por completo su lenguaje. De ese olvido proviene una ruptura del hombre con la Naturaleza (la divinidad) y, en consecuencia, un desconocimiento de sí en cada quien. Hölderlin dice esto de mil maneras. Por ejemplo, en un poema titulado "La despedida":

¿Partir uno del otro? ¿Y lo creímos justo y
acertado?
Y cuando estuvo hecho ¿por qué nos asustó
como si fuera un crimen?
Poco nos conocemos
pues un Dios reina dentro de nosotros.

Quisiera que por ahora evitáramos darle a ese Dios un valor psicológico (el del inconsciente, por ejemplo, el de la represión) y nos contentáramos con lo que los versos dicen por sí mismos; esto es, que nos conocemos poco porque cada quien lleva un Dios dentro de sí. Quiero que nos quedemos en esto porque creo que estos versos de "La despedida" pueden servirnos para enfocar uno de los temas centrales de Hölderlin. Y es que, visto así, en ellos, ese Dios que por naturaleza propia es distinto de cada quien (que lo lleva dentro), y a la vez distinto en cada quien, es al mismo tiempo un solo Dios, el mismo para todos. Y así, uno es cada quien y el dios que lleva den-tro, como si la vida tuviera por sí misma una vida propia, independiente de nosotros, y esa vida se viviera en nosotros al modo de un Dios. Refiriéndose a su novela, Hiperión, y al amor de Hiperión por Diótima que se describe en ella, el mismo Hölderlin le pide a la Diótima real (a Susette Gontard) que considere "todo lo que aquí y allá se dice acerca de ellos y de nosotros, de la vida de nuestra vida, como un testimonio de gratitud que no pocas veces es tanto más verdadero cuanto mayor es la torpeza con que se expresa".9

Un Dios múltiple y único, pues, y una misma vida que se vive distinta en cada pecho. Se trata aquí tal vez de una puesta al día de la vieja idea griega del Todo-Uno, pero tanto en la carta como en el poema Hölderlin muestra algo más que su versión gnóstica —por así llamarla—, pues no sólo reconoce el valor de la experiencia religiosa independientemente del carácter de los individuos y del nombre que cada quien le dé a la divinidad, sino que además reúne en un mismo destino lo único y lo múltiple, al individuo y a la comunidad. Los reúne y los re-liga —como es propio de las re-ligiones— en un terreno común que, por serlo, se ve como un destino y, a la vez, como una representación. En esto Hölderlin coincidía en principio con su compañero de estudios (y de habitación) en el Seminario de Tubinga, Hegel, pero se separaba de él en cuanto a la forma de concebir esa unidad en el tiempo. Hegel acabaría mirándola como un despliegue del espíritu en la historia, como una evolución y, finalmente, como un progreso; Hölderlin por su parte, más apegado a las maneras griegas, miraría ese transcurrir, más que como un verdadero despliegue, como un ámbito donde es posible el cambio. No la evolución ni el progreso sino el cambio, la trasformación. Un ámbito, por cierto, donde conviven (para quien quiera y pueda verlos) el presente, el pasado y el futuro, y donde todo lo que fue, será; esto es: un mundo. Así se lo dice Empédocles a Pausanias en el drama de Hölderlin: "Ve, no temas nada: todo retorna. / Lo que haya de ocurrir está ya consumado".

Dilthey arguye un motivo psicológico detrás de esta idea de Hölderlin cuando dice que "en un temperamento así, que vive en la conexión íntegra de la interioridad, el pasado actúa como presente".10 Puede ser. Pero no hay que olvidar que, por otra parte, Hölderlin nos pone frente a un mito muy poderoso y antiguo (el del eterno retorno) y que sólo por él puede entenderse que la promesa de una vida futura se cumpla en la restauración del pasado, en la "recordación" de ese destino que los hombres hemos olvidado. Dice Hölderlin en el cuarto fragmento de "Pan y vino":

Delfos duerme. ¿Dónde retumba la gran
/voz del destino?
¿Dónde está ese destino veloz?
¿Aún desciende el relámpago
que nos colma de sus favores cuando deslumbra
desde lo alto de un cielo claro, entre el
/ruido del trueno?
¡Oh padre éter! Un grito como éste volaba
/de boca en boca,
mil veces repetido. Y nadie debía vivir solo.
Un bien semejante, repartido entre todos,
da la alegría [...]

y más adelante, hacia el final del poema:

[...] Insensibles somos y parecidos a las
/sombras
Un día, no obstante, nuestro Padre, el éter,
/de todos conocido,
será el patrimonio de todos. Y en la espera
/se acerca
el Hijo del Altísimo, el dios sirio.
Sabios venturosos lo ven; una sonrisa
/asciende de alma cautiva
y brilla; sus ojos se abren a la luz.

Sí, un bien semejante da alegría, y los sabios ven anunciada su llegada... Pero es preciso que su voz sea escuchada. Por eso tantas voces quieren hablar y hablan en los versos de "Pan y vino": "la gran voz del destino", "el ruido del trueno", "un grito [...] mil veces repetido"... ¿Las oyen? Son las voces de la poesía. Y se oyen en el terreno común que es la poesía.

Nadie se extrañaría si dijéramos que la poesía es "una voz común", pero el párrafo anterior implica además casi lo contrario: que la poesía es "un oído común", el éter —como diría Hölderlin— que precede y da sustento al lenguaje todo. Trataré de explicarme.

Unir lo único con lo múltiple significa desde luego, por una parte, hacer de la voz del elegido la voz del pueblo (tema constante de los poetas románticos), pero al mismo tiempo significa fundar el habla común en la poesía. Y esto es bastante más extraño. Para explicarlo, Heidegger dice que "la palabra esencial, para entender[se] y hacerse posesión más común de todos, debe hacerse común".11 Lo que el poeta instaura entonces es esa "palabra común" en torno a la cual se reúne el pueblo. No rebaja la palabra esencial por hacerla común: la comunica. Por eso el poeta es para Hölderlin y para Heidegger un héroe y un profeta, aquel que aún colige algo del lenguaje olvidado de los dioses y viene a entregárnoslo de nuevo como un don. El octavo fragmento de "Pan y vino" dice:

El pan es fruto de la tierra, pero lo bendice
/la luz,
y al dios tonante debemos la alegría del
/vino.
Estos dones nos recuerdan a los inmortales,
/que antaño
vivieron entre nosotros y a su tiempo
/volverán.
Por eso los poetas ofrecen al dios del vino
/graves cantos,
y para el antiguo dios no son vanas
/quimeras.

Pero he dicho "de nuevo" y he dicho "como un don". Y es que, por cualquier lado que se la vea, sigue siendo misteriosa la forma en que el canto "común" de los poetas llega sin embargo a los oídos del dios, acostumbrado a escuchar sólo palabras esenciales. ¿De dónde procede entonces la voz de los poetas y por qué es después de todo inteligible tanto para los dioses como para los hombres? La obra de Hölderlin supone que este problema no se resuelve nunca satisfactoriamente en términos meramente racionales. Por eso se hace necesario plantearlo míticamente. Véanse, si no, estos versos suyos:

Los hombres hemos experimentado mucho,
hemos nombrado a muchos dioses,
desde que somos un diálogo
y podemos oír unos de otros

Heidegger comenta al respecto:

"Desde que somos un diálogo"... El ser del hombre se funda en el habla; pero ésta acontece primero en el diálogo. Sin embargo, esto no es sólo una manera como se realiza el habla, sino que el habla sólo es esencial como diálogo. [...] Somos un diálogo significa que podemos oírnos mutuamente. Somos un diálogo significa siempre igualmente que somos un diálogo. Pero la unidad de este diálogo consiste en que cada vez está manifiesto en la palabra esencial el uno y el mismo por el que nos reunimos, en razón de lo cual somos uno y propiamente nosotros mismos. El diálogo y su unidad es portador de nuestra existencia (Dasein).12

Es una tesis radical, pero no tan extraña si se piensa en las cosas que concluyen a menudo los pensadores que se dedican a Hölderlin. Dilthey, por ejemplo, deduce de las ideas del poeta un principio también radical: el de que "del arte brota [...] la religión".13 Con todo, no puede decirse en realidad que los comentarios de Dilthey y Heidegger racionalicen el mito tal como éste aparece en Hölderlin, sino sólo que ofrecen a la razón las condiciones que vuelven necesaria su aparición. Con ello quiero decir que aun en la exégesis de Heidegger el problema del lenguaje sigue apareciendo como mito; esto es, como una representación simbólica. Se le ha reprochado a veces, por ello, que se muestre más escritor que filósofo en sus obras más tardías. No importa. La acusación, de por sí superflua, resultará más superflua todavía si dejamos que sea el mismo Hölderlin quien explique la necesidad de esta clase de representaciones.

En un fragmento en prosa, que los editores han dado en titular "Sobre la religión", dice Hölderlin (y lo cito por extenso):

Aun cuando los hombres —me preguntas—, con arreglo a su naturaleza, se eleven por encima de la necesidad y, así, se encuentren en una relación más múltiple y más íntima con su mundo, aun cuando ellos, tan lejos como se eleven por encima de la necesidad física y moral, vivan siempre una vida humanamente más alta, de modo que haya entre ellos y su mundo una más alta conexión —más que una conexión mecánica—, un más alto destino, aun cuando efectivamente esta conexión más alta sea para ellos mismos lo más sagrado, porque en ella se sienten reunidos ellos mismos y su mundo y todo lo que ellos tienen y son, ¿por qué —me preguntas— precisamente tienen que representarse la conexión entre ellos mismos y su mundo, por qué tienen que hacerse una idea o una imagen de su destino, que, exactamente considerado, ni se dejaría justamente pensar ni tampoco yace ante los sentidos?

Así me preguntas y sólo puedo contestarte esto: que incluso el hombre se eleva por encima de la necesidad en cuanto que él puede y quiere acordarse de su destino, agradecer su propia vida; que él también siente más generalmente su conexión, más general, con el elemento en el que se mueve [...]14

Me detengo un instante en este último párrafo, sólo para señalar a la pasada las similitudes que este olvido fundamental tiene en Hölderlin, por un lado, y en Freud y Marx, por el otro. Los tres ven en él, en efecto, la huella de una falta que es preciso resarcir. Sólo que para Hölderlin ese resarcimiento tiene además un valor en cuanto experiencia religiosa: acordarse del destino es agradecer la propia vida, que entonces se siente inmersa en su elemento... Pero sigamos:

Aquellas relaciones más infinitas, más que referentes a necesidad, de la vida pueden, ciertamente, también ser pensadas, pero no meramente pensadas; el pensamiento no las agota, y, si hay leyes más altas, que determinan aquella conexión más infinita de la vida, si hay leyes divinas no escritas, de las cuales habla Antígona [...] —y tiene que haberlas, si aquella conexión más alta no es un delirio—, digo que, si tales hay, entonces, en la medida en que son representadas, en que son concebidas meramente para sí y no en la vida, son insuficientes [...]15
[...]
...y ninguna otra cosa mienta y tiene que mentar, cuando habla de una deidad y habla de corazón y no a partir de una memoria servicial o por profesión. La prueba está en pocas palabras. Ni sólo a partir de sí mismo, ni únicamente a partir de los objetos que le rodean, puede el hombre experimentar que hay en el mundo más que un discurrir mecánico, que hay un espíritu, un dios, pero sí puede experimentarlo en una relación más viviente, elevada por encima de la necesidad, relación en la que él se sostiene con aquello que le rodea.16

Me detengo de nuevo. Esta vez para subrayar en el párrafo anterior la oposición entre las concepciones "mecanicistas" y "vitalistas" que imperaban en la época de Hölderlin. Visto a la luz de nuestros días, al tomar partido por las últimas el poeta no sólo manifestaba el descontento general de los románticos frente a la imagen del universo que heredaban de la Ilustración (y cuya crítica más emblemática se halla quizá en el Frankenstein de Mary Shelley) sino que daba pie a lo que un siglo y medio más tarde serían las reflexiones de Heidegger en torno a la tecnología y la deshumanización del mundo, que en cierto sentido puede interpretarse como una abjuración de la Naturaleza y una pérdida de la confianza en ella, como una "enajenación" y un extrañamiento frente al mundo, que ahora se vuelve mudo.

Pero volvamos al mito que pone en evidencia la intimidad que según Hölderlin debe gobernar sobre las relaciones del hombre y su mundo:

[...] las relaciones religiosas en su representación no son ni intelectuales ni históricas, sino intelectuales históricas, esto es: míticas, tanto por lo que toca a su material como por lo que toca a su exposición. Así, pues, por lo que se refiere al material, no contendrán ni meramente ideas o conceptos o caracteres, ni meros sucesos, hechos, sino ambas cosas en uno [...]
Así también la exposición del mito. Por un lado, sus partes son compuestas de tal manera que [...] ninguna sobresale demasiado y cada una recibe, precisamente por ello, cierto grado de autonomía [...]17

Ideas y sucesos, "ambas cosas en uno", y partes autónomas de un mismo relato que es, al mismo tiempo, una única imagen. ¿No vemos aquí algo más que la reunión de lo único y lo múltiple, del individuo y su comunidad; una consecuencia más grave y fundamental? En efecto, borrando vitalmente esta frontera se borraría también el umbral que separa a lo objetivo de lo subjetivo.

"Sería así poética, según su esencia, toda religión", concluye Hölderlin.18

La experiencia de esta religión que ha borrado por completo la diferencia entre el sujeto y el objeto se aviene bien y en términos de igualdad con las "cosas" de la naturaleza, que para Hölderlin son sagradas, como el hombre, por el simple hecho de que son. ¿No declaraba él mismo, con reverencia: "si yo volviera a nacer ¡cuánto me gustaría ser un roble!"? ¿No es ésta acaso la afirmación de un griego? Tal vez pensaba en eso Luis Cernuda cuando escribió:

Siempre extrañará a alguno la hermosa diversidad de la naturaleza y la horrible vulgaridad del hombre. Y siempre la naturaleza, a pesar de esto, parece reclamar la presencia de un ser hermoso y distinto entre sus perennes gracias inconscientes. De ahí la recóndita eternidad de los mitos paganos, que de manera tan perfecta respondieron a ese tácito deseo de la tierra con sus símbolos religiosos, divinos y humanizados a un tiempo.19

Y es sin duda pensando en esa naturaleza como declara Hölderlin que "todo es íntimo". No hay pues ya nada fuera de la experiencia en que él se funde con ella y que los críticos han llamado con justicia "panteísta", y que por lo mismo ven como un mundo intrascendente.

Pero ¿es esto justo? ¿No se da justamente el arrebatado abatimiento en ese mismo poeta que aspiraba siempre a lo más alto? Sí, si damos crédito a Jaspers. Y entonces en ese abatimiento habrá de cumplirse una ascensión; en ese panteísmo inmanentista, la trascendencia. ¿Puede ser esto? No lo sé. Me parece claro, por una parte, que la necesidad de establecer un mito para representar la experiencia de intimidad con el mundo obedece a que no es posible hablar de esa experiencia sin estar a la vez en el mundo, experimentando esa intimidad. Pero, como esta experiencia es la de una comunicación y un diálogo, tendemos a suponer que ocurre en un terreno común a quienes participan en él. El problema reside, entonces, en que de ese modo imaginamos que el diálogo mismo es distinto de los "dialogantes", a quienes acoge, lo que vale tanto como decir que es diferente de la lengua en que se efectúa. Pero que todo sea íntimo supone que ese diálogo, los dialogantes y el espacio en que dialogan no son cosas distintas, y que su "ser verdadero" reside justamente en ser un diálogo, una comunicación. Por eso para Hölderlin el restablecimiento de la dignidad del universo consiste en "recordar" la lengua en que se da ese diálogo: la lengua de la intimidad, la lengua de los dioses.

Pero ¿cómo justificar entonces que esa lengua no sea una mera literalidad; que el nombre de las cosas no las haga aparecer en su materialidad (como ocurre en la Creación judeo-cristiana?) sino en su sentido? Hölderlin dice que sólo se puede hablar del sentido del mundo en términos de una representación, pues el sentido no se presenta realmente a los ojos de la razón. La razón falta a la verdad en la medida en que presenta la experiencia del mundo como un diálogo entre dos entidades que no tiene más remedio que suponer distintas y discretas (el hombre por un lado, el mundo por otro). Pero, al distinguirlas de este modo, así sea sólo provisionalmente, les arrebata el lenguaje, que si bien sigue siéndoles común y es atributo suyo, ya no constituye su esencia. Por eso para la razón el mundo tiene que ser mudo. De otro modo ¿qué valor tendrían sus propios predicados sobre él? ¿Cómo justificar entonces la ciencia, la filosofía?

Hölderlin comprende este dilema de la razón positiva, pero no se conforma con lo que conlleva; a saber, una desacralización de la experiencia del mundo. Para él, la representación se sustenta en la experiencia, que es en sí misma diálogo y lenguaje. Pero entonces ¿cómo hablar de ella? ¿Cómo referirse al diálogo desde fuera del diálogo? ¿Como hablar del habla sin hablar?

Podría parecer que nos hallamos aquí ante un callejón sin salida, y que lo mejor sería guardar silencio... Pero existe la poesía. Quiero decir con esto que el callejón sin salida se presenta sólo ante los ojos de la razón postiva, que no puede ex-poner discursivamente la relación entre el mundo y el hombre sin suponer —así sea sólo provisionalmente— que en ella están presentes de manera distinta y discreta el hombre y el mundo. Pero ni la poesía ni la experiencia religiosa se someten a esa misma exposición discursiva. El mundo al que ellas se refieren no queda ex-plicado en lo que dicen sobre él. No. El mundo está im-plicado en lo que dicen. Por eso es un diálogo y es íntimo. Y por eso, al presentarlo a la razón, aparece como mito. Porque, ante la razón positiva, aquello que funda la relación del hombre con su mundo (aquello que sustenta la solidaridad entre el mundo y su representación) no puede presentarse más que bajo la forma de un mito. O de un poema. De ahí en adelante la razón positiva puede lavarse tranquilamente las manos y hacer de cuenta que la experiencia de ese mundo (y su expresión poética) no es asunto de su incumbencia. De ahí en adelante puede olvidar.

Pero que la razón positiva llegue sólo hasta aquí no implica que aquí se detenga toda reflexión sobre el asunto. Heidegger, por ejemplo, retoma justo en este punto el hilo de Hölderlin, y lo alarga todavía otro tramo. Si la crítica basa en ello sus pruritos hacia lo "literario" de su obra es, quizá, porque ve con desconfianza el "inmanentismo" que parece conllevar. No se lo podía reprochar a Hölderlin, que es un poeta, pero sí a Heidegger. Y es comprensible que así lo haga, pues la razón positiva en realidad no puede suponer —como parece hacerlo Heidegger— que Hölderlin haya cumplido en la locura el destino que él mismo había vislumbrado siempre para sí mismo en sus poemas. Y tampoco puede seguir a Hölderlin, sensatamente, hasta el punto de coincidir con él en que los dioses a veces tocan a los hombres con la locura, y que la locura es por lo tanto un don sagrado —y un don, como debe ser, más bien inútil, superfluo ante los ojos de los mortales comunes, desperdiciado. Pero al decir que esto no puede suponerse en realidad no estoy implicando que no pueda suponerse en absoluto —como metáfora por ejemplo, o, una vez más, como mito.

En cuanto tal mito, no me parece difícil aceptar que Hölderlin haya cumplido cabalmente su destino, como acepto el mito del Genio y el de la inspiración en los poetas —y hasta me valgo de él, como Jaspers, para intentar comprender algo que no pertenece, estrictamente hablando, al mundo del mito. Y esto porque creo que la locura no está nunca del todo vacía de sentido y que siempre tiene algo que decirnos sobre el mundo en el que, sin embargo, tiene lugar. Es decir, porque creo, como el dicho popular, que "no hay loco que coma fuego". O porque creo, como dice Jaspers, que "el espíritu en sí no puede enfermar"20; que "durante la esquizofrenia puede el paciente dar un sentido a ciertas vivencias que le proporciona su enfermedad, y valorarlas en relación con su existencia espiritual", pues "por sí misma la locura no es un fenómeno de orden espiritual"21... y Hölderlin sigue siendo evidentemente Hölderlin en su locura.

No se me escapa que deslindar de este modo locura y espíritu tiene a su vez algo de mitológico (y muy poco de psiquiátrico, además), pero es quizá una buena estrategia para intentar comprender de qué modo Hölderlin, su poesía y su locura han llegado a reunirse tan íntimamente en un mismo mito y para buscar en él aquello que lo vuelve milagroso. Tan milagroso que convierte la locura en santidad. Me explicaré.

Que Hölderlin haya cumplido cabalmente el destino que él mismo vislumbraba para sí (y que consistía precisamente en mostrar poéticamente cuál ese destino que se cumplía en mostrarlo) sólo puede verse como una coincidencia si uno se sitúa fuera, muy afuera de la obra misma del poeta y, en consecuencia, de su caso específico. Es lo que hacen por lo general los psiquiatras, y lo que les reprocha Jaspers. Pero para situarse dentro de esa obra es preciso reconocer lo que de mítico hay en ella, y por lo tanto proponer que "el espíritu no enferma". Sólo así puede entenderse que la obra de Hölderlin se haya visto coronada por la locura; porque sólo de esta manera la locura viene a decir lo mismo que la obra y, a fin de cuentas, lo mismo que la vida toda del poeta, como si en su locura se condensara todo su ser. Sólo en ese sentido puede decirse que, en el caso de Hölderlin —puesto que es un mito—, la locura es santidad. Porque fuera de ahí no podríamos comprender que esté "en brazos de los dioses" quien está postrado en la más pura indigencia y cuyo aspecto —según le escribe Schelling a Hegel en 1803— "repugna de puro abandono".22

Hölderlin presentía esto al escribir que, en su juventud, "las grandes palabras doradas de la muerte de los héroes empezaron a llenar mi corazón de un espanto cargado de presentimientos".23 Pero no sólo intuyó su locura sino que vio en ella el precio que debía pagar a los dioses por revelar entre los hombres su mensaje. Unos versos de su Empédocles nos servirán de ejemplo. En ellos el sacerdote Hermócrates muestra la necesidad del destino trágico de los héroes (y del de Hölderlin):

Funesto como el fuego o la espada
es el espíritu del hombre, émulo de los dioses,
cuando no sabe callar y esconder su secreto
celosamente. Mas si lo guarda
en el fondo del alma, sin dejar entrever
sino lo imprescindible, entonces es un bien
este fuego que todo lo devora al romper sus
/cadenas.
¡Fuera de aquí quien desnuda su alma
y descubre sus dioses, el temerario
que pretende expresar lo inexpresable,
y, como si fuera agua, deja correr
la peligrosa ciencia que atesora! Quien tal hace,
peor es que un asesino... y, como un criminal
debe pasar su vida entre aflicciones
todo el que pone en manos del hombre lo
/divino.24

Hay en ello un pecado de desacato y desmesura, una hybris, como decían los griegos, que los dioses del Olimpo castigan sin remedio. Y castigado por el Olimpo se siente Hölderlin, golpeado por Apolo, sacrificado ("crucificado", como se sentiría Nietzsche, arrebatado a su vez, y "cobijado", por su propia locura).

Y la misma dramática aptitud para participar, aun débilmente, en una divinidad caída y en un culto olvidado, convierte a esos seres mortales en seres semidivinos perdidos entre la confusa masa de los humanos. Tal fue el caso de Friedrich Hölderlin —dice Cernuda.25

Sí, ese fue siempre su destino para él, y lo es para nosotros. No otro, menos trágico o menos griego, pues todo cuanto le atañe implica una vuelta a Grecia. Aun la revolución que propugna ha de volver a Grecia, si en verdad quiere devolver a los hombres su legítima libertad y su antigua dignidad. En el prólogo a su traducción de los Poemas de Hölderlin, José-Miguel Mínguez dice que el poeta "ve la promesa de una vida dichosa [aun] en la oscuridad y en lo anodino de su siglo. El futuro será un retorno: el retorno a Grecia".26

Pero ¿por qué Grecia? ¿Por qué no evitar en este grave asunto el uso de ese símbolo que su propia época tanto desgastó, según el mismo Hölderlin se lo reprocha a "Los poetas hipócritas?":

[...] ¡no habléis de los dioses!
Sois demasiado razonables para creer en Helios,
en Zeus tonante, en el dios de los mares.
La tierra por vosotros está yerta.
¿Qué agradecimiento iréis a presentarle?

¿Por qué pues justamente Grecia? Por sinceridad y honra. Dilthey dice que, a diferencia de sus compañeros de Tubinga (Hegel y Schelling), Hölderlin captaba el punto más hondo de la concepción griega del mundo: la idea de la afinidad entre la naturaleza, los hombres, los héroes y los dioses. Los helenos representaban para él la experiencia viva de nuestra interior comunidad de ser con la naturaleza; un arte que exalta la belleza del mundo basada en esta unidad de la vida y respeta las grandes pasiones en lo que tienen de santo; el culto de la amistad, del heroísmo y de ansia por una existencia grande, peligrosa y heroica. En medio de la miseria de la vida alemana de aquel entonces, jamás le abandonó la nostalgia de este mundo ya desaparecido.27

Hölderlin ve en los griegos la última nación de hombres que aún habló la lengua de los dioses y los llamó "por su nombre". Y no puede evitar gritarlo a los cuatro vientos. Por fidelidad a sí mismo, por sinceridad y honradez, cualidades que no sólo lo calificaban a él sino que, a los ojos de Dilthey, sustentaban el edificio entero de su experiencia religiosa: "Lo único que quería —dice Dilthey— era mantener su alma pura. De esta pureza de alma nacía lo que había en él de vidente".28

Uno presiente en estas palabras, una vez más, a Nietzsche, que tampoco vio en los dioses de Grecia un mero recurso literario para dar un lustre clásico y erudito a su literatura, cosa tan frecuente en su época. Y es que no hay nada más alejado de Hölderlin que la actitud de Schiller (su maestro, sin embargo, y protector), que simplemente —como los psiquiatras de Jaspers— veía en los dioses griegos "hermosos seres del país de la fábula".29 No. "Hölderlin es el único poeta al que se debe creer cuando dice que cree en los dioses", como escribe Guardini. Porque es sincero y es sólo esa sinceridad lo que puede servirles de divisa tanto al milagro de Hölderlin como a su locura. Otra vez en palabras de Guardini:

El sentido religioso de Hölderlin era extraordinario por su pureza y desarrollo. Puede decirse que tomó la dirección de su vida espiritual. Lo que definitivamente determinó su tabla de valores fue la experiencia religiosa, unida a una potencia maravillosamente pura de visión poética y de expresión. Mas tanto la actitud religiosa como la poética de Hölderlin, distinguíanse profundamente de las características de los tiempos modernos: les faltaba subjetividad. Su conciencia religiosa se enderezaba no a estados o alteraciones personales, sino a fuerzas y entidades objetivas. La interioridad a que llegaba no era una esfera subjetiva, sino las profundidades del ser real, del hombre singular, del pueblo, del río, de la montaña, de la planta y del animal, de la tierra, del mar, finalmente, del mundo. Y lo que exigía su temperamento artístico era, no comunicar propias experiencias, sino alabar sublimes entidades, publicar potestades, ser anunciador de grandes sucesos, emisario de los mandatos del mundo.31

La misma sinceridad que antes vimos como divisa de las verdades del poeta se muestra ahora aquí como inocencia. Por eso aquel regreso a Grecia suele verse también como una vuelta a la infancia. No es extraño. Hölderlin mismo a menudo asociaba la infancia con lo divino (que tampoco tiene destino) y con una natural disposición a escuchar con claridad, inocentemente y con pureza, lo que se dice en la lengua de los dioses. Es un tema que recogió Rilke en la novena de sus Elegías de Duino ("No creáis que el destino sea más que el espesor de la infancia"32) y que después ha hecho popular también el psicoanálisis. Pero, para terminar, permítanme mostrar esto en un poema juvenil del mismo Hölderlin, que acaso pudiera también servir como epitafio a su poesía, si es verdad que el principio aparece de nuevo al final; si es verdad que la infancia y Grecia son un destino, y vuelven:

CUANDO YO ERA NIÑO

Cuando yo era niño
muy a menudo me salvaba un dios
del griterío y la cólera de los hombres;
jugaba entonces, tranquilo y bueno,
con las flores del bosque
y las brisas del cielo
jugaban conmigo.
Y lo mismo
que el corazón alegras de las plantas
cuando hacia ti
sus tiernos brazos tienden, así
alegrabas tú mi corazón,
¡padre Helios!; y, como Endimión,
tu favorito fui,
¡Luna sagrada!
¡Oh vosotros, fieles,
amables dioses todos,
si supierais
cuánto os amó mi alma!
Entonces, sin embargo, aún no os llamaba yo
con nombres, ni vosotros
me nombrabais a mí, como hacen los hombres
igual que si se conocieran.
Pero yo os conocía
mejor de lo que nunca conocí a los hombres;
comprendía el silencio del Éter;
las palabras humanas jamás las entendí.
Me educó lo armonioso
de la arboleda susurrante
y fui aprendiendo a amar entre las flores.
Yo crecí en brazos de los dioses.33

Muchas gracias.

Cuernavaca-Chiconcuac, 15-19 de septiembre de 2000

Notas

________________

* Una versión de este ensayo fue presentada el 18 de septiembre del 2000 en el diplomado "Poesía y psicoanálisis" de la Facultad de Psicología de la UAEM, en Cuernavaca.

(1) Jaspers, Karl, Genio y locura, Traducción de Agustín Caballero Robredo, Aguilar, Madrid, 1968.

(2) Ibíd., p.187.

(3) Ibíd., p.196.

(4) Carta a Böhlendof fechada el 4 de diciembre de 1081, reproducida en Hölderlin, Ensayos, Traducción, presentación y notas de Felipe Martínez Marzoa, Libros Hiperión (I. Peralta, Ediciones), Madrid, 1976, p.129.

(5) Heidegger, Martin, "Hölderlin y la esencia de la poesía", en Arte y poesía, Traducción de Samuel Ramos, México, FCE, 1958, p.138.

(6) Heidegger, Martin, "What are Poets for", en Poetry, Language, Thought, Traducción al inglés de Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row, New York, 1975.

(7) Citado por Jaspers, Op. cit., p.190.

(8) Whyte, Lancelot, El inconsciente antes de Freud, Trad. de Maria Luisa Díez-Canedo, Joaquín Mortiz, México, 1967.

(9) Citado en Dilthey, Wilhelm, Vida y poesía, Traducción de Wenceslao Roces, Prólogo y notas de Eugenio Imaz, FCE, México, 1945, p.435.

(10) Dilthey, Op. cit., p.479.

(11) Heidegger, Arte y poesía, p.132.

(12) Heidegger, Martin, Arte y poesía, pp. 133-134.

(13) Dilthey, Op. cit., p.455.

(14) Hölderlin, Friedrich, Ensayos, Traducción de Felipe Martínez Marzoa, libros Hiperión, Madrid, 1976, p.90.

(15) Ibid., p.91-92.

(16) Ibid., p.93.

(17) Ibid., p.95.

(18) Ibid., p. 96.

(19) Cernuda, Luis, en el Prólogo a Hölderlin, Poemas, Versión española de Luis Cernuda y Hans Gebser, Séneca, México, 1942, p.8.

(20) Jaspers, Op. cit., p.182.

(21) Ibid., p.194.

(22) Citado por Jaspers en Op. cit., p.181.

(23) Citado en Dilthey, Op. cit., p.409.

(24) Tomo la traducción que aparece en Jaspers (Op. cit., p.198), pues me parece menos deficiente que las otras versiones al español, y además está en verso.

(25) Cernuda, Op. cit., p..

(26) Mínguez, José-Miguel, "La poesía de Hölderlin en el mundo de hoy", Prólogo a su traducción de: Hölderlin, Friedrich, Poemas, Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1975, p.25.

(27) Dilthey, Op. cit., p.416.

(28) Ibíd.., p.405.

(29) Citado por Mínguez en Op. cit., p.30.

(30) Guardini, Romano, Hölderlin. Weltbild und Frömmingkeit [Hölderlin. Imagen del mundo y religiosidad], Leipzig, 1939, p.16. Citado por Mínguez en Op. cit., p.31.

(31) Ibíd.., p.194. Citado por Mínguez en Op. cit., p.31.

(32) Rilke, Rainer Maria, Elegías de Duino, Traducción de Félix Dauajare, Ediciones sin nombre, 2» ed., México, 1997.

(33) Como en los demás poemas de Hölderlin aquí citados, compongo esta versión echando mano sobre todo de tres versiones distintas: 1) la de Ernst-Edmund Keil y Jenaro Taléns (Poemas, Hontanar, Valencia, 1971); 2) la de José María Valverde (Doce poemas, Adonais, México, 1949); y 3) la de José-Miguel Mínguez (Poemas, Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1975), que sirvió sobre todo de testigo para las otras dos. Es una lástima que no haya versión de Cernuda de ninguno de los poemas citados aquí.

fscamelo@prodigy.net.mx

Francisco Segovia, "Hölderlin: locura y santidad", Fractal n° 18, julio-septiembre, 2000, año 4, volumen V, pp. 87-105.

2 B's from the triple B... BachBeethovenBrahms

2011-12-24T12:23:00.000-06:00

This post is just to keep track of what I like... thanks to Centro de música clásica

Beethoven Complete Edition (87 cds)

links (rars de 700mb cada uno / rars of 700mb each one):

http://www.fileserve.com/file/yrwf7sA
http://www.fileserve.com/file/YsGAQQ7
http://www.fileserve.com/file/sj8MhDT
http://www.fileserve.com/file/fnN52vt
http://www.fileserve.com/file/UUSufeK
http://www.fileserve.com/file/5XuuvNR
http://www.fileserve.com/file/T7qFwHh
http://www.fileserve.com/file/zymHPcq

scans:
http://www.fileserve.com/file/QBDtGxc

Brahms Complete Edition (43 cds)

links:

http://www.fileserve.com/file/UDRHfK3
http://www.fileserve.com/file/593qDgW
http://www.fileserve.com/file/rY7H4SV
http://www.fileserve.com/file/EZJ8Bjs
http://www.fileserve.com/file/WQEydsY
http://www.fileserve.com/file/UsJYYjV
http://www.fileserve.com/file/f9z7ZYs

Extra:

CICLO DE CANCIONES Op.39 (1840)

(Liederkreis)

Música de Robert Alexander Schumann(1810 - 1856)

Letra de Joseph von Eichendorff (1788 -1857)

Op. 39 Ciclo de canciones(Liederkreis)

LOS AMORES DE UNPOETA Op.48

(Dichterliebe)

Música de Robert Alexander Schumann(1810 - 1856)

Texto de Heinrich Heine (1797 - 1856)

Op. 48 Los amores de un poeta (Dichterliebe)

NOVALIS (1772-1801) por Antoni Marí

2011-12-22T23:27:00.002-06:00

Nadie ha realizado como Novalis el ideal romántico: el ideal de la síntesis absoluta y de acceso al Todo. Su obra es la expresión del sentimiento de sentirse y saberse el centro del universo; un espacio donde no tienen lugar las desavenencias y la eterna lucha de contrarios deviene Unidad inseparable, unidad en constante devenir y mutación.
"Destruir el principio de contradicción es tal vez la más alta tarea de la más alta crítica". Todo concepto sintético contiene dos conceptos opuestos: vida y muerte constituyen una unidad, el consciente y el inconsciente se confunden, como se confunde la altura con la profundidad y el interior con el exterior. La obra de Novalis no está concebida desde el camino que conduce a la unidad, sino desde la unidad misma: "Soñamos en viajar por el espacio cósmico: ¿acaso no está en nosotros? Ignoramos las honduras de nuestro espíritu. La senda misteriosa va hacia dentro. En nosotros o en ninguna parte se encuentra la eternidad con sus mundos, lo pasado y lo futuro".

El hombre es una representación analógica del Universo. Microcosmos y macrocosmos en perfecta analogía y correspondencia proporcionales. Este sentirse uno con el Todo, esta armonía cósmica está descrita por Novalis en el concepto Stimmung. La palabra designa el acorde de un instrumento musical y la disposición (humor) del alma, y es, en la unión de los dos sentidos, en la que tiene lugar el fenómeno: un alma en estado de Stimmung es un alma bien atemperada.

"La palabra Stimmung se refiere a las relaciones anímicas de carácter musical. La acústica del alma es aún un campo muy oscuro, pero quizás muy importante. Oscilaciones armónicas e inarmónicas".
El Stimmungen es aquel cuya melodía y ritmo interiores está en perfecto acoplamiento y acorde con la melodía y ritmo universales. El Stimmung es uno de los efectos de una causa más vasta todavía: el Gemüt -armonía de todas las fuerzas espirituales.

Toda mística tiene como punto de partida el Ser, uno y absoluto, idéntico al pensamiento. Su objeto es la reducción a este Uno primitivo, infinito y eterno, emanación del pensamiento individual, limitado en el tiempo y en su potencialidad. El pensamiento de Novalis enlaza con toda la tradicción mística occidental desde los Eléatas hasta el maestro Eckhart; en ellos encontrará el reconocimiento de su propio pensamiento y su afirmación, no influirán ni torcerán su pensamiento puesto que estaban en él, previamente a su lectura.
En el idealismo absoluto de Fichte, encontrará su propio pensamiento explicitado y sistematizado que con el tiempo, y sin renunciar a él, devendrá idealismo mágico. Para Fichte, fuera del Yo no existe nada. "Fichte, dice Novalis, lo sitúa todo en el interior". Sólo el Yo es real: el No-Yo (todo lo que está fuera del Yo) no existe sino por una decisión del Yo que lo pone. El Yo es el Absoluto en quien y para quien existen todas las cosas. Si, a la vez, todas las cosas creadas por el Yo están en perfecta armonía con él, estaremos en posesión del Stimmung.

Únicamente la poesía puede hacer sensible esta experiencia y sólo por ella puede expresarse en toda su plenitud y complejidad. No hay otra forma de expresar esta vivencia trascendental sin la pérdida de todos sus infinitos matices. Expresión que se realiza a través de la palabra, del ritmo, y de la resonancia de la palabra en perfecta correspondencia con el mundo interior.
"La poesía es representación del alma, representación del mundo interior en su totalidad. Sus intermediarios, las palabras, lo indican, pues son la manifestación exterior de este reino profundo. El sentimiento poético tiene muchos puntos comunes con el sentimiento místico. Este es el sentimiento de todo lo que es particular, personal, desconocido, misterioso, de lo que debe ser revelado, de lo que es a la vez necesidad y azar. Representa lo irrepresentable... Es absurda la crítica de la poesía, puesto que es muy difícil precisar si una cosa es poesía o no, y ésta es la única distinción posible. El poeta es, literalmente, sujeto y objeto, alma y universo. De donde el carácter infinito, eterno, de un buen poema."

Antoni Marí
(Ibiza, 1979)

________________________

- Del libro "El Entusiasmo y la Quietud"
- Edición de Antoni Marí
- Tusquets Editores, 1979
________________________

Oda a Hölderlin de Hermann Hesse

2011-12-21T22:50:00.000-06:00

Amigo de mi juventud, a ti regreso agradecido
ciertos atardeceres, cuando entre los saúcos
en el jardín que duerme suena sólo
la fuente susurrante.

Hoy nadie te conoce, amigo mío; en estos tiempo nuevos
muchos se han apartado del encanto tranquilo de la Hélade,
sin oraciones y sin dioses
prosaicamente el pueblo camina sobre el polvo.

Pero para una secreta multitud de absortos entrañables
a los que el dios llenó el alma de anhelos
aún suenan las canciones
de tu arpa divina.
Cansados del trabajo regresamos ansiosos
a la ambrosiaca noche de tu canto,
cuyas flotantes alas nos protegen
con un sueño dorado.

Y cuando nos encanta tu canción más ardiente se enciende,
más dolorosamente arde hacia el país dichoso del pasado
hacia los templos de los griegos
esta nostalgia que jamás termina.

Versión de Jesús Ruiz

En torno al 9a de Beethoven

2011-12-21T20:23:00.000-06:00

Aquí les dejo la parte vocal traducida al castellano y con las voces quela interpretan. Es un arreglo de la "An die Freude" (algo así como Odao himno a la alegría) de Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) . El primer solode barítono está agregado por Beethoven, se supone que por razonesmusicales.

Solo de el baritono

¡Oh amigos, este tono no!
Mejor prorrumpamos más agradable
y alegremente.
¡Alegría! Alegría!
Solo de Cuarteto de voces y Coro

Alegría, bella chispa divina,
Hija del Elíseo,
Entramos, borrachos de fuego,
Divina, en Tu santuario!
Tus hechizos reúnen
Lo que la costumbre severa dividió;
Todos los hombres serán hermanos,
Donde repose Tu suave ala.

Quienquiera que logre la gran suerte
De ser amigo de un amigo;
Quien consiga una dulce esposa,
Que entremeta su júbilo!
¡Sí, también quien pueda reclamar
Un alma sola de toda la tierra!
Y quien jamás haya podido, que se hurte
Llorando de esta banda.

Alegría beben todos los seres
Del pecho de la Naturaleza;
Todos los buenos, todos los malvados,
Siguen su rostro de rosas.
Besos nos dio y vides,
Un amigo, probado en la muerte;
Voluptuosidad le concedió a los gusanos,
Y el querubín está plantado ante Dios.
Ante dios!

Solo de Tenor y Coro Masculino

Felices, como vuelan sus soles
Por el maravilloso plan del Cielo,
Corred, hermanos, vuestro camino,
Alegres, como un héroe a la victoria.

Coro

Recibid un abrazo, millones.
Este beso para todo el Planeta!
Hermanos, por encima del cielo estrellado
debe vivir un Padre cariñoso.
Os postráis, millones?
Presientes al Creador, mundo?
Búscadle sobre el cielo estrellado!
Sobre estrellas debe vivir.

[el final repite en fuga las palabras: ]
Recibid un abrazo, millones.
Este beso para todo el Planeta!
Hermanos! por encima del cielo estrellado
Debe vivir un Padre cariñoso.
Un abrazo, millones.
Este beso para todo el Planeta!
Alegría, bella chispa divina,
Hija del Elíseo,
Entramos, borrachos de fuego,
Divina, en Tu santuario!
Tus hechizos reúnen
Lo que la costumbre severa dividió;
Todos los hombres serán hermanos,
Donde repose Tu suave ala.
Alegría, bella chispa divina,
Hija del Elíseo,
Alegría, bella chispa divina! Escuchala:

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 9 in D minor "Choral", Op. 125
CONDUCTOR : Herbert von Karajan / ORCHESTRA : The Philharmonia Orchestra / year 1955

1. Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso (15:04)
Download (mp3)

2. Molto vivace (10:09)
Download (mp3)

3. Adagio molto e cantabile (16:06)
Download (mp3)

4. Recitative: (Presto – Allegro ma non troppo – Vivace – Adagio cantabile – Allegro assai – Presto: O Freunde) – Allegro assai: Freude, schöner Götterfunken – Alla marcia – Allegro assai vivace: Froh, wie seine Sonnen – Andante maestoso: Seid umschlungen, Millionen! – Adagio ma non troppo, ma divoto: Ihr, stürzt nieder – Allegro energico, sempre ben marcato: (Freude, schöner Götterfunken – Seid umschlungen, Millionen!) – Allegro ma non tanto: Freude, Tochter aus Elysium! – Prestissimo: Seid umschlungen, Millionen! (24:07)
Download (mp3)

Ignoria: Jorge Luis Borges - El principio

2011-12-15T13:58:00.000-06:00

Ignoria: Jorge Luis Borges - El principio: Dos griegos están conversando: Sócrates acaso y Parménides. Conviene que no sepamos nunca sus nombres; la historia, así, será má...

El principio

Dos griegos están conversando: Sócrates acaso y Parménides.

Conviene que no sepamos nunca sus nombres; la historia, así, será más misteriosa y más tranquila.
El tema del diálogo es abstracto. Aluden a veces a mitos, de los que ambos descreen.
Las razones que alegan pueden abundar en falacias y no dan con un fin.
No polemizan. Y no quieren persuadir ni ser persuadidos, no piensan en ganar o en perder.
Están de acuerdo en una sola cosa; saben que la discusión es el no imposible camino para llegar a una verdad.
Libres del mito y de la metáfora, piensan o tratan de pensar.
No sabremos nunca sus nombres.
Esta conversación de dos desconocidos en un lugar de Grecia es el hecho capital de la Historia.Han olvidado la plegaria y la magia.

Jorge Luis Borges

Holderlin, "The Poet in the Tower," by J.M. Coetzee

2011-12-09T11:47:00.001-06:00

The Poet in the Tower

October 19, 2006

J. M. Coetzee

E-mail Print Share

Poems and Fragments
by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated from the German by Michael Hamburger
London: Anvil, 823 pp., $29.95 (paper)

In the depths of the Second World War, in a London battered by German bombs, a young Jew named Michael Hamburger penned a lament in the voice of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin:

Diotima is dead, and silent
The island’s singing bird.
The temple I raised from ruin
Fallen again.

Where is the flame I stoked from ashes
Of the mind? Where are the heroes
And my pulsing song?
Nothing stirs on the lakes of time.

A volume of Hölderlin translations from Hamburger’s hand appeared in 1943. Meanwhile, in German classrooms, children were chanting verses from Hölderlin too:

O take me, take me up into the ranks,
so that I do not one day die a common death!
I do not want to die in vain, what
I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound

For the Fatherland, to pour out the heart’s blood
For the Fatherland.

Who was Hölderlin, who could be made to speak for both a lost past and a National Socialist future?
Friedrich Hölderlin was born in 1770 in the tiny independent duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany. His father—who died when the boy was two—was an ecclesiastical employee; his mother, the daughter of a clergyman, intended him for the church. He was sent to church schools and then to the prestigious theological seminary in Tübingen.

Württemberg was unusual among German statelets of the late eighteenth century: whereas most were ruled by absolute princes, in Württemberg the powers of the duke were constitutionally constrained by an assembly of non-noble families, the Ehrbarkeit, to which the Hölderlins belonged. This body, which included the clergy and upper bureaucracy, ran the cultural and intellectual life of the duchy.
Young men who passed the seminary’s stiff entrance examination were given a free education on condition they would thereafter serve in Württemberg parishes. Hölderlin was a reluctant seminarian: without success, he tried to persuade his mother to let him study law instead. She controlled his not inconsiderable inheritance: he remained dependent, until her death in 1828, on the meager allowances she doled out.

Though the seminary offered a first-class training in classical languages, theology, and divinity, there was also a stress on obedience to church and state that students found irksome. Hölderlin spent five restless years (1788–1793) there. Intellectual stimulus came not from his teachers—whom he looked down on for their obsequiousness in the face of authority—but from fellow students, who in his cohort included G.F.W. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. He himself stood out: “It was as if Apollo was striding through the hall,” a classmate recalled.
In practice the seminary produced more graduates than there were clerical openings, and disaffection with the system was rife. Hölderlin was not alone in dreaming of an alternative career as a man of letters. But the Consistorium, the board in charge of the seminary, was hostile to such ambitions. For the rest of his life he had to request permission before he changed abode or employment, under penalty of having to repay the cost of his education.

In the seminary Hölderlin wrote enthusiastic, rather strident poems of a pantheistic bent celebrating the universe as a living whole infused with divinity. Their immediate model was Friedrich Schiller,
but their philosophical underpinning was ultimately Neoplatonic. As his motto Hölderlin adopted the Greek phrase en kai pan, one and all: life is a harmonious unity, our goal must be to merge with the All.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then burst the bomb of the French Revolution. At the
two centers of learning in the duchy, the university and the seminary,
revolutionary societies were founded, French newspapers pored over,
revolutionary songs sung. Students joyfully endorsed the Declaration of
the Rights of Man. When in 1792 the European autocracies launched
attacks on France, it was the French armies for which they cheered. The
Duke of Württemberg deplored their support for “French anarchy and
regicide,” and tightened his control. Rather than fomenting anarchy,
the young philosophical radicals in fact hoped for the creation of a
republic of Württemberg, or of a wider Swabia, under the protection of
French arms, and were disconcerted when the Terror began to gather
momentum in France.

There is no doubting Hölderlin's revolutionary sympathies—”Pray for
the French, the champions of human rights,” he instructed his younger
sister—but his poems say nothing direct about politics. To a degree
this was because he had no models for political poetry; but it was also
because of a strong tradition among Germany's intellectual class of not
involving itself in political affairs.
The writer with the strongest following among young idealists was
Schiller, and Schiller's political line after 1793 was that the
consciousness of the people needed to be changed before true political
change could occur. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind
of 1794–1795 Schiller proposed that the human spirit could best be
enlightened, liberated, and refined by participating in aesthetic play.
For proof, one need look no further than ancient Athens, a democratic
society that prized the life of the mind.
Hölderlin approved the leading role that Schiller gave the artist,
but was disappointed by Schiller's antirevolutionary stance, as he was
dissatisfied with the skeptical divide between politics and ethics
maintained by Immanuel Kant: political reform might be desirable, said
Kant, but only as an aid to the more important goal of individual moral
growth. For a while Hölderlin found in Johann Fichte a guide more to
his liking; but in the end even Fichte was not strongly enough
committed to a utopian future.
The issue was human freedom and what freedom consisted in. The
idealism of Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling in their revolutionary
phase rested on a conviction that ideas could change the world, that
the inner freedom envisaged by Kant, Schiller, and Fichte could be
extended, that there could again emerge such a thing as a free society
along Athenian lines. If Schiller, following on Johann Winckelmann,
represented a second generation of German philhellenism, Hölderlin,
Hegel, and Schelling formed a third wave: young men who saw in Greece a
model to be emulated and even surpassed, not just in art and philosophy
but in democratic practice too.
Similarly with the French Revolution in its glory days. The
Revolution, said Hölderlin, gave an intimation of how the gap could be
bridged between ideas and reality, between the realm of the divine and
the world. En kai pan: what had once been whole and good, and
had then fallen apart, could be put together again. To search out
traces of lost unity in the chaos of appearance we have only the
aesthetic sense to rely on; to philosophy and poetry falls the task of
healing what was broken.
Nevertheless, the self-betrayal and defeat of the Revolution left
its mark on Hölderlin as on many other disappointed young Europeans of
his generation. “It would make terrible reading,” wrote his younger
contemporary Achim von Arnim in 1815, the year when the autocracies of
Europe reasserted their sway, “to count off all the beautiful German
souls who surrendered to madness or suicide or to careers they
detested.”

2.

Graduating from the seminary with the degree of Magister, and
resisting pressure from his mother to look for a parish, Hölderlin
established a toehold in literary Jena. An extract from his novel in
progress, Hyperion, was published in a magazine Schiller
edited; with Schiller himself Hölderlin established a quasi-filial
relationship. At first Schiller accepted the role genially enough,
giving Hölderlin advice about his verse-writing—notably to avoid large
philosophical subjects— which Hölderlin ignored. What Hölderlin was
really after was a more complicated and indeed Oedipal relationship
than the older man cared for—”I am at times in a secret struggle with
your genius, to protect my freedom against it,” he confided—and in the
end Schiller stopped answering his letters.
Needing an income, Hölderlin took on the first of a series of
appointments as resident tutor in the homes of well-to-do families.
None of these lasted long—Hölderlin had no particular rapport with
children—but the second, with a prominent Frankfurt family, affected
his life decisively. He fell in love with his employer's wife, Susette
Gontard, and she with him. Forced to resign, he for a while continued
to meet her clandestinely. But in 1802, at the age of thirty-four, she
contracted tuberculosis and died.
Love affairs between ambitious but penniless young intellectuals and
the neglected wives of businessmen are a staple of nineteenth-century
romantic fiction. Hölderlin's first biographer, Wilhelm Waiblinger, did
his best to assimilate Hölderlin and Susette to the genre: Susette, “a
young woman… of enthusiastic soul and fiery, vivacious disposition,”
was “inflamed to the highest degree” by Hölderlin's “gallant,
distinguished person, his fine eyes, his youth, his uncommon
understanding and eminent talent,” as well as his skill in music-making
and conversation. The reality transcended the clichés of fiction.
Susette's letters to Hölderlin have survived, along with a few of his
to her. As one reads them, writes David Constantine, “one's sympathy is
continually moved towards that peculiar sadness and outrage which comes
when one witnesses an irremediable harm being done.” “The thwarted
relation of Hölderlin and Susette Gontard can properly be called a
tragedy.”^[2]
In a sense Susette made Hölderlin as a poet. She gave him back the
confidence that Schiller had undermined. She persuaded him to look to
earlier German poets, Klopstock in particular, as models. But most
importantly she incarnated in his eyes the union of earthly beauty with
pure mind to which his more mystical, pantheistic intuitions had
pointed him—en kai pan—but in which he had lost confidence reading Kant and Fichte. Susette appears in the two-volume Hyperion(1797,
1799) as Diotima, a sage and beautiful woman who guides the steps of
Hyperion, a philhellene who has voyaged from his soulless German
homeland—where, as he bitterly remarks, poets live like strangers in
their own house—to help the Greeks in their struggle against the
Ottomans.
Fichte had taught that consciousness is not part of nature but
stands outside nature observing it. To Hölderlin the evolution of
consciousness had seemed to foster only a dispiriting sense of
alienation. Diotima-Susette brings Hyperion-Hölderlin to realize that
consciousness can be an agency of spiritual growth, that it is possible
to share at a fully conscious level in the divinity of the All.
Specifically, the experience of beauty leads to the divine. Thus in his
late twenties Hölderlin began to develop a philosophy with Platonic
undertones and a strongly aesthetic orientation, coupled with a
perspective on history in which the modern world is continually
measured against the standard of the ancient.
Hölderlin worked up the Greece of Hyperion out of travel
books, thereby joining a line of distinguished German philhellenes who
never visited Greece, a line that included Goethe and Winckelmann,
author of the little book, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), that had sparked off the philhellenic craze. In Hyperion
and in poems from the same period Hölderlin adopted Winckelmann's
Greece of “noble simplicity and quiet greatness” as the theater in
which he would thenceforth play out his ideas. If in bygone times men
had been free to pursue personal excellence and the life of the mind,
then they might be able to do so again in some liberated Germany of the
future.

After leaving the Gontards, Hölderlin took on two
further tutoring jobs, and was dismissed from each for erratic
behavior. He tried to win a lectureship in Greek at the University of
Jena, but without success. A friend created for him at the court of
Hessen-Homburg a position as librarian with the lightest of duties, a
position that the friend secretly funded. But this happy solution to
the problem of how the philosopher-poet might devote himself to what,
in a letter to his mother, he called “the higher and purer activities
for which God in his excellence has intended me” came to an abrupt end
when the friend was arrested on charges of treason. For a while it
seemed that Hölderlin himself might be charged as a co-conspirator; but
after a medical examination he was declared of unsound mind (his speech
was “half German, half Greek, half Latin,” said the doctor) and allowed
to go home to his mother.

To these last years of precarious sanity belongs much of Hölderlin's
greatest work: the late hymns, the Sophocles and Pindar translations,
the play The Death of Empedocles in its final version. He had
hoped to use his time in Homburg to write an exposition of his
philosophy of poetry, which had hitherto found only fragmentary
expression in essays and letters; but perhaps because he was losing the
capacity for extended thought the job was never done.
One of Hölderlin's biographers has argued that Hölderlin only
pretended to be mad to escape the law. But the weight of evidence
suggests otherwise. Hölderlin had been dismissed from his last
tutorships because fits of rage made him unfit to teach young children.
His attention wandered; he alternated between bursts of activity and
withdrawal; he was morbidly suspicious.
In 1806, after his condition had deteriorated further, Hölderlin was
conveyed, kicking and struggling, to a clinic in Tübingen from which he
was in due course discharged as incurable but harmless. A cabinetmaker
with literary interests took him in and housed him in a tower attached
to his home. His mother paid for his upkeep out of his inheritance,
assisted by a state annuity. He spent much of his time in his host's
garden, walking about alone, gesticulating and talking to himself.
There was a trickle of visitors, who would usually be welcomed with
courtly formality. A caller left a record of such a visit. From the
elderly poet he requested a few lines “as a souvenir.” “Shall they be
verses on Greece, Spring, or the Spirit of the Age?” he was asked. The
Spirit of the Age, replied the visitor. Hölderlin took out a folio
sheet and penned six lines of doggerel, signing them “Obediently,
Sardanelli. 24 May 1748.” Under the name Sardanelli and other aliases,
Hölderlin continued to write occasional verse until his death in 1843
at the age of seventy-three.
The poet in the tower was not forgotten by the reading public.
Editions of his poems appeared in 1826 and 1846. During his lifetime
Hölderlin was sentimentalized by romantics as a fragile soul driven to
madness by his daimon. Later he fell into neglect, remembered only as
an eccentric nostalgist for ancient Greece. Nietzsche had a deeper
appreciation of him; but it was not until the first decade of the
twentieth century, when he was taken up and promoted by the poet Stefan
George, that Hölderlin's star began to rise. With George commences the
reading of Hölderlin as a specifically German prophet-poet that would
later bedevil his image. “The great visionary for his people,” George
called him in 1919: “The cornerstone of the approaching German future
and the herald of the New God.”

On the centenary of Hölderlin's death a project was
launched to publish all of his writings, a task that would take forty
years to complete. For this so-called Stuttgart Edition the principles
of classical philology were applied to divide the surviving manuscript
material into a core of texts and a secondary corpus of variants. This
distinction between text and variant came to prove so contentious among
Hölderlin scholars that in 1975 a rival and yet to be completed
edition, the so-called Frankfurt Edition, was inaugurated on the
principle that there can be no core Hölderlinian text, that we must
learn to read the manuscripts as palimpsests of versions overlaying and
underlying other versions. For the foreseeable future the notion of a
definitive text of Hölderlin is thus in suspension.

One reason for this contest of editions is that in the
ninety-two-page notebook at the heart of the problem Hölderlin went
back and forth between new and old manuscript poems, using different
pens and inks in an unsystematic way, dating nothing, allowing what one
might naively call different versions of the same poem to stand side by
side. A deeper reason is that in his last productive years Hölderlin
seems to have abandoned the notion of the definitive and to have
regarded each seemingly completed poem as merely a stopping place, a
base from which to conduct further raids into the unsaid. Hence his
habit of breaking open a perfectly good poem, not in order to improve
it but to rebuild it from the ground up. In such a case, which is the
definitive text, which the variant, particularly when the rebuilding is
broken off and not resumed? Are apparently unfinished reworkings to be
regarded as abandoned projects, or might Hölderlin have been feeling
his way toward a new aesthetics of the fragmentary, and an accompanying
poetic epistemology of the flashing insight or vision?
In Germany the Hölderlin centenary of 1943 was celebrated on a grand
scale. Ceremonies took place across the country; hundreds of thousands
of Hölderlin readers were printed and distributed to German soldiers.
Why this philosopher-poet, elegist of the Greek past and foe of
autocracy, should have been adopted as a mascot of the Third Reich is
not obvious. Initially the line followed by the Nazi cultural office
was that Hölderlin was a prophet of the newly arisen German giant.
After the tide of the war turned at Stalingrad, that line was amended:
Hölderlin now spoke for European values being defended by Germany
against the advancing Asiatic, Bolshevist hordes.
All of this rested on a handful of patriotic poems interpreted in a
slanted way, plus some tinkering with the texts. Conveniently forgotten
was the fact that when Hölderlin wrote of a Vaterland he as
often as not meant Swabia rather than a wider Deutschland (which in
1800 was a cultural term, not a political one). The Nazis certainly did
not absorb his warning, in the poem “Voice of the People,” against the
“mysterious yearning toward the chasm” that can overtake whole nations.
The fortunes of Hölderlin under the Nazis are intricately
intertwined with his fortunes in the hands of his most influential
interpreter, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's meditations on the place of
Germany in history are carried out largely in the form of commentaries
on Hölderlin. In the 1930s Heidegger saw Hölderlin as the prophet of a
new dawn; when the Reich collapsed he saw him as the consoling poet for
dark times when the gods withdraw. While in rough outline this account
squares with the Nazi version, it does an injustice to the seriousness
with which Heidegger reflects on each line of Hölderlin. To Heidegger
in “the completely destitute time” of the pres-ent (he was writing in
1946), when the relevance of poetry is everywhere in doubt, Hölderlin
is the one who articulates most clearly the essential calling of the
poet, namely to speak the words that bring a new world into being. We
read Hölderlin's dark poetry, says Heidegger, not so much to understand
him as to keep in contact with him until that future arrives when he
will at last be understandable. He quotes Hölderlin:

The bold spirit, like an eagle
Before the tempests, flies prophesying
In the path of his advancing gods.

Among the liberal intelligentsia of Germany in
Hölderlin's day there prevailed not just an admiration for Athens as a
model society where men devoted themselves to the quest for truth,
beauty, and justice, but also a somewhat starry-eyed vision of a past
when the divine was a living force in the world. “Where the gods were
more like human beings/Human beings were more godlike,” wrote Schiller
in “The Gods of Greece” (1788). This picture of Greece was based
largely on a reading of Greek poetry, to a lesser extent on secondhand
accounts of Greek sculpture. An elective affinity was claimed between
Germany and Greece, between the German language and the Greek language.
A new theory of literature was developed, based on Plato rather than
Aristotle, in which key elements of modernist aesthetics are
prefigured: the autonomy of the art object, organic form, the
imagination as a demiurgic power.

Out of an idealized vision of Greece grew a movement whose agenda,
as formulated by Kant, was to allow “the germs implanted by nature” in
humankind to develop fully, so that “man's destiny can be fulfilled
here on earth.” Beginning with the reforms to the Prussian education
system effected by Wilhelm von Humboldt, reforms that put the study of
Greek language and literature at the core of the curriculum,
philhellenic neohumanism rapidly came to dominate the education of the
German middle classes.
The project of remodeling Germany along Athenian lines was to an
extent the brainchild of young men with little social capital save a
schooling in the classics (Winckelmann was the son of a shoemaker,
Schiller the son of a soldier) but with ambitions to wrest control of
cultural life from the Frenchified German courts and to give a new,
nationalist meaning to German identity. Within a generation, however,
the tincture of revolutionary idealism had been purged from the
education system, as the career men and professionals took over. Though
it continued to be associated with a lofty if vague liberalism,
philhellenism in the academy had by the 1870s become part of a
conservative establishment. The new radicals were the archaeologists
and textual scholars, Nietzsche among them, to whom the neohumanist
version of Greece—Winckelmann's “noble simplicity and quiet greatness,”
Humboldt's “purity, totality, and harmony” —ignored too much of Greek
reality, the violence and irrationalism of Greek religion, for instance.
At first glance, Hölderlin may seem a typical neohumanist of his
generation: a déclassé intellectual alienated from church and state,
aspiring toward a utopia in which poets and philosophers would be
accorded their rightful due; more specifically, a poet constitutionally
trapped in a backward-looking posture, mourning the passing of an age
when gods mixed with men (“…My friend, we have come too late. Though
the gods are living,/Over our heads they live, up in a different
world./…Little they seem to care whether we live or do not”).
But such a reading underestimates the complexity of Hölderlin's
attitude toward Greece. To him the Greeks were not to be copied but
confronted: “If one is not to be crushed by the accepted,…there seems
little choice but with violent arrogance to pit oneself as a living
force against everything learned, given.”

Ramifications of this stance are explored in a
letter of 1801. To the Greeks, says Hölderlin, “holy pathos” and the
Apollonian “fire from heaven” came naturally. Intrinsic (eigen)
to Western thought, on the other hand, are “Junonian sobriety” and
“clarity of representation.” “Nothing is more difficult for us to learn
than free use of our national traits…. This sounds like paradox. But
I repeat…: in the advancement of culture [Bildung] the
intrinsically national will always prove to be of lesser benefit.” The
most striking achievement of Greek art was to master sobriety and
clarity. Out of admiration for the Greeks, the Western poet may try to
recreate Greek pathos and fire; but the profounder task is to master
what comes naturally to him. This is why the Greeks are “indispensable”
to us: we study them not in order to imitate them but to understand how
unlike them we are.

Not only does this letter belie the picture of Hölderlin as a
dreamer lost in the past, it also underlines the originality and rigor
of his thinking about art. What the modern poet most clearly lacks, he
writes, is technical training (in his own case, long apprenticeship to
Greek masters fitted him to domesticate Greek meters more fluently than
any of his European contemporaries). We arrive at poetic truth not by
giving utterance to our personal feelings but by carrying our
individual sensibility [Gemüth] and individual experience across into “analogical material of a different [fremd] kind.”

The most intensely inward feeling becomes vulnerable to
passing away to the extent that it is not prepared to disown its actual
[wahren] temporal and sensory connections…. Precisely for this
reason the tragic poet, because he expresses the deepest inward
intensity, wholly disowns his own person, his subjectivity, as well as
the object present to him, and carries them over [instead] into alien [fremde] personality, into alien objectivity.

The great subject of Hölderlin's poetry is the retreat of God or the
gods, and the role of the poet in the benighted or destitute times that
follow their retreat.

…Since
The most Blessed in themselves feel nothing
Another, if to say such a thing is
Permitted, must, I suppose,
Vicariously feel in the name of the gods,
And him they need,

he writes, with palpable diffidence, in the late hymn “The Rhine.”
But what can it be that the gods in their remoteness look to us to
feel? We do not know; all we can do is put in words our most intense
yearning for their return, and hope that, touched perchance by fire
from heaven, our words may to some extent incarnate the Word and thus
transform yearning into epiphany. (In his fitful faith in a Word that
will use human agency to express itself, Hölderlin comes closest to his
friend Hegel's historical idealism.)
The Greeks, observed Goethe, did not pine for the infinite but felt
at home in the world. A hankering for a lost “classic” wholeness is the
trademark of the Romantic. Hölderlin's Romantic longing to be reunited
with the divine comes to him not just from his early Neoplatonism—en kai pan—but
also from his Christian roots. In the overarching
mythological-historical scheme he constructed, Christ counts as simply
the last of the gods to tread the earth before night closes in; but the
late hymns suggest the beginnings of a rapprochement, a new intimacy
with Christ if not with the Christian religion:

…And yet, and yet,
You ancient gods and all
You valiant sons of the gods,
One other I look for whom
Within your ranks I love…
My Master and Lord!
O you, my teacher!
Why did you keep
Away?

Where Hölderlin's explorations would have taken him had the light
not gone out in his thirty-sixth year is anyone's guess. There is one
text from his afterlife in the tower that may suggest the direction of
his thought. In 1823 his friend and biographer Waiblinger published a
seven-hundred-word fragment of prose that he claimed to have extracted
from the poet's papers. If we accept its authenticity, it suggests
that, in times more destitute than he could ever have foreseen,
Hölderlin's fundamental hopefulness remained undimmed—his faith that
our creative, meaning-making faculty will see us through. I quote from
Richard Sieburth's translation:

…Is God unknown?
Is he manifest as the sky? This I tend
To believe. Such is man's measure.
Well deserving, yet poetically
Man dwells on this earth. But the shadow
Of the starry night is not more pure, if I may say so,
Than man, said to be in the image of God.^[3]

3.

Michael Hamburger was born in Germany in 1924. In 1933 the Hamburger
family emigrated to Britain, where they integrated smoothly into the
upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Hamburger was a precocious student,
winning a scholarship to Oxford at the age of seventeen to study French
and German. His first book of translations, Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, appeared from a small press in 1943.
These early versions were later more or less disowned. In 1952 a
new, expanded set of Hölderlin translations appeared, followed in 1966
by what was intended to be a “definitive selection and rendering.”
Though in 1990 some poems were added, most of the latest edition (2004)
dates from the 1960s.
Michael Hamburger is very much the doyen of translators of modern
German poetry. Yet in his memoirs he admits to some exasperation at
being best known as a translator. As a young man he clearly had
creative ambitions, and for a while his poems were to be found in
anthologies of modern British verse. Read as a whole, his Collected Poems
tells a story of a writer of some gifts who never quite found his true
subject and who, sometime in early middle age, gave up the quest and
settled for occasional verse.
There is a passage in one of Hölderlin's letters that Hamburger quotes with clear reference to himself:

For this is tragic among us, that we leave the realm of the
living quite calmly, packed into a container, not that devoured by
flames we atone for the flame which we could not master.

For Hamburger the sacred flame he could not master went out early;
the life of atonement as translator and scholar he regards as a sad
second best. (There is some irony here in the fact that Hölderlin
himself reached audacious poetic heights as a translator.)
In a succession of prefaces and essays Hamburger has spelled out his
aims as a translator. What he did wrong in 1943, he says, was to
privilege literal accuracy over Hölderlin's “beautifully singular” way
of writing:

No translation of Hölderlin's odes and elegies can be close
to the originals without rendering their metres or at least their
cadences, and conveying something of their peculiar dynamism, their
peculiar stillness, brought about by the tension between a strict form
and an impulse beating against it.

He has striven therefore for “the best possible translation of a
certain kind,” in which word-for-word accuracy is weighed against the
need to reproduce Hölderlin's music. He dismisses the kind of free
translation practiced by Ezra Pound and fashionable in the 1960s under
the name of “imitation”: “occupational therapy for poets partly or
temporarily disabled,” he calls it.

We get an idea of Hamburger's “best possible” in his
version of the ode “The Poet's Courage,” composed around 1800,
substantially rewritten a year or two later, and then even more
radically reworked under the title “Timidness.” Hamburger selects the
first version.

For, as quiet near shores, or in the silvery
Flood resounding afar, or over silent deep
Water travels the flimsy
Swimmer, likewise we love to be
Where around us there breathe, teem those alive, our kin,
We, their poets; and glad, friendly to every man,
Trusting all. And how else for
Each of them could we sing his god?
Though the wave will at times, flattering, drag below
One such brave man where, true, trusting he makes his way,
And the voice of that singer
Now falls mute as the hall turns blue;
Glad he died there, and still lonely his groves lament
Him whom most they had loved, lost, though with joy he drowned;
Often a virgin will bear his
Kindly song in the distant boughs.

The meter is asclepiadic, an intricate pattern of iambs and dactyls
broken by caesurae in the longer first two lines of each four-line
strophe. Hamburger renders Hölderlin's versification faithfully, and
although one might quibble with certain word choices (“flimsy” might be
replaced with “light-bodied,” for instance, and “grows dim” would be
better than “turns blue”), the musical effect he achieves in English is
ravishing, capturing exactly the tone of hope, tentative yet vibrant,
with which Hölderlin confronts defeat, a tone that characterizes both
his grasp of his vocation and his vision of history.
“If I had not…found it necessary to imitate Hölderlin's
meters…then many of my translations would have become smoother and
more acceptable to English ears,” writes Hamburger. He is scathing
about what he sees as the unadventurousness of English prosody —its
prejudice against classical meters and its unthinking preference for
the iamb. At the risk of seeming “pedestrian and pedantic” he takes it
upon himself “to reproduce even those peculiarities of [Hölderlin's]
diction, form and way of thinking which are alien both to myself and to
English conventions obtaining either in his time or in ours.” His
method works, he believes, as long as the English reader is prepared to
approach his renderings “as poems necessarily different from any
written in [the reader's] own language, in his own time.”
The peculiarities of diction and form that Hamburger alludes to are
not just Hölderlin's use of Greek meters but his practice of varying
poetic diction in accord with a system of “tonal modulation” that he
developed from hints in Schiller and outlined in a cryptic essay
entitled “Wechsel der Töne.” Hamburger is one of only two translators
of Hölderlin who, to my knowledge, have taken the system to heart
seriously enough to embody it in their own versions (Cyrus Hamlin is
the other). Its presence beneath the surface of his English texts,
together with the exigencies of the metrical scheme, may go some way
toward explaining, here and there, lapses into archaism (“Silence often
hehoves [sic] us” for “Schweigen müssen wir oft,” often we must be silent) and incongruous colloquialism (“Too greatly,/O Christ, I'm attached to you”).

The sternest test comes in Hölderlin's late poems,
where the music becomes more impetuous and the poetic logic —hinging on
conjunctions (denn, aber, nemlich) used as if they
were Greek rather than German—more enigmatic, and where lines of verse
are interspersed with what read like memos from the poet to himself
(“This river seems/ to travel backwards and/I think it must come from
the East,” he writes of the Danube. “Much could/Be said about this”).
Here Hamburger's determination to avoid building his own interpretation
into the poem issues sometimes in a lifeless literalism. Compare the
following two translations of a passage from Hölderlin's poem on the
Danube, “Der Ister.” The first is by Hamburger:

But here we wish to build.
For rivers make arable
The land. For when herbs are growing
And to the same in summer
The animals go to drink,
There too will human kind go.
This one, however, is called the Ister.
Beautifully he dwells. The pillars' foliage burns,
And stirs. Wildly they stand
Supporting one another; above,
A second measure, juts out
The roof of rocks.

The second is by Richard Sieburth:

For the rivers make the land
Arable. If there be vegetation
And animals come to water
At the banks in summer,
Here men will also go.
And they call this the Ister.
Beautiful his dwelling. Leaves on columns
Burn and quiver. They stand in the wild,
Rising among each other; above which
Surges a second mass,
The roofing of rock.

The words “build,” “herbs,” “dwells” in Hamburger's version
literally translate the wording of the original. “Beautifully he
dwells” sounds as odd in German as in English (it is in fact a
Graecism). Sieburth, on the other hand, sees no harm in nudg-ing words
until they sit more comfortably in English or clarify the logic of the
passage. Thus “herbs” becomes “foliage,” “build” becomes “settle.”
The divergence of approach between the two translators becomes more
pointed in the image with which the passage closes. The last three
lines clearly refer to rocky crags above the tree level of the valley
floor. Sieburth feels free to write “a second mass,/The roofing of
rock,” even though Hölderlin's word Maß (“Ein zweites Maß…/ Von Felsen das Dach“) means “measure” rather than “mass.” Hamburger, perhaps because Maß
is such a key term in Hölderlin (not only the measure of verse but the
Greeks as a measure of ourselves), cautiously retains the sense of
measure, plane, dimension, and thus comes up with a less vivid
rendering.
It is an open question whether the project that Hamburger embarked
on half a century ago was wisely planned —the project of translating
into English a body of work whose textual foundation would grow less
and less steady over the years, reproducing as far as possible its
metrical patterning and play of levels of language. Hamburger seems not
to have doubted himself, though the prefaces to succeeding editions
betray an increasing defensiveness. There are signs that he does not
welcome criticism: errors identified by Paul de Man in his versions of
“Bread and Wine” and “The Rhine” have been left untouched. Perhaps with
the Nazi appropriation of Hölderlin at the back of his mind, he tends
to treat words like Vaterland and Volk more gingerly than is necessary, in places translating Volk as “kin” and Vaterland as “my country” or “our country.”
His achievement is nevertheless considerable. The 2004 edition of Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments contains about 170 poems, some in alternative versions, plus The Death of Empedocles
in its second and third drafts, plus the so-called Pindar fragments—in
other words, the bulk of Hölderlin's surviving verse, including all the
major poems of the years between 1800 and 1806. Empedocles is
particularly well rendered; as for the poems, though Hamburger's
versions prove only intermittently to be touched with divine fire, they
are a reliable guide to Hölderlin's German and give an echo of his
outlandish music.

Notes

^[1] Michael Hamburger, Collected Poems 1941–1983 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), p. 21.
^[2] David Constantine, Hölderlin (Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 110.
^[3] Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments(Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 249.

Georg Lukács 1934 - Hölderlin’s Hyperion

2011-12-09T11:44:00.001-06:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 1934;
Translator: Robert Anchor;
Source: Goethe and His Age Merlin Press 1968;
Transcribed: Harrison Fluss for marxists.org, February 2008.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh! were there a banner ... a Thermopylae upon which I could spill my blood with honour, all that solitary love for which I can have no use.

[O gab’es eine Fahne . . . ein Thermopyla, wo ich mit Ehre sie verbluten konnte, all die einsame Liebe, die mir nimmer brauchbar ist].

Hölderlin’s glory is that he is the poet of Hellenism. Everyone who reads his work senses that his Hellenism is different, more sombre, more tortured by suffering than the radiant Utopia of antiquity envisaged during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But his vision of Hellas has nothing in common either with the tedious, trivial, academic classicism of the nineteenth century or with the hysterical bestiality with which Nietzsche and the imperialist period envisaged Greece. The key to Hölderlin’s view lies then in the understanding of the specifics of this conception of Hellenism.

With inimitable clarity Marx uncovered the social basis of the veneration for antiquity during the great French Revolution.

“As unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nonetheless had need of heroism, the spirit of self-sacrifice, terror, civil war, and wars between nations in order to engender it. And it is in the rigorous classical traditions of the Roman Republic that its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the illusions which they needed to conceal from themselves the limited civic content of their struggle and to keep their passion at the pitch of the great historical tragedy.”

The peculiar situation of Germany during the transition of the bourgeoisie from its heroic to its unheroic period consists in the fact that the country itself was still far from being mature enough for a real bourgeois revolution, but that in the minds of its best ideologists the heroic flame of these “illusions” was bound to flare up; in the fact that the tragic transition from the heroic age of the polls republic dreamed by Robespierre and Saint-Just into capitalist prose had to be effected in a purely Utopian and ideological manner without a preliminary revolution.

In the Tubingen seminary three young students witnessed with enraptured rejoicing the great days of the revolutionary liberation of France. With youthful enthusiasm they planted a tree in honour of liberty, danced around it, and swore eternal loyalty to the ideal of the great struggle for liberation. Each of these three youths- Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling-represented in his later development a typical possibility of the German reaction to the course of events in France. Toward the end of his life, Schelling lost himself in the narrow-minded obscurantism of an abject reaction, of a revived Romanticism during the preparatory period of the ‘48 revolution. Hegel and Hölderlin did not betray their revolutionary oath. But when it was a question of realizing it, the difference in their interpretation reveals clearly the ideological courses which the preparation of the bourgeois revolution could and had to follow in Germany.

The intellectual absorption of the ideas of the French Revolution by Hegel and Hölderlin was still far from being accomplished when in Paris Robespierre’s head fell, and Thermidor and afterwards the Napoleonic period came into being. The consolidation of their Weltanschauung had to be achieved then on the basis of this turning-point in the revolutionary development of France. With Thermidor, the -prosaic content of the heroic form of antiquity in bourgeois society, with its progressiveness and also-inseparable from this- its frightfulness, appeared more and more clearly in the foreground. And the altered heroic character of the Napoleonic period placed the German ideologists before an insoluble dilemma: on the one hand, Napoleonic France was a radiant ideal for the national greatness which could flower only on the soil of a victorious revolution, but on the other hand, this same French imperium brought on Germany a condition of the deepest national disunion and degradation. Since the objective conditions were lacking in Germany for a bourgeois revolution, which would have been capable of opposing to the Napoleonic conquest a revolutionary defence of the fatherland similar to that of 1793, the embryonic bourgeois-revolutionary longing for national liberation and unification faced an insoluble dilemma that was destined to lead to reactionary Romanticism. “All the wars of independence waged against France bear the common stamp of a regeneration which is coupled with reaction” (Marx).

Neither Hegel nor Hölderlin lapsed into this Romantic reaction. But their intellectual coming-to-grips with the post-Thermidorian situation develop in diametrically opposed directions. To be brief, Hegel comes to terms with the post-Thermidorian epoch and the close of the revolutionary period of bourgeois development, and he builds up his philosophy precisely on an understanding of this new turning-point in world history. Hölderlin makes no compromise with the post-Thermidorian reality; he remains faithful to the old revolutionary ideal of renovating polis democracy and is broken by a reality which had no place for his ideals, not even on the level of poetry and thought.

In a contradictory manner, both approaches reflect the unbalanced development of bourgeois-revolutionary thinking in Germany. And this unbalanced development-which Hegel himself designates in an idealist and ideological manner as the “ruse of reason"-manifests itself especially in Hegel’s intellectual accommodation to the post-Thermidorian reality which led him into the main current of the ideological development of his class, from which point further intellectual development was possible until the transformation of bourgeois-revolutionary methods of thinking into proletarian-revolutionary methods was achieved (i.e. the materialist inversion by Marx of Hegel’s idealist dialectic). Hölderlin’s intransigence ended in a tragic impasse. Unknown and unmoumed, he fell like a solitary poetic Leonidas for the ideals of the Jacobin period at the Thermopylae of invading Thermidorianism.

On the one hand, of course, Hegel’s accommodation leads to a defection from the revolutionary republicanism of his Bern period. It leads him from his enthusiasm for Napoleon to an intellectual reconciliation with the wretchedness of a Prussian constitutional monarchy. But on the other hand, it leads-although in an ideal-istically distorted and inverted manner-to the intellectual discovery and elaboration of the dialectic of bourgeois society. In Hegel, classical English political economy appears for the first time as an element of the dialectical conception of world history which is only an ideological form, an idealistic reflection of the fact that for Hegel the dialectic of capitalism itself became the foundation for the dialectic of the present. The Jacobin ideal of the struggle against the inequality of wealth and the Jacobin illusion of the economic levelling of a society based on capitalist private property disappears in order to give place to a cynical realization of the contradictions of capitalism inspired by Ricardo. “Factories and manufacturing are founded precisely on the misery of a class,” Hegel writes a few years after his turning to an evaluation of contemporary events. The polis republic disappears as an ideal to be realized. Greece becomes a thing of the past, irrevocably gone, never to return.

The world historical significance of Hegel’s accommodation consists precisely in the fact that he grasped-as only Balzac beside him -the revolutionary development of the bourgeoisie as a unitary process, one in which the revolutionary Terror as well as Thermidor and Napoleon were only necessary phases. The heroic period of the revolutionary bourgeoisie becomes in Hegel-just as antiquity does -something irretrievably past, but a past which was absolutely necessary for the emergence of the unheroic prose of the present considered to be progressive; for the emergence of advanced bourgeois society with its economic and social contradictions. The fact that this conception is marred both by all the faults of an accommodation to the wretchedness of the Prussian and German situation and by all the mystifications of the idealist dialectic cannot diminish its world-historical significance. But with all its defects it is one of the great paths which leads to the future and to the elaboration of the materialist dialectic.

Hölderlin always refused to recognize this as the correct way. But even his thinking could not remain unaffected by the reality which emerged after Thermidor. Hegel’s Frankfurt period, the period in which he turns to historical methodology, is precisely the period of their second, more mature association and collaboration. But for Hölderlin, the post-Thermidorian development suggests only a sloughing off of the ascetic elements of the ideal conception of Hellenism, only a greater accentuation of Athens as a model as opposed to the unbending Spartan and Roman virtue of the French Jacobins. He continues to remain a republican. Even in his later work, Empedocles, the hero answers the Acragantines who offer him the crown: “This is the age of kings no longer,” and he preaches-in mystic forms it is true-the ideal of a radically revolutionary renovation of mankind:

What is told and taught you from the lips of the fathers, Laws and customs, the names of the ancient gods, Boldly forget them and, like new born men, Lift your eyes to divine Nature!

[Was euch der Vater Mund erzahlt, gelehrt, Gesetz’ und Brauch’, der alten Gotter Namen, Vergesst es kiihn und hebt, wie Neugebome, Die Augen auf zur gottlichen Natur! ]

This Nature is that of Rousseau and Robespierre, the dream of a transformation of society which-without Hölderlin’s raising the question of private property in a clear manner-restores the perfect harmony of man with a society which is adequate to him, with Nature itself through a society which has become natural again. “The ideal is what Nature was,” says Hölderlin’s Hyperion some- what in the manner of Schiller, but going far beyond him in revolutionary fervour. And for Hölderlin, Hellenism is precisely the ideal which was living reality, Nature. “Formerly the peoples started from a childlike harmony,” Hyperion continues. “The harmony of the spirits will be the beginning of a new universal history.”

“All for each and each for all!” This is Hyperion’s social ideal when he enters the revolutionary struggle for the liberation of Greece from the Turkish yoke. It is the dream of a revolutionary war for national liberation which is supposed to become also the war of liberation for all mankind: almost what the radical dreamers of the great revolution itself-Anacharsis Cloots, for example-hoped from the wars of the French Republic. Hyperion says: “No one must recognize by its flag alone our people to come; it is necessary that all be rejuvenated, that all be radically different, that joy be filled with seriousness and all work be gay! Nothing, not even the least significant, the most commonplace without spirit and the gods! Love, hate, and every sound we utter must astonish the vulgar world, and not once are we to be reminded, even for a moment, of the insipid past!”

Hölderlin thus takes no notice of the limitations and contradictions of the bourgeois revolution. This is why his social theory must lose itself in mysticism, a mysticism it is true, filled with confused forebodings of a real upheaval of society and a real renovation of mankind. These forebodings are even more Utopian and mystic than those of the isolated visionaries of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France. For in a Germany undeveloped from the point of view of capitalism, Hölderlin is unable to perceive in a concrete manner the seeds and beginnings of social tendencies which point beyond the limited and contradictory capitalist horizon. His Utopia is purely ideological. It is a dream of the return of the golden age, a dream in which the presentiment of the development of bourgeois society is joined in an illusory manner with the Utopia of something beyond this society, of a real liberation of mankind. It is very interesting to note that everywhere, and especially in Hyperion, Hölderlin struggles ceaselessly against the overestimation of the State, and that his Utopian conception of the future State, reduced to its essentials, verges very closely on the thinking of the first liberal ideologists of Germany, e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt.

The mainstay of a social renovation for Hölderlin therefore can only be a new religion, a new church. In the social development of Germany the bases for his Utopias could not be found: objectively because in fact they did not exist in the bourgeois reality; subjectively because the seeds of a development tending to surmount capitalism could not possibly He within Hölderlin’s purview. So it was inevitable that he should seek the source of a social renovation in a new religion. This turning to religion, despite a complete break with the old religions, is inevitable for all revolutionaries in this period who wish to pursue the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion, but who shrink back at the same time from its necessary result: the unleashing of capitalism with all its social and cultural consequences. Robespierre’s cult of the “Supreme Being” is the greatest practical historical example of this inevitable return to religion.

It is clear that Hölderlin also could not escape this dilemma. If his Hyperion wishes to limit the effect of the State, he nonetheless dreams of the rise of a new church which is supposed to become the bearer of his social ideals. The inevitability, and at the same time, the bourgeois-revolutionary character of this conception manifest themselves in the fact that Hegel also, still during the period of his transition to a complete acknowledgment of the capitalist development of the revolution, is seized by the idea of a new religion. It is a religion “in which the infinite anguish and the whole weight of its opposite are admitted but resolved without trouble and in a genuine manner when there is a free people and Reason will have regenerated its reality as a moral spirit which is able to have the audacity to assume its pure form on the basis of itself and its .peculiar majesty.”

This is the ideological framework within which the action of Hyperion unfolds. The point of departure of the action is the attempt of the Greeks to revolt against the Turks in 1770, an attempt which occurred with the support of a Russian fleet. The contradictory character of this theme, which is both revolutionary and reactionary, is highly characteristic of Hölderlin’s historical situation. But it is also highly characteristic that he has a certain insight into the reactionary tendencies of the situation he depicts; an insight which is incomparably more penetrating and progressive than the illusions of the national revolutionaries of the war of liberation with regard to Russia. Hölderlin’s martial heroes view the Russian aid without illusions and with a Machiavellian and realistic political attitude. “One poison thus destroys the other,” says Hyperion when the Turkish fleet is demolished by the Russians. On this point also then Hölderlin was not a Romantic reactionary.

The internal plot of the novel is formed by the ideological struggle of two tendencies competing to realize Hölderlin’s revolutionary Utopia. The warrior hero, Alabanda, who is endowed with certain Fichtean characteristics, represents the tendency of armed insurrection. The heroine of the novel, Diotima, incarnates the tendency of the religious and ideological, peaceful Aufklärung. She wants to make of Hyperion the educator of his people. At first the conflict ends with the victory of the martial principle. Hyperion joins with Alabanda to prepare and carry out the armed uprising. The fame of Alabanda awakens him to self-reproach as regards his hitherto contemplative inactivity. “I have become too idle . . . too ethereal, too indolent. Yes, to be soft at the right time is fine, but to be soft at the wrong time is odious because it is cowardly! And to the warning of Diotima: “You will conquer and forget what for,” Hyperion replies: “Servitude kills, but a just war enlivens every soul.” Diotima too sees the tragic conflict which at this point confronts Hölderlin-Hyperion. “Your whole soul bids you to it; not to obey it often leads to ruin, but to obey no doubt also does.”

The catastrophe begins. After a few victorious skirmishes the insurgents take Misistra, formerly Sparta. But the conquest is followed by pillage and massacre, and Hyperion, deceived, turns his back on the insurgents. “In truth, it was an extraordinary project to entrust the planting of my Elysium to a gang of thieves.” Soon afterwards, the insurgents suffer a crushing defeat and are dispersed. In the battles of the Russian fleet Hyperion seeks death, but in vain.

Hölderlin’s attitude to armed revolution is not new in Germany. The repentance of Hyperion after the victory repeats on a higher level the despair of Schiller’s Karl Moor at the end of the Robbers: “that two men like me should destroy the whole structure of the moral world.” It is no coincidence that the phil-Hellenic classicist Hölderlin esteemed so highly until the end of his conscious life the youthful dramas of Schiller. He justifies this esteem by means of analyses of their composition; but the true reason lies in the similarity of their formulation of problems, in their longing for a German revolution, and at the same time-inseparable from this-in their shrinking back from the facts and consequences of such a revolution. Along with the similarities, however, it is also necessary to stress the differences in their approach to problems. Young Schiller does not merely recoil from the severity of revolutionary methods, but also from the radical content of the revolution itself. He fears that the moral foundations of the world-of bourgeois society-might collapse in a revolution. This Hölderlin does not fear: he does not feel inwardly related to any of the visible manifestations of bourgeois society. As we have seen, what he hopes foils precisely a radical revolution of his world whereby nothing of the present would survive. He shrinks from the revolutionary methods about which he fears, very much like the idealistic ideologists of the revolution, a perpetuation of the evils of the present in another form.

This tragic discord of Hölderlin was insurmountable for him since it resulted from the relations of the classes in Germany. For all the historically necessary illusions concerning the renovation of the democracy of the polis, the revolutionary Jacobins of France derived their verve and energy from their association with the democratic-plebeian elements of the revolution, with the petty bourgeois and semi-proletarian masses of the towns and with the peasantry. Relying on these elements, they could combat-only temporarily, of course, and in a very contradictory manner-the egoistic baseness, the cowardice and avarice of the French bourgeoisie and drive the bourgeois revolution forward along plebeian lines. The anti-bourgeois characteristic of this plebeian method of revolution is very salient in Hölderlin. His Alabanda says of the bourgeois: “One does not ask if you want! Slaves and barbarians, you never want! It is not you we wish to improve, for this would be in vain! “We wish to take care only that you get out of the way of the victorious advance of mankind.” A revolutionary Jacobin in Paris in 1793 could have spoken such words amid the rejoicing of the plebeian masses. In Germany in 1797, such a view signified a despairing and disconsolate solitude, for there was no social class to which these words could be addressed, none in which they could have found so much as an ideological echo. After the failure of the Mainz uprising, Georg Forster could at least take refuge in revolutionary Paris. For Hölderlin there was no homeland either inside or outside Germany. It is no wonder that, after the failure of the revolution, the way of Hyperion gets lost in a despairing mysticism, and that Alabanda and Diotima perish with the downfall of Hyperion. It is no wonder that the next and last great work of Hölderlin, the tragedy Empedocles, which remained a fragment, has for its theme mystic self-sacrifice.

The reaction always fastens on to this mystic dissolution of Hölderlin’s Weltanschauung. After official German literary history had long treated Hölderlin episodically as a representative of a secondary current of Romanticism (e.g. Haym), he was rediscovered in an openly reactionary manner in the imperialist period and utilized for the ideological aims of the reaction. Dilthey makes him a precursor of Schopenhauer and of Nietzsche by the simple trick of completely detaching the Hellenism and the effects of classical German philosophy from the influence of the French Revolution and by reducing these latter in significance to the level of an episode. Gundolf already separates in Hölderlin the “original experience” [Urerlebnis] and the “acquired experience” [Bildungserlebnis]. “Acquired experience” is everything revolutionary, everything “merely temporal”; and as such all this is irrelevant to the understanding of the “essential” Hölderlin. The “essential” Hölderlin is an “Orphic mystic.” In Gundolf also the lines lead from Hölderlin to Nietzsche, and beyond him to the “deification of the body” by Stefan George. The Hölderlin, who fell tragic victim to a belated Jacobinism, becomes in Gundolf a precursor of rentier parasitism. Hölderlin’s tragic elegy on man’s loss of political, social, and cultural liberty ends up in Stefan George’s decadent Parklyrik. Hölderlin’s Hellenic and republican cult of friendship, for which his models were the [would be] tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogiton,[1] is transformed into a prefigurement of the aestheticist, decadent, homosexual George circle.

Both Dilthey and Gundolf imagine they are able to get at the essential core of Hölderlin by leaving out the “temporal” aspects of his life and work. Hölderlin himself knew very well that the mournful elegiac aspect of his poetry, his longing for vanished Greece, in a word, the essential quality of his poetry was altogether temporal. Hyperion says:

“But this, this anguish, which is like no other, is a ceaseless feeling of total annihilation when our lives lose their significance, when the heart tells itself: you must descend and nothing more remain of you: no flowers have you planted, no cottages have you built only that you might say: I leave a trace behind on earth. ... But enough! enough! Had I grown up with Themistocles or lived among the Scipios, my soul surely would never have come to know this side of life.”

And for a liberated fatherland – in his sense of the term – Hölderlin celebrates a heroic death:

Oh, take me, admit me into the ranks,

So that one day I may never die a common death! To die in vain is not my wish, but To be killed on the altar of sacrifice

For the fatherland ...

And heralds of victory descend: the battle Is ours! Live on above, oh fatherland, And reckon not the dead! For you Beloved, not one too many has fallen.

[O nimmt mich, nimmt mich mit in die Reihen auf, Damit ich einst nicht sterbe gemeinen Tods! Umsonst zu sterben, lieb ich nicht, doch Lieb ich, zu fallen am Opferhiigel

Furs Vaterland ...

Und Siegesboten kommen herab: Die Schlacht 1st unser! Lebe droben, o Vaterland, Und zahle nicht die Toten! Dir ist, Liebes! nicht einer zu viel gefallen].

He also celebrates his own destiny as a poet, his longing for at least one fulfilment of that which is of central concern to his soul:

Grant me but one summer, you mighty ones! And one autumn to ripen my song,

So that my heart, sated with sweet play, Might die then more willingly.

The soul, denied in life its divine right, Rests not even in Orcus below;

Yet should I ever achieve that sacred thing, The poem which is my heart’s desire,

Then welcome, repose of the world of shadows!

I am content, even if the music of my strings

Does not escort me down; once

I shall have lived like the gods, and there is no need of more.

[Nur einen Sommer gonnt, ihr Gewaltigen !

Und einen Herbst zu reifem Gesange mir,

Dass williger mein Herz, vom siissen

Spiele gesattigt, dann mir sterbe.

Die Seele, der im Leben ihr gottlich Recht

Nicht ward, sie ruht auch drunten im Orkus nicht; Doch ist mir einst das Heil’ge, das am Herzen mir liegt, das Gedicht gelungen.

Willkommen dann, 0 Stille der Schattenwelt!

Zufrieden bin ich, wenn auch mein Saitenspiel Mich nicht hinabgeleitet; einmal

Lebt’ ich wie Gotter, und mehr bedarfs nicht].

Nothing can be considered in isolation here. Hölderlin is too genuine a poet, he always echoes the momentary and concrete occasion of his experience, he has no need therefore to rehearse constantly in abstract terms the ultimate bases of the individual experience he expresses. And especially with Hölderlin, the yearning after poetic fulfilment cannot be understood in a formal-artistic sense. Form and content here too are inseparable. Poetic success presupposes that the central content of the poetry will somehow be realized in life, in his life. And Jacobin principles constitute the whole atmosphere of his poems. Only he whose perspective is dulled or blinded by class conformity will not perceive this all-determining atmosphere.

But what about the mysticism of nature; the fusion of nature and culture, man and the godhead in the experience of Hellas ? This is what a modern admirer of Hölderlin, influenced by Dilthey and Gundolf, might perhaps retort. “We have already alluded to the Rousseauesque and Robespierrian character of Hölderlin’s cults of nature and Greece. In his great poem, The Archipelagus (which Gundolf made the point of departure for his interpretation of Hölderlin), Greek nature and the grandeur of the Athenian culture which grew out of it is expressed with overwhelming elegiac pathos. But toward the end of the poem, Hölderlin speaks with equally moving pathos and equally accusatory elegy about the cause of his sorrow over vanished Greece:

Alas! It wanders in the night, it dwells as in Orcus,

With nothing godlike, our race. To their own bustle

Alone they are fastened, and in the raging workshop

Each hears only himself, and the wild ones with mighty arms

Work much without respite; yet ever more

Sterile, like the Furies, remains the toil of the poor.

[Aber weh ! Es wandelt in Nacht, es wohnt, wie im Orkus,

Ohne Gottliches unser Geschlecht. Ans eigene Treiben

Sind sie geschmiedet allein, und sich in der tosenden Werkstatt

Horet jeglicher nur, und viel arbeiten die Wilden

Mit gewaltigem Arm, rastlos, doch immer und immer

Unfruchtbar, wie die Furien, bleibt die Miihe der Armen].

This conception is neither incidental nor unique in Hölderlin.

After the Greeks are defeated in their struggle for liberty and Hyperion experiences his disillusionment, we find at the end of the novel the terribly accusing chapter on Germany, the enraged ode in prose on the degeneration of man into misery, into the narrow philistinism of early German capitalism. The invocation of Greece as a unity of culture and nature is in Hölderlin always an indictment of his age, a vain appeal to action, an appeal for the destruction of this miserable reality.

The “refinement” of the analysis of Dilthey and Gundolf, their eradication of all traces of the great social tragedy in the life and works of Hölderlin, forms the foundation of the grossly demagogic and flagrantly false disfigurement of his memory by the Brown-shirts of literary history. Just as fascist ideologists berated the unconscious, or not yet conscious, petty bourgeois with the hopelessness of their path, the. literary S.A. men befouled the memory of many sincerely despairing German revolutionaries by juggling away the true social cause of their despair and by explaining it as despair over the fact that they could not witness the “deliverance” by the Third Reich and the “saviour” Hitler.

This is also how Hölderlin fared at the hands of German fascism. Among German fascist writers it is good breeding today to idolize Hölderlin as an important precursor of the Third Reich. Naturally, the attempt to carry through this claim in a concrete manner, the attempt to show concretely the evidence of fascist ideology in Hölderlin involves serious difficulties. They are much more serious than they were for Gundolf whose formalistic, art-for-art’s-sake viewpoint, emptied of all content, allowed for the adoration of the formal aspects in Hölderlin, the idealization of his supposedly mystical conception of Hellas, without any immediately apparent inner contradiction. (The contradiction existed “merely” between Gundolf’s image of Hölderlin and the true Hölderlin).

On this basis Rosenberg makes Hölderlin a representative of “authentic” Germanic yearning. He tries to harness Hölderlin to the social demagogy of National Socialism by turning his critique of the times into a fascist critique of “the bourgeois.” “Did not Hölderlin suffer from these people even at a time when they did not yet hold sway as omnipotent bourgeois, even when Hyperion, in search of great souls, was obliged to state that they had only become barbarous by their diligence, their science, and their very religion? Hyperion found artisans, thinkers, priests, and title-holders, but no human beings, only fragmented beings without inner unity, without inner drive, without wholeness of life.” But Rosenberg also takes care to concretize as little as possible this social critique of Hölderlin. This whole great sally ends with a leap into the void. Hölderlin is simply stamped as a representative of Rosenberg’s nonsensical “aesthetic will.”

The same mixture of bombastic grandiloquence and anxious evasion of all facts characterizes the later evolution of the fascist image of Hölderlin. In a series of essays a “major turning-point” in the life of Hölderlin is discovered: his renunciation of the “eighteenth century,” his conversion to Christianity and with it to the fascist and Romantic “German reality.” In a Romanticism constructed to be the prelude to fascism, Hölderlin is inserted into a series extending from Novalis to Gorres. The worth of this falsification of history is shown by the fact that even the official side of National Socialism had to reject it as being “deviant” and “erroneous.” This occurs in an article by Matthcs Ziegler in the Nationalsozialistische-Monatsheft. in which Meister Eckart, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are presented as the great precursors of the National Socialist Weltanschauung. But whereas Baumler could succeed in delineating the romantic, anti-capitalist, irrationalist-mystic features of Kierkegaard without overt historical lies, only with some light brown retouching, Ziegler’s article remains a pitiful stammer encased, of course, in crude apodictic bombast. Scrupulously avoiding anything concrete in the quotations, he too only centres on Hölderlin’s opposition to contemporary culture (to the “bourgeoisie”) and his longing for a form of community. And he twists this longing, of which we already know the true social basis and the true social content, into a longing for Hitler, into anticipation of the Third Reich. Summarizing, he writes: “It was the tragedy of Hölderlin that he had to separate himself from the community of men without it being allotted him to contribute to the formation of the community of the future. He remained a solitary man who was misunderstood in his time but who bore within him the future as a certainty. He wished no revival, no new Greece, but he rediscovered in Hellas the Nordic heroic attitude to life which was atrophied in the Germany of his time, the only attitude, however, from which the community of the future could grow. He was obliged to express himself in the language and in the conceptions of his time, which is why it is often difficult for us, men of today, formed by the experience of our age, to understand him properly. But our struggle for the formation of the Reich is the struggle for the same achievement that Hölderlin was unable to accomplish because the time was not yet ripe.”

The objective result, even measured by a standard applicable to a National Socialist literary history, is extremely pitiful; Ziegler himself lets slip the admission that he scarcely understands Hölderlin, if at all. National Socialist writers are obliged to make the image of Hölderlin even more abstract than it is in Dilthey and Gundolf, even more devoid of all individual as well as social and historical features. The Hölderlin of the German fascists is some sort of Romantic poet who is scarcely distinguishable any longer from Georg Biicnner-also repeatedly slandered of late-who has been twisted in turn into a protagonist of “heroic pessimism,” and thereby into a precursor of the “heroic realism” represented by Nietzsche and Baumler. In the spiritual night of the fascist falsification of history, every figure becomes brown.

But the “methodology” of these falsifications nonetheless shows, if unintentionally, a result: namely the intrinsic relation between the inability of liberalism to understand German history and the increasingly conscious falsification of it by fascist imperialism. Dilthey challenges the interpretation of Hölderlin by Haym as being a “lateral shoot of Romanticism,” but only to enrol Hölderlin among the decadent belated Romantics of the end of the century and to make him a precursor of Nietzsche. Gundolf goes further and makes Hölderlin a precursor of Stefan George. And the National Socialists misuse the romantic and anti-capitalist features of Hölderlin, which at that time were still by no means unequivocally reactionary, in order to mount this deformed image of the tragic revolutionary as an ornament on the facade of the fascist prison for working Germany.

In his essence, however, Hölderlin is no Romantic, although his criticism of emerging capitalism is not without some Romantic traits. But whereas the Romantics, from the economist Sismondi to the mystic poet Novalis, see a refuge from capitalism in a simple merchandise economy, and oppose to anarchic capitalism the “ordered” Middle Ages, oppose to the mechanistic division of labour the “totality” of artisan labour, Hölderlin criticizes bourgeois society from another side. In a Romantic manner, he too hates the capitalist division of labour. But in his eyes the most essential aspect of the degradation to be combated is the loss of liberty. And in him this conception of liberty strives to transcend-in mystic forms, as we have seen, and with a vague Utopian content-the narrow notion of political freedom in bourgeois society. The difference in choice of themes between Hölderlin and the Romantics-Greece versus the Middle Ages-is not merely a difference in themes then but a difference in ideology and politics.

When Hölderlin celebrates the festivals of ancient Greece, he celebrates the vanished democratic public character of life. In this respect he not only follows the same course as the friend of his youth, Hegel, before his transformation, but ideologically he moves also in the direction of Robespierre and the Jacobins. In his great speech to the Convention on the introduction of the cult of the “Supreme Being,” Robespierre declares: “The true priest of the Supreme Being is Nature; his temple the universe; his cult virtue; his festivals the joy of a great people united under his eyes in order to draw tighter the bond of universal brotherhood and to offer him the veneration of pure and sensitive hearts.” And in the same speech he refers to the Greek festivals as an example of this strengthening of a democratic republican education aimed at realizing the virtue and happiness of a liberated people.

It is true that Hölderlin’s mysticism far surpasses the inevitable and heroic illusions of Robespierre. Moreover, it is a flight into mysticism and a mysticism of flight: a mysticism of yearning for death, the death of self-sacrifice, death as a means to become united with nature. But this nature mysticism in Hölderlin is by no means uniformly reactionary.

In the first place, its Rousseauian revolutionary source is always perceptible. The immediate point of departure of Hölderlin’s flight into mysticism lies precisely in the fact that he was obliged to raise the socially necessary hopeless tragedy of his idealistic aspirations to the level of a cosmic tragedy. Secondly, his mysticism of self-sacrifice has a distinctly pantheistic and anti-religious character. Before going to his death, Alabanda speaks of his life “that no god created.” “If the hand of a potter has fashioned me, then let him smash his vessel as he pleases. But what lives must be uncreated; must be of divine nature in its origin, superior to any power and all art, and thus invulnerable, eternally.” And in a similar manner, in her farewell letter to Hyperion, Diotima writes of the “divine freedom which death gives us.” “And if I should become a plant, would the loss be so great? I shall still exist. How could I vanish from the sphere of life wherein the eternal love, which is common to all, joins all natures? How could I sever myself from the union which links all beings?”

If the modern reader wishes to gain a historically correct perspective on German nature mysticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he must never forget that at that time the dialectic of nature and society was discovered and elaborated of course in idealistic and mystical forms. It is the period of the nature philosophy of Goethe, young Hegel, and young Schelling. (Marx speaks of the “honest thoughts of Schelling’s youth”). It is a period in which mysticism is not merely a dead weight carried over from the theological past, but frequently, and very often in a manner difficult to distinguish, an idealistic haze which veils the still unknown future methods of dialectical thinking. Just as at the beginning of the development of the bourgeoisie, in the Renaissance and in the emerging materialism of Bacon, the intoxication of new knowledge assumes exuberant and fanciful forms, so too now, in the intoxication of the dawn of the dialectical method, a philosophy emerges “on which no member is not drunk” (Hegel). What Marx says about the philosophy of Bacon is valid-mutatis mutandis-also for this period: “Matter smiles on the total man with a poetically sensuous radiance; the aphoristic doctrine itself, on the other hand, still abounds in theological inconsequentialities.”

Hölderlin himself takes a very active part in the formation of the dialectical method; he is not only the friend of youth of Schelling and Hegel, but also their philosophical fellow-traveller. In his important discourse on Athens, Hyperion speaks also of Heraclitus. And the “One differentiated in itself” of Heraclitus is for him the point of departure of thought: “It is the essence of beauty, and before this was found, there was no philosophy.” For Hölderlin also then philosophy is identical with dialectic.

Identical, it is true, with an idealistic dialectic which loses itself in mysticism. And the mysticism is particularly obvious in Hölderlin because in increasing measure it has the task for him of glorifying on a cosmic plane the social tragedy of his existence and of pointing an apparent way out of the historical impasse of his situation in a meaningful death. But this horizon, which gets lost in mystical haziness, is also a common characteristic of the whole epoch. The end of Hyperion and Empedocles is no more mystical than the fate of Makarie in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre or that of Louis Lambert or Seraphitus Seraphita in Balzac. Just as this mystic horizon, which cannot be disjoined from the work of the great realists, Goethe and Balzac, also cannot invalidate the fundamental realism of their work, so too Hölderlin’s mysticism of death cannot impair the fundamentally revolutionary character of his heroic elegy.

Hölderlin is one of the purest and most profound elegiac poets of all time. In his important definition of elegy, Schiller writes that “in elegy, the sorrow must result only from an enthusiasm aroused by the ideal.” And with perhaps too much severity, Schiller condemns all elegists who lament a purely private fate (e.g. Ovid).

In Hölderlin’s poetry individual and social destinies fuse into a tragic harmony rarely achieved. Throughout his life Hölderlin was a failure. He never got beyond the general transitional stage in which the destitute German intelligentsia existed at that time: tutorship; moreover, he did not even succeed in creating an existence as a tutor. Despite the benevolent protection of Schiller and notwithstanding the commendation of the most significant critic of the period, A. W. Schlegel, he remained completely unknown as a poet and without the prospect of a livelihood. His great love for Suzette Gontard ended in a tragically despairing resignation. Both his outer and his inner life were so desperately hopeless that many contemporaries and biographers have perceived something fatefully necessary even in the insanity which put an end to his youth.

But the elegiac sorrow of Hölderlin’s poetry never has the character of a petty private recrimination for his ruined personal life. Even if Hölderlin cosmically mystified the social necessity for the failure of his decisive aspirations, this mystification also expresses the feeling that the failure of his private aspirations was only the inevitable consequence of this great general failure. This is always the point of departure of the elegiac lament running through his poetic works.

The contrast between vanished Hellas, which must be renewed in a revolutionary manner, and the miserable condition of contemporary Germany constitutes the constant, though always variously recurring, content of his lament. His elegy is therefore a pathetic and heroic accusation against the age and not a subjective and lyrical lamentation of a private fate, however pitiable.

It is the complaint of the best bourgeois intellectuals over the loss of the revolutionary “illusions” of the heroic period of their own class. It is the grievance over a solitude, a cry of distress issuing from a solitude which is insurmountable because, although manifesting itself in all moments of private life, it was created by the iron hand of economic and social development itself.

The revolutionary fire of the bourgeoisie is extinguished. But the heroic ardour of the great Revolution gives rise everywhere in the middle class to fiery souls in whom this brand continues to smoulder. Their ardour, however, no longer inflames the class as a whole. The revolutionary flame of Jacobinism still burns in Stendhal’s Julien Sorel just as it does in Hölderlin. And if the hopelessness of the situation of that belated Jacobin differs deeply in an external sense from Hölderlin’s destiny, if Julien’s fate is not an elegiac lament, but rather a power struggle carried on with hypocritical and Machiavellian means against the ignoble society of the Restoration, the hopelessness is nonetheless the same and has similar social origins. Julien Sorel also gets no farther than to take flight, at the end of an unsuccessful life, into a pseudo-heroic and tragic death; than to fling his plebeian and Jacobin contempt in the face of society after a life of shameful hypocrisy.

The creative form in which this last late-born Jacobin of France appeared was ironical and realistic. In England, such late-comers also manifest classicist, elegiac, and hymnic qualities: Keats and Shelley. But whereas the fate of Keats presents, even externally, a great many features relating him to Hölderlin, a new sun pierces the horizon of Shelley; a new rejoicing intrudes into his elegiac lament. In his greatest poetic fragment, Keats mourns the fate of the Titans overthrown by the ignoble new gods. Shelley too poetizes the destiny of an ancient god, the struggle of the miserable new gods against the ancient gods of the golden age (the golden age, the “reign of Saturn” being in most mythologies the myth of the period prior to private property and the state), and the struggle of Prometheus bound against the new god, Zeus. But in Shelley the new usurper gods are vanquished and his hymns celebrate the liberation of mankind. Shelley has already glimpsed the rising new sun, the sun of the proletarian revolution. He was able to celebrate the liberation of Prometheus because already he could summon the men of England to revolt against capitalist exploitation:

Sow seed-but let no tyrant reap;

Find wealth-let no imposter heap;

Weave robes-let not the idle wear;

Forge arms-in your defence to bear.

In Shelley the prospect of a transition to the real struggle for the liberation of humanity presents itself to Jacobins born too late for their own class.

What was possible socially in England around 1819 for a revolutionary genius, at least as a poetic visionary prospect, was not possible for anyone in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. Because of the contradictions of the internal and world situation of Germany at the time, the course generally followed by the German bourgeois intelligentsia led to the spiritual morass of Romantic obscurantism. The accommodation of Goethe and Hegel saved and continued the best of the heritage of bourgeois thought, although in a form which in many ways is distorted and trivial. The heroic intransigence of Hölderlin was bound to lead him into a desperate impasse. He is truly a unique poet who did not have and could not have any successors. He is unique, however, not in the sense of those who defile his memory today by singing the praises of his shortcomings and obscurities, but because his tragic situation could no longer recur for the bourgeois class.

A later Hölderlin who did not follow Shelley’s course would not have been a Hölderlin, but rather a narrow classicist liberal. When Arnold Ruge begins his letter in the Correspondence of 1843 with Hölderlin’s famous lament on Germany, Marx replies: “My dear friend, your letter is a good elegy, a breathtaking dirge; but politically it is nothing at all. No people despairs; and even if for a long time its hope is based only on stupidity, after many years all its pious wishes are fulfilled by a sudden intelligence.”

Marx’s praise applies to Hölderlin, for Ruge does nothing more than to vary his quotation in a trivial manner. His rebuke applies to all who have revived the lament of Hölderlin after the basis upon which it was founded, the objective hopelessness of his situation, was negated by history itself.

Hölderlin could have no poetic successors. The later elegists of the nineteenth century bewail, on the one hand, much more private destinies, and on the other hand, in their lament on the misery of their age, are incapable of preserving their faith in humanity with the same purity it had in Hölderlin. This contrast raises Hölderlin far above the generally false dilemma of the nineteenth century. He is neither an insipid optimist nor a despairing irrationalist pessimist. His style neither sinks into an academic classicistic objectivism nor into an amorphous, impressionist subjectivism; his poetry is neither dryly and didactically intellectual not atmospheric and void of thought.

Hölderlin’s lyricism is a lyricism of ideas. Its point of departure is formed by the inner contradiction of the bourgeois revolution raised to the level of a Weltanschauung (and mystified, of course, in an idealistic manner). Both aspects of the contradiction exist in this poetry of ideas: the Jacobin Hellenic ideal and the ignoble bourgeois reality. The imperishable greatness of Hölderlin lies in his superb stylistic mastery of the insoluble contradiction which was basic to his social existence. He not only fell bravely as a belated martyr on an abandoned barricade of Jacobinism, but he also expressed this martyrdom-the martyrdom of the best sons of a once revolutionary class-in immortal song.

His novel Hyperion also has this lyric and elegiac character. It is less epic than plaintive and accusatory. Nevertheless, the bourgeois critics are wrong who see in Hy-perion a lyric dissolution of the epic form such as in Novalis’s Hcinrich von Ofterdingen. Even stylistically Hölderlin is no Romantic. On the theoretical level he goes beyond Schiller’s conception of the ancient epos as “naive” (in opposition to modern “sentimental” poetry). But he does so in the direction of a revolutionary objectivism. He writes: “The epic poem, naive in appearance, is heroic in its significance. It is the metaphor of great aspirations.”

The historical tragedy of Hölderlin affects his artistry in that its epic heroism never advances beyond a mere beginning; in that he was only able to express the elegiac metaphor of the great aspirations. The epic fulness must be transferred from the action into the souls of the actors. But to this inner action Hölderlin imparts a very palpable plastic and objective character, having an intensity such as was possible only on account of the tragically contradictory foundations of his conception. In this respect also, his failure is not only heroic, but is transformed into a heroic song. To Goethe’s “educational novel,” which teaches adaptation to the capitalist reality, he opposes an “educational novel” which teaches heroic resistance to this reality. He does not wish, like Tieck or Novalis, to “poetize” in a Romantic manner the “prose” of the world of Wilhclm Meister; rather he opposes to the German paradigm of the great bourgeois novel the project of a novel of the citizen.

Hyperion also bears stylistically the marks of the hopelessly problematical character of this genre. The attempt to depict the citizen in epic was bound to fail. But from this failure emerged a unique style which is both lyrical and epic: the objective style of a profound indictment of the abjectness of the bourgeois world after the light of its heroic “illusions” is extinguished. The lyric novel of Hölderlin, of which the action is almost solely “metaphorical,” remains then, even in terms of style, isolated in the evolution of the bourgeoisie. Nowhere else has purely internal action been shaped in a manner so palpable and objective; nowhere else has the lyrical attitude of the poet been so thoroughly integrated into an epic work.

Unlike Novalis, Hölderlin never criticized the great bourgeois novel of his age. Nonetheless, his opposition to Wilhelm Meister is more profound, for he opposes to it a completely different type of novel. “Whereas Goethe’s novel grows organically out of the social and stylistic problems of the French and English bourgeois novel of the eighteenth century, Hölderlin takes up the threads of the problem at the point where the revolutionary ideals for the transformation of life by the bourgeoisie gave rise to the attempt to create an epos of the citizen; where Milton had made the great unsuccessful attempt to depict, with classical plasticity, the necessarily idealistic existence and destiny of the citizen. The epic plasticity for which Milton strove, however, breaks up into magnificent lyrical descriptions and purely lyrical-pathetic explosions.

From the very start Hölderlin renounces the impossible aspiration to create an epos in a bourgeois world. In accordance with the requirements of the novel, he situates his characters and their destinies in a setting-however stylized-of everyday bourgeois life. This compels him to depict the citizen without separating him entirely from the world of the bourgeois. And even if he is understandably unable to endow the idealized citizen with a full-blooded material life, he nonetheless approaches much more closely than any of his predecessors a really plastic creation in his depiction of the citizen.

His historical and personal tragedy, the fact that the heroic “illusions” of the bourgeoisie could no longer be the banner for real revolutionary heroism, but only that of the yearning for such heroism, constitutes precisely the stylistic presupposition of this (relative) success. Never have the emotional conflicts expressed by a bourgeois poet been less exclusively emotional, less exclusively private and personal, so directly public than in his works. Hölderlin’s lyric and elegiac novel-despite its inevitable failure, precisely because of its failure-is the most objective epic poem of the citizen to be written in the course of the development of the bourgeoisie.

1934.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Harmodius and Aristogiton, said to be lovers, conspired to assassinate Hyppias and the tyrants of Athens (514 B.C.). The plot failed and the two conspirators were killed, but the tyrants were eventually overthrown. Both men then were celebrated in song and the sculptor Antenor built a monument in their honour.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Georg Lukacs Archive

From a Walter Benjamin Website

2011-12-08T21:38:00.001-06:00

Hölderlin Translations

Hölderlin, On Judgment & Being trans. H.S.Harris
Hölderlin,On Jacobi's Letters Concerning the Teaching of Spinoza (1790) trans. by S.J.Thompson
Hölderlin, Letters to G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling trans. by S.J.Thompson
Wilhelm Waiblinger's essay: "Friedrich Hölderlin's Life, Poetry and Madness" (1830) trans. by S.J.Thompson
Alleged Account of Madame de S....y [From Moritz Hartmann, "Eine Vermutung" ("A Supposition," 1852)] trans. by S.J.Thompson
Documents from Isaak von Sinclair's Trial for High Treason trans. by S.J.Thompson

Friedrich Hölderlin

Chronology

Charlie Chaplin final speech in The Great Dictator

2011-12-07T23:03:00.000-06:00

Lo siento, pero no quiero ser emperador. No es lo mío. No quiero gobernar o conquistar a nadie. Me gustaría ayudar a todo el mundo, si fuera posible: a judíos, gentiles, negros, blancos. Todos nosotros queremos ayudarnos mutuamente. Los seres humanos somos así. Queremos vivir para la felicidad y no para la miseria ajena. No queremos odiarnos y despreciarnos mutuamente. En este mundo hay sitio para todos. Y la buena tierra es rica y puede proveer a todos.
El camino de la vida puede ser libre y bello; pero hemos perdido el camino. La avaricia ha envenenado las almas de los hombres, ha levantado en el mundo barricadas de odio, nos ha llevado al paso de la oca a la miseria y a la matanza. Hemos aumentado la velocidad. Pero nos hemos encerrado nosotros mismos dentro de ella. La maquinaria, que proporciona abundancia, nos ha dejado en la indigencia. Nuestra ciencia nos ha hecho cínicos; nuestra inteligencia, duros y faltos de sentimientos. Pensamos demasiado y sentimos demasiado poco. Más que maquinaria, necesitamos humanidad. Más que inteligencia, necesitamos amabilidad y cortesía. Sin estas cualidades, la vida será violenta y todo se perderá.
El avión y la radio nos han aproximado más. La verdadera naturaleza de estos adelantos clama por la bondad en el hombre, clama por la fraternidad universal, por la unidad de todos nosotros. Incluso ahora, mi voz está llegando a millones de seres de todo el mundo, a millones de hombres, mujeres y niños desesperados, víctimas de un sistema que tortura a los hombres y encarcela a las personas inocentes. A aquellos que puedan oírme, les digo: “No desesperéis”.
La desgracia que nos ha caído encima no es más que el paso de la avaricia, la amargura de los hombres, que temen el camino del progreso humano. El odio de los hombres pasará, y los dictadores morirán, y el poder que arrebataron al pueblo volverá al pueblo. Y mientras los hombres mueren, la libertad no perecerá jamás.
Soldados. No os entreguéis a esos bestias, que os desprecian, que os esclavizan, que gobiernan vuestras vidas; decidles lo que hay que hacer, lo que hay que pensar y lo que hay que sentir. Que os obligan a hacer la instrucción, que os tienen a media ración, que os tratan como a ganado y os utilizan como carne de cañón. No os entreguéis a esos hombres desnaturalizados, a esos hombres-máquina con inteligencia y corazones de máquina. Vosotros no sois máquinas. Sois hombres. Con el amor de la humanidad en vuestros corazones. No odiéis. Sólo aquellos que no son amados odian, los que no son amados y los desnaturalizados.
Soldados. No luchéis por la esclavitud. Luchad por la libertad. En el capítulo diecisiete de san Lucas está escrito que el reino de Dios se halla dentro del hombre, no de un hombre o de un grupo de hombres, sino de todos los hombres. En vosotros. Vosotros, el pueblo tenéis el poder, el poder de crear máquinas. El poder de crear felicidad. Vosotros, el pueblo, tenéis el poder de hacer que esta vida sea libre y bella, de hacer de esta vida una maravillosa aventura. Por tanto, en nombre de la democracia, empleemos ese poder, unámonos todos. Lucharemos por un mundo nuevo, por un mundo digno, que dará a los hombres la posibilidad de trabajar, que dará a la juventud un futuro y a los ancianos seguridad.
Prometiéndoos todo esto, las bestias han subido al poder. Pero mienten. No han cumplido esa promesa. No la cumplirán. Los dictadores se dan libertad a sí mismos, pero esclavizan al pueblo. Ahora, unámonos para liberar el mundo, para terminar con las barreras nacionales, para terminar con la codicia, con el odio y con la intolerancia. Luchemos por un mundo de la razón, un mundo en el que la ciencia y el progreso lleven la felicidad a todos nosotros. Soldados, en nombre de la democracia, unámonos.

Reflexión histórica # 0001

2011-12-05T15:49:00.001-06:00

En quinientos años se han construido ideas que son más ideología que historia. De ahí que se hable de:

Conquista de México (¿México en 1521?)
y por España (¿cuál España en 1521?)
Independencia de México (¿Independencia?)
Revolución mexicana (¿revolución en 1910?)

Por eso surgen, de las crecientes contradicciones entre los discursos nacionalistas y oficialistas y la historia sería, las provocaciones e irreverencias que llaman a reinventar este México como nuestro… un nuestro que contruya a la persona y la proyecte al futuro. Y aunque parezca doler cuando se dice lo que se dice acerca de nuestra historia, dicho dolor es más bien hipocondriaco. Educados, como lo hemos sido, en la hipocondría histórica:

la de los mitos y dogmas,
la de las canonizaciones y satanizaciones,
la de lo blanco y negro.

Nos obliga a cambiar y reconocer a los fantasmas crueles, como la independencia y la revolución que, en nada ayudaron a este país, sino que México existe a pesar de ellos.

Para saber más (requiere registrarse, pero vale la pena):

JUANDIEGUITO: EL MEXICANO CHIQUITO

'Test' Un poema de Nicanor Parra

2011-12-03T23:36:00.001-06:00

Qué es un antipoeta:
un comerciante en urnas y ataúdes?
un sacerdote que no cree en nada?
un general que duda de sí mismo?
un vagabundo que se ríe de todo
hasta de la vejez y de la muerte?
un interlocutor de mal carácter?
un bailarín al borde del abismo?
un narciso que ama a todo el mundo?
un bromista sangriento
deliberadamente miserable?
un poeta que duerme en una silla?
un alquimista de los tiempos modernos?
un revolucionario de bolsillo?
un pequeño burgués?
un charlatán?
un dios?
un inocente?

un aldeano de Santiago de Chile?
Subraye la frase que considere correcta.

Qué es la antipoesía:
un temporal en una taza de té?
una mancha de nieve en una roca?
un azafate lleno de excrementos humanos
como lo cree el padre Salvatierra?
un espejo que dice la verdad?
un bofetón al rostro
del Presidente de la Sociedad de Escritores?
(Dios lo tenga en su santo reino)
una advertencia a los poetas jóvenes?
un ataúd a chorro?
un ataúd a fuerza centrífuga?
un ataúd a gas de parafina?
una capilla ardiente sin difunto?

Marque con una cruz
la definición que considere correcta.

POEMS BY Durs Grünbein

2011-11-30T09:19:00.001-06:00

German Poetry in English Translation

POEMS BY Durs Grünbein

IN BELGIUM, A MAN WAS SHOT BY HIS DOG

IN FRONT OF AN OLD X-RAY

IN THE PROVINCES 1

IN THE PROVINCES 2

IN THE PROVINCES 3

IN THE PROVINCES 4

IN THE PROVINCES 5

TITIAN’S NEW PAD

VITA BREVIS

Germany - Poetry International Web

Faculty / Durs Grünbein / Biography / Quotes

Quid magazine: Five poets

Quid magazine is published from Cambridge U.K.
Editor: Keston Sutherland

Durs Grünbein

from Variation auf kein Thema

translated by Keston Sutherland

Again before the telephone, in the exhibit
                   case beneath a verge of glass, the door
was hardly shut, stiffened, an object
                for pedestrians at the streetside
you stare at the touchtone panel, numbers
                   like the stellar enchanted forest
there at the night sky / decimal mandala
                   which with its reachable sum lures,
with sudden nearness, whispers, betrayal,
       love even — everything coded
as long since planned ahead a life
on call and hardly dialed
a voice explodes in your head.

The unfathomable & ungraspable friend

2011-11-28T12:41:00.001-06:00

To Hölderlin

Near is salvation
unfathomable & ungraspable
but where there is a possibility
no matter that surrounded by danger
him, the poet, grows as well...
almost touchable as a fate.

El enigma imperecedero tomado de EFE

2011-11-28T09:46:00.001-06:00

Heinrich von Kleist sigue siendo un enigma 200 años despues de su muerte: ALEMANIA LITERATURA

EFE News Service [Madrid] 20 Nov 2011.

Turn on hit highlighting for speaking browsers

Turn off hit highlighting

Other formats:
Citation/Abstract

Abstract (summary)

Translate

La obra y la vida de Heinrich von Kleist sigue siendo para muchos un enigma 200 años despues de su muerte, que se cumplen mañana tras un año lleno de conmemoraciones, homenajes y simposios que tratan de acercarse a una de las figuras más contradictorias y…

Show all

Full Text

Translate

Rodrigo Zuleta
Berlín, 20 nov (EFE).- La obra y la vida de Heinrich von Kleist sigue siendo para muchos un enigma 200 años despues de su muerte, que se cumplen mañana tras un año lleno de conmemoraciones, homenajes y simposios que tratan de acercarse a una de las figuras más contradictorias y complejas de la literatura alemana
Su figura ha sido reclamada por diversas corrientes esteticas y ha intentado, a lo largo de los años, ser instrumentalizada por las mas variadas ideologías políticas.
Un ejemplo es la historia de la recepción de su drama "Die Hermannschlacht", basado en la batalla de Varus, una rebelión germana contra el Imperio romano, considerada como uno de los mitos fundacionales alemanes y que Kleist vio como ejemplo a seguir, aunque el enemigo ya no era Roma sino las tropas napoleónicas.
Posteriormente, en 1914, tras una representación del drama, se leyeron partes de victoria de las tropas alemanas en los campos de la Primera Guerra Mundial, cuyas batallas quedaban así vinculadas simbólicamente con la batalla de Varus.
Su narración "Michael Kohlhaas", otra de sus obras más famosas, cuenta la historia de un hombre al que "el sentimiento de la justicia hizo asesino y bandolero".
Esa obra, para muchos la más representativa del autor, ha hecho que algunos relacionen a Kleist con la banda terrorista "Fracción del Ejercito Rojo" (RAF) y, por extensión, con el terrorismo de izquierdas en general.
En todo caso, las contradicciones que atraviesan la obra de Kleist y las percepciones que se puedan tener o se agotan en el terreno político sino que parece haber algo más esencial. Goethe y Thomas Mann, por ejemplo, parecían sentir una mezcla de atracción y repugnancia por la obra de Kleist.
Es posible que ello se deba a la radicalidad de sus narraciones y sus dramas, en donde suele haber descripciones y representaciones de la violencia que muchas veces resultan difíciles de digerir
Para muchos esa radicalidad, que impedía que Kleist hiciese compromisos y lo mantenía en litigio permanente con la gente que manejaba el mundo teatral del momento, fue lo que terminó llevándolo al suicidio.
Kleist se suicidó el 21 de noviembre de 1811, junto con su amiga Henriette Vogel, al lado de un lago entre Berlín y Potsdam. El escritor tenía 34 años, sus obras de teatro no tenían el exito esperado y sus esfuerzos por conseguir un empleo como director dramático habían fracasado.
Nacido en Fráncfort del Oder en 1777, Kleist era hijo de un oficial. En 1804, Kleist debutó como dramaturgo con el estreno en Graz (Austria) de "La familia Schroffenstein", drama con el que se inicia una producción dramática y narrativa abundante.
A esa actividad literaria, se agrega su producción periodística, en el "Berliner Abendblatt", periódico fundado y dirigido por Kleist, quien lo aprovechaba para hacer crónicas policiales y para insultar desde sus páginas a los empresarios de teatro que rechazaban sus obras.
Mientras que en vida le fue negado el reconocimiento, despues de su muerte ha habido olas de admiración por Kleist que han ido cambiando la percepción de su obra. La primera de ellas, en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, asumió a Kleis como un símbolo del nacionalismo alemán.
A comienzos del siglo XX, los expresionistas lo reclamaban como su "hermano mayor" -la expresión es del poeta Georg Heym- lo que no impedía que oficialmente se le siguiera instrumentalizando por parte del imperio alemán.
Mientras que en 1911, en el primer centenario de la muerte, había quien definía a Kleist como culminación del clasicismo, cincuenta años despues otros lo definían como precursor de la vanguardia y ahora el poeta Durs Grünbein ha relacionado su teatro con el de Samuel Becket.
Del año Kleist, que se cierra mañana con una vista a la tumba restaurada del poeta, quedan nuevas ediciones de sus obras, dos nuevas biografías, de Peter Michelzik y Günter Blamberger, y muchas preguntas abiertas sobre la obra del que ha sido probablemente el escritor alemán más radical de todos los tiempos.EFE
© EFE 2011. Está expresamente prohibida la redistribución y la redifusión de todo o parte de los contenidos de los servicios de Efe, sin previo y expreso consentimiento de la Agencia EFE S.A.

Word count: 665

Hoelderlin’s Hyperion

2011-11-26T07:34:00.001-06:00

The “Real” Greece – Part II: Philosophy and Poetry in Hoelderlin’s Hyperion

Κυριακή, 28 Φεβρουαρίου, 2010

“But then she [Gaia] did couple with Ouranos
to bear deep-eddying Okeanos,
Koios and Kreios, Hyperion and Iapetos,
Theia and Rheia, Themis and Mnemosyne,
as well as gold-wreathed Phoebe and lovely Tethys.”
(Hesiod, Theogony, 132-136)

“Hölderlin is one of our greatest, that is, most impending thinkers,” wrote Heidegger, “because he is our greatest poet. The poetic understanding of his poetry is possible only as a philosophical confrontation with the manifestation of being in his work.”

Today I continue with my quest to discover and present the “real” Greece. I strive to unearth the riches of Greece and Hellenism and based on this to determine what constitutes Greece and the Hellenism! It is a circle pointing to itself, and in order for it not to become a vicious circle, I have to break into it!

(η αποπειρα μου ειναι περισσοτερο να αναδειξω τον πλουτο που ενυπαρχει στην ελλαδα, στον ελληνισμο, και με βαση αυτην την αποπειρα να προσδιορισω και το τι ειναι η ελλαδα και ο ελληνισμος! ειναι μια κυκλοειδης διαδικασια, ειναι μια διαδικασια που για να μη γινει “φαυλος κυκλος” θα πρεπει να εισχωρησουμε στον κυκλο!)
I have chosen Hoelderlin’s Hyperion, as it is the perfect ground where poetry and philosophy cross each other, and because it opens the door to some very interesting considerations regarding the path of life. This topic in my view exemplifies what are some of the elements that constitute the “real” Greece. By necessity, I have used long quotes to get the basics of the story across, and then to convey some thinkers’ views and interpretations. The reader who endures the difficult read will be rewarded.
“The novel Hyperion presents different practical approaches to dealing with the bi-polarity of the “eccentric path.” This novel is a collection of letters, mostly written by the novel’s modern Greek hero, Hyperion, to his German friend, Bellarmin, in which he recounts his adventures, states of mind, and longings. The original unity which Hyperion was, from the outset, keen to recapture, is understood in different ways by Hyperion at different stages of his life. Ultimately, he will realize that none of these is satisfactory, but that they represented ways of approaching that which is the underlying unity, i.e. Being, throughout the course of his life.
These different representations of unity are of ancient Greece (also reflected in childhood), of modern Greece liberated from Turkish rule, and of aesthetic beauty. This trilogy is not random but corresponds to different temporal understandings of the idea of the fundamental unity of Being. It is first grasped as belonging to the past (Childhood/Ancient Greece), then the future (liberated Greece), and finally the present (immediacy of aesthetic beauty). Each way of life is exemplified by a character with whom Hyperion is connected, respectively through a master-pupil relationship (Adamas), friendship (Alabanda) and love (Diotima).

Symposium, Tomb of the Diver, Paestum

In each case, Hyperion attempts to fully adopt the corresponding way of being only to find its limitations and be confronted with the need to move on. Thus, with Adamas, Hyperion feels compelled to leave his master and seek another way of life because of man’s lack of contentment and constant desire to go beyond his current condition: “We delight in flinging ourselves into the night of the unknown, into the cold strangeness of any other world, and, if we could, we would leave the realm of the sun and rush headlong beyond the comet’s track” (Hölderlin, 1990, p. 10) [“Wir haben unsre Lust daran, uns in die Nacht des Unbekannten, in die kalte Fremde irgend einer andern Welt zu stürzen, und wär’ es möglich, wir verlieβen der Sonne Gebiet und stürmten über des Irrsterns Grenzen hinaus” (Hölderlin, 1999, p.492)]. After leaving home and learning about the world, his encounter with Alabanda is that of a soul-mate who has fought his way to freedom. Together, they plan noble and heroic deeds, but Hyperion’s world crumbles when he realizes the dark side of such purported moral ambition. Alabanda’s friends are ruthless revolutionaries who seek to overthrow the present powers by violent means: “The cold sword is forged from hot metal” (ibid., p.26) [“Aus heiβem Metalle wird das kalte Schwert geschmieden” (ibid., p. 510)]. Through this experience, Hyperion grasps something of the conflictual nature of human life: “If the life of the world consists in an alteration between opening and closing, between going forth and returning, why is it not even so with the heart of man” (ibid., p.29) [“Bestehet ja das Leben der Welt im Wechsel des Entfaltens und Vershlieβens, in Ausflug und in Rückkehr zu sich selbst, warum nicht auch das Herz des Menschen” (ibid., p.514)]? However, it is by encountering beauty in the person and life of Diotima (Book II of Volume I) that Hyperion believes he has found what he is looking for, i.e. the Unity he is after: “I have seen it once, the one thing that my soul sought, and the perfection that we put somewhere far away above the stars, that we put off until the end of time – I have felt it in its living presence” (ibid., p.41) [“Ich habe es Einmal gesehen, das Einzige, das meine Seele suchte, und die Vollendung die wir über die Sterne hinauf entfernen, die wir hinausscheben bis ans Ende der Zeit, die hab’ ich gegenwärtig gefühlt” (ibid., p.529)]. A period of bliss ensues, but Diotima understands that Hyperion is “born for higher things” (ibid., p.72) [“zu höhern Dingen geboren” (ibid., p.566)], that the simple harmony of her life is not for him. He must go out and bring beauty to those places where it is lacking. Having grasped this (Book I of Volume II), Hyperion answers Alabanda’s call to join him in battle to free Greece.

Hyperion’s departure for battle is followed by several letters addressed to Diotima and a couple of her replies. After initial success in the fight against the Turks, Hyperion’s men are delayed by the long siege of Mistra. Nonetheless, as they finally enter the town, they go on a]rampage, pillaging and killing indiscriminately. Rather than face the enemy, Hyperion’s army disperses once its lust for plunder is satisfied. This leads to the death of forty Russian soldiers who stood alone fighting the common foe. Hyperion takes his army’s dishonour to make him unworthy, in his eyes, for Diotima’s love: “I must advise you to give me up, my Diotima” (ibid., p.98) [“ich muβ dir raten, daβ du mich verlässest, meine Diotima” (ibid., p.597)]. In letters to Bellarmin, we discover more details of the battles fought by Hyperion and Alabanda. Their friendship flourished again, but Alabanda’s lust for battle eventually came to an end, thus pointing once more to the limits of his way of life.
In a letter from Diotima that arrives later, it emerges that she lost her will to live as her lover did not return, and she finally let herself die. In a development which reflects Hölderlin’s understanding of human life, the effortless harmony of Diotima’s world of beauty, once disturbed by the fire of Hyperion’s free aspiration to noble deeds, could not simply return to its original form. Rather, it became something to aim for, something Diotima thought Hyperion could achieve for her: “You drew my life away from the Earth, but you would also have had power to bind me to the Earth” (ibid., p.122) [“Du entzogst main Leben der Erde, du hättest auch Macht gehabt, mich an die Erde zu fesseln” (ibid., p.626)]. It is, thus, through its very destruction, that Diotima’s way of life ceases to represent that which Hyperion could have sought to take refuge in. Diotima’s words illustrate the whole problem of life as an “eccentric path,” but her death, apparently, only leaves Hyperion confused: “as I am now, I have no names for things and all before me is uncertainty” (ibid., p.126) [“wie ich jetzt bin, hab ich keinen Namen für die Dinge, und es ist mir alles ungewiβ” (ibid., p.632)]. At the end of the novel, however, the beauty of Nature once again fills Hyperion with joy, and this poetic sense of oneness reaches beyond separation and death to Alabanda and Diotima. Somehow, he has made some sense of his experiences. Thus, after all these tragedies, an overall feeling of unity prevails: “You springs of earth! you flowers! and you woods and you eagles and you brotherly light! how old and new is our love!- We are free, we are not narrowly alike in outward semblance; how should the Mode of life not vary? yet we love the ether, all of us, and in the inmost of our inmost selves we are alike” (ibid., p.133) [“Ihr Quellen der Erd! Ihr Blumen! Und ihr Wälder und ihr Adler und du brüderliches Licht! Wie alt und neu ist unsere Liebe! – Frei sind wir, gleichen uns nicht ängstig von auβen; wie sollte nicht wechseln die Weise des Lebens? Wir lieben den Äther doch all und innigst im Innersten gleichen wir uns” (ibid., p.639-640)]. However, the last words of the novel suggest an open ending: “So I thought. More soon” (ibid., p.133) [“So dacht’ ich. Nächstens mehr” (ibid., p.640)]. Thus, after all the ordeals that he has worked through in these letters, Hyperion’s life goes on. This seems to point to new experiences and the possibility of revisiting his interpretation of his life thus far.”
(Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

“…..The main work of this period is the novel
Hyperion oder Der Eremit in Griechenland (2
volumes, 1797-1799; translated as Hyperion; or, The
Hermit in Greece, 1965). Hölderlin had begun the
novel during his student days in Tübingen and
had revised it continually during his stays in
Waltershausen and Jena. In 1794 a preliminary
version was published under the title “Fragment
von Hyperion” (Fragment of Hyperion) in Friedrich
Schiller’s literary journal Neue Thalia. This version
of the novel is cast in the form of letters from
Hyperion, a young late-eighteenth-century Greek,
to his German friend Bellarmin. The letters depict
his constant struggle to attain the moment of
transcendent experience in which all conflict is
resolved and temporality is suspended: “Was mir
nicht Alles, und ewig Alles ist, ist mir Nichts”
(What for me is not All, and eternally All, is
nothing). In nature, in love, in a visit to Homeric
sites, Hyperion experiences momentary
intimations of his ideal, which constantly eludes
him, so that his aspirations remain unfulfilled.
The image of the “exzentrische Bahn” (eccentric
path), which constantly diverges from the center
of Being that it always seeks but can never
permanently attain, becomes a symbol of the
course of human existence.

Fichte

In Jena Hölderlin had revised this version, partly
in order to take account of his attempt to come to
terms with the philosophy of Fichte. In a metrical
version and a fragment entitled “Hyperions
Jugend” (Hyperion’s Youth), he abandoned the
epistolary format in favor of a retrospective
technique in which the older Hyperion looks back
on his youth. The narrator, relating his story to a
young visitor, acknowledges that the process of
reflection has made him “tyrannisch gegen die
Natur” (tyrannical toward nature), in that he has
reduced nature to the material of selfconsciousness.
This theme echoes Hölderlin’s
criticism of Fichte’s philosophy and its
preoccupation with the autonomy of the “absolute
ego.” Hölderlin’s new orientation finds expression
in the Platonic view of love as the longing of the
imperfect for the ideal, and in a new conception of
beauty, which emerges as the only form in which
the unity of Being, unattainable precisely because
it is the object of striving, is incarnated: “jenes
Sein, im einzigen Sinne des Worts … ist
vorhanden–als Schönheit” (Being, in the unique
sense of the word … is present-as Beauty). With
this subordination of self-consciousness to the
realization of beauty, Hölderlin establishes the
conceptual framework that he follows in
completing the novel.
The final version of the novel, the greater part of
which was completed during the period he was in
Frankfurt am Main, shows Hölderlin’s increasing
stylistic and formal mastery. He returns to the
epistolary form of the first version, but now
endows it with a particularly sophisticated
structure. Hyperion presents a retrospective view
of his life, beginning at the stage at which, after
having lost his beloved and his friends, he returns
bitterly disappointed to his native land, intending
to take up the life of a hermit. The main focus is
not the sequence of events but the act of narration
itself. The seemingly disconnected fragments of
his experience are integrated through the process
of reflective recapitulation and gradually assume
a dialectical structure in which union and
separation, joy and suffering come to be seen as
inseparable parts of a complex unity.

Heraclitus

….

The principle of “das Eine in sich
unterschiedne” (the one that is differentiated
within itself), which Hölderlin adapted from a
formulation of Heraclitus, defines at once the
essence of the Athenian and the nature of beauty–as opposed to the one-sidedness and
fragmentation characteristic of the Egyptians and
the Spartans, and, in Hölderlin’s view, also of
modern times.”

Source: Hoelderlin, Duke University

Gothe

“Like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Schiller, his older contemporaries, Hölderlin was a fervent admirer of ancient Greek culture, but had a very personal understanding of it. Much later, Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers would recognize in him the poet who first acknowledged the orphic and dionysiac Greece of the mysteries, which he would fuse with the Pietism of his native Swabia in a highly original religious experience. For Hölderlin, the Greek gods were not the plaster figures of conventional classicism, but living, actual presences, wonderfully life-giving and, at the same time, terrifying. He understood and sympathized with the Greek idea of the tragic fall, which he expressed movingly in the last stanza of his Hyperions Schicksalslied “Hyperion’s Song of Destiny”. (Source: icompositions).

Hyperion’s Song of Destiny
by Fr. Hölderlin

Holy spirits, you walk up there
in the light, on soft earth.
Shining god-like breezes
touch upon you gently,
as a woman’s fingers
play music on holy strings.

Like sleeping infants the gods
breathe without any plan;
the spirit flourishes continually
in them, chastely kept,
as in a small bud,
and their holy eyes
look out in still
eternal clearness.

A place to rest
isn’t given to us.
Suffering humans
decline and blindly fall
from one hour to the next,
like water thrown
from cliff to cliff,
year after year,
down into the Unknown

We have no footing anywhere,
No rest, we topple,
Fall and suffer
Blindly from hour
To hour

like water
Pitched from fall
To fall, year in,
Year out, headlong,
Downward for years to the vague abyss

“Philosophy then, is not born out of the nostalgia for an absent unity, nor out of the exile from the All, but out of an accord with that which is in the difference of its multiplicity. For what is thus achieved is a concept of beauty different from that of Platonism and from that of the classicism of Goethe and Winckelmann: no longer the becoming-visible of the idea, but the harmony of opposites, no longer the static concept of an atemporal beauty, but the dynamic one of a living beauty that Plato himself, citing Heraclitus, has not perhaps ignored, as Hoelderlin implies in the preface to Hyperion, when he exclaims, after having alluded to the already realised presence of being as beauty:

Plato

I think that in the end we will all cry out: saint Plato, forgive us! We have gravely sinned against you!
For it is on the basis of such a sensible presence of beauty and of the effective presence of the union of the infinite with the finite that Greece is defined in Hyperion as the homeland of philosophy, in opposition to Egypt and the North:
Do you see now why the Athenians in particular could not but be a philosophical people too? Not so the Egyptian. He who does not live loving Heaven and earth and loved by them in equal measure, he who does not live at one in this sense with the element in which he has his being, is by his very nature not so as one with himself as a Greek, at least he does not expewrience eternal Beauty as easily as a Greek does.
It is, in fact, only Greece that is capable of this harmony with the sensible and with exteriority which procures it the harmony with the intelligible and interiority: neither the Oriental (the Egyptian), subject to an exteriority which appears like a “terrible enigma”, nor the Nordic (the German), enclosed in an interiority without an outside, are capable of such a harmony and can be open to a beauty at the same time “human and divine”. Must Greece, then, be resurrected?” (Source: Francoise Dastur: Hoelderlin and the Orientalisation of Greece)
“Oh! were there a banner … a Thermopylae upon which I could spill my blood with honour, all that solitary love for which I can have no use.”
“Hölderlin’s glory is that he is the poet of Hellenism. Everyone who reads his work senses that his Hellenism is different, more sombre, more tortured by suffering than the radiant Utopia of antiquity envisaged during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But his vision of Hellas has nothing in common either with the tedious, trivial, academic classicism of the nineteenth century or with the hysterical bestiality with which Nietzsche and the imperialist period envisaged Greece. The key to Hölderlin’s view lies then in the understanding of the specifics of this conception of Hellenism.”
Georg Lukacs, Goethe and His Age, 1934

2011-11-26T00:02:00.001-06:00

In lieblicher Blaue – In lovely blue: A poem by Friedrich Holderlin

Δευτέρα, 25 Απριλίου, 2011

Louise Keller, Holderlin (1842) drawing

More than a year ago, I wrote a post about Holderlin’s “Hyperion”. Today I revisit the great German poet, and present his poem “In lovely blue”. I have added some pictures to the words. In addition, there are explicary notes to the poem and the pictures. All of them are at the end of the post.
In Lovely Blue
by Friedrich Hölderlin
(Translated by Glenn Wallis)

Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, MOMA, Ney York (See Note 1)

In lovely blue blooms the steeple with its metal
roof. Around the roof swirls the swallows’ cry,
surrounded by most touching blue. The sun rises high
above and tints the roof tin. But in the wind beyond, silently,
a weathercock crows. When someone comes forth from
the stairs of the belfry, it is a still life. And though the form
is so utterly strange, it becomes the figure of a
human being. The windows out of which the bells resound are as
gates to beauty. Because gates still take after nature
they resemble forest trees. Purity, too, is beauty. From within, out
of diverse things, a grave spirit emerges. So simple,
these images, so holy, that one often fears
to describe them. But the heavenly ones, always
good, possess, even more than the wealthy, virtue and
joy. Humans may follow suit. Might a person, when
life is full of trouble, look up and say: I, too,
want to be like this? Yes. As long as friendliness and purity
dwell in our hearts, we may measure ourselves not unfavorably
with the divine. Is God unknown? Is he manifest
as the sky?(a) This I tend to believe. It is the measure
of the human. Deserving, yet poetically, we dwell
on this earth (b). The shadow of night with its stars,
if I may say so, is no purer than we
who exist in the image of the divine (c).

Andre Butzer, Nasaheim (See Note 2)

Is there measure on earth? There is none. (d) For
the creator’s worlds can never contain the clap of thunder.
Because it blooms under the sun, a flower, too, is beautiful.
In life, the eye often finds creatures to call more beautiful
still than flowers. Oh! I know this well!
For to bleed in body and heart and cease to be whole—
does this please God? The soul, I believe, must remain
pure, or else the eagle will wing its way to the almighty
with songs of praise and the voice of so many
birds. It is substance and it is form. Beautiful little
brook, so touching you seem as you roll so clear,
like the eye of God, through the Milky Way. I know
you well. But tears stream from my eyes. A clear
life I see in the forms of creation that blooms around me
because I do not compare them unreasonably with the lonely pigeons
in the churchyard. People’s laughter seems
to grieve me—after all, I have a heart. Would I
like to be a comet? I believe so. For they have the quickness
of birds, they blossom in fire, and in their purity is as children’s.
To wish for more is beyond the measure of human nature.
The clarity of virtue also deserves praise from the grave
spirit that blows between the garden’s three pillars. A beautiful virgin must
garland her head with myrtle, for to do so is simply
her nature and her sensibility. But myrtle trees are found in Greece.

Samuel Francis, In lovely Blueness 2 (1955-56) (See Note 3)

When a person looks into a mirror and sees
his image, as if painted, that is like the Manes.
The human form has eyes, but the moon has light.
Perhaps King Oedipus (e) had an eye too many. This
man’s suffering seems indescribable, unspeakable,
inexpressible. When the drama presents it so, so it is. But how is it with me?
Am I thinking now of your suffering? Like brooks, the end of
Something as vast as Asia is carrying me toward it. Oedipus, of course, suffered like this, too;
and certainly for the same reason. Did Hercules suffer as well? Of course.
Did not the Dioscuri, too, in their friendship bear pain?
As Hercules fought with God—that is
suffering. And immortality in envy of this life—
to divide these two—that, too, is suffering. But it is also
suffering when a person is covered with freckles—
to be completely covered with freckles! The beautiful
sun does that, for it draws out everything. The path
seduces the young with the charm of its rays, like roses.
Oedipus’s suffering is like a poor man
wailing that he is deprived. Son Laios, poor
stranger in Greece. Life is death, and
death is also a life.

Emil Nolde, March Landscape in the evening (See Note 4)

Notes to the poem
(a) Note that in German, Sky is Himmel, which also stands for Heaven.
(b) This is the phrase that Heidegger used in his essay “…poetically man dwells…”.
(c) Book of Genesis, Chapter 1 verse 26: ‘And God said: Let us make man in our image’.
(d) Holderlin seems to imply that only in the heavenly skies one can find measure, therefore introducing a metaphysical element in the poem. Werner Marx, who was the professor who took Heidegger’s teaching post at the University of Freiburg, wrote a book with the same question in its title, and “Foundations for a nonmetaphysical ethics” as its subtitle.
(e) Holderlin translated Sophocles’ tragedies Oedipus and Antigone. These translations are significant interprpetations of the works.
Notes accompanying the pictures
(1) Note to Yves Klein’s painting: Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—has been a strategy adopted by many painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent. Klein likened monochrome painting to an “open window to freedom.” He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.(Source: MOMA)
(2) Question: On the other hand, perhaps it is Friedrich Holderlin who has organized you? Why is Friedrich Holderlin ‘Kommando’, rather than, e.g., ‘Muse’?

No. Holderlin is just one of my main heroes and he is my favorite poet in my private library. He is my choice and therefore I myself am Holderlin, I can call myself N-Holderlin, which means NASAHEIM(*)-Holderlin, a self-fullfilling prophecy of abstract art. There is no form of art without a relation towards utopia and therefore abstraction. The show is called Kommando because it was a very high or a very low order from heaven that initiated the show. Within the world of art, which is a completely useless world, a Kommando can be a group of people, or an individual that tries to find a way out of this world.

(*) “Nasaheim” – the outerspace station of Anaheim/Disneyland.

(Source: An Interview With Andre Butzer, Artist And Curator Of ‘Kommando Friedrich Holderlin’ At Max Hetzler, Berlin, Saatchi Online Magazine)

(3) This at once airy and expansive composition by Sam Francis brilliantly demonstrates the artist’s unique combination of Abstract Expressionist and late Impressionist influences. With its soft pastel palette, the monumental abstract work creates the sensation of standing before a vast and boundless space. Francis, who often found his inspiration in literary sources, titled the painting after a poem by the German Romantic writer Friedrich Hölderlin which begins with the narrator looking to the sky: “In lovely blue the steeple blossoms/ With its metal roof. Around which/ Drift swallow cries, around which/ Lies most loving blue.” (Source: Art Institute of Chicago)

(4) Nolde’s landscape is a landscape dominated by the sky of North Germany, near the Danish borders, Nolde’s home.

Δημοσιεύθηκε από panathinaeos

Καταχωρήθηκε στο abstract expressionism, art, expressionism, germany, greece, ποιηση, τέχνη, ελλας, ζωγραφικη, literature, painting, poetry
Με ετικέτα: andre butzer, Art institute of chicago, Emil Nolde, heidegger, holderlin, MOMA, samuel francis, yves klein

Kleist

2011-11-24T21:56:00.001-06:00

The Tragedy of Fate and the Tragedy of Culture: Heinrich von Kleist’s The Schroffenstein Family

On 21st November 1811, on a lake’s edge near Potsdam, a 34 year old Kleist shot himself dead in a suicide pact with his terminally ill lover. He left behind him just under a decade of intense literary output which has established him as one of the most important writers of the German romantic period. On the bicentenary of his death, Kleist scholar Steven Howe explores the importance of his first dramatic work and how in it can be seen the themes of his later masterpieces.

Chalk-drawing reproduction of a now lost miniature which Peter Friedel made in 1801 to be presented to Kleist's fiancée at the time Wilhelmine von Zenge

Heinrich von Kleist is without doubt one of the most challenging figures in German literary history. In a career lasting a little under a decade, from 1802 through to his premature death in 1811, he produced a remarkable body of creative work that radically called into question the prevailing intellectual, aesthetic and ethical orthodoxies of the age. Today, Kleist is perhaps most familiar, certainly to British audiences, as the dramatist behind the violently tragic Penthesilea and the brilliantly enigmatic The Prince of Homburg, and as the author of a series of daring and dramatic short stories, including Michael Kohlhaas, The Marquise of O…, and The Earthquake in Chile. Altogether less well-known, however (notwithstanding Eric Bentley’s adaptation in German Requiem), is his first major literary production, the five act play The Schroffenstein Family, published in 1803. Aside from a brief premiere at the National Theatre in Graz in January 1804, the drama found little immediate resonance, and it has traditionally been regarded as belonging to the second class of the author’s imaginative work. Kleist, for his part, also seems to have attached little value to the piece, referring to it in a letter to his sister, Ulrike, as a ‘wretched botched job’. That the drama suffers from the defects one might expect of the first work of a young poet is a point that few would demur: the language is overwrought, the plot convoluted, and the entire exposition lacks the refined touch which Kleist was later to perfect. That being said, the play nonetheless contains a number of scenes and episodes which provide an early glimpse of the author’s promise and genius, and introduces several of the most significant themes and features which were to subsequently become a hallmark of his poetics.
The action of the drama revolves around the conflict between the rival houses of Rossitz and Warwand, and the fate of two star-crossed lovers, Ottokar and Agnes. The imaginative debt to Romeo and Juliet is plain to see, and Kleist hews closely to the model of Shakespeare’s tragedy, though with one significant variation – the two feuding houses are here different branches of the same family. The origins of the conflict extend from a testamentary contract, according to which the property of either house should fall to the other branch if the line of descent is broken. This breeds an atmosphere of mistrust, as both houses suspect one another of pursuing its demise, and particularly that of its heirs. When the younger son of Count Rupert, head of the Rossitz branch of the family, dies in unexplained circumstances, his suspicions thus fall directly on his counterpart, Count Sylvester, and the drama opens with him compelling his immediate family to swear an oath of bloody and absolute vengeance against the entire house of Warwand.

The cast of characters of Die Familie Schroffenstein as featured in a 1922 collection of Kleist's works for the stage.

The tragic trajectory of the play is set by the issue that Ottokar, the elder son of Rupert, partakes in this oath-swearing, unaware that the girl with whom he has fallen in love, Agnes, is the daughter of Sylvester. Once alerted to the fact, he is convinced by Agnes of her father’s innocence in the matter of the child’s death and attempts to negotiate a reconciliation between the warring counts. His efforts are thwarted, however, by Rupert’s burning hatred for Sylvester and his untameable lust for revenge. Upon learning of his son’s clandestine affair, Rupert resolves to murder Agnes, and when the two lovers secretly meet at a mountain cave, he and his vassal, Santing, accost them. In an attempt to deceive his father and protect his beloved, Ottokar exchanges clothes with Agnes; failing to note the switch in the darkness, Rupert stabs his own son to death, whereupon the presently arriving Sylvester follows suit by murdering Agnes in the mistaken belief that she is Ottokar. Ironically – or perhaps appropriately – it falls to the blind grandfather, Sylvius, to recognise the true identities of the two victims and reveal the double filicide. At the play’s end, an old widow, Ursula, discloses the true state of affairs, namely that Rupert’s son’s death was accidental – he drowned in a forest brook. With the misunderstanding resolved, a despairing reconciliation follows, and the drama closes with the mad-driven bastard son of the Rossitz house, Johann, addressing Ursula as master and personification of fate.
That the mechanisms of fate and chance do serve as an important motor for the action of the drama is very much an accepted commonplace in interpretive criticism. In his personal letters, Kleist reveals a fascination with the unknowable powers of contingency and coincidence that intrude upon and shape the life of the individual, and such concerns penetrate to the core of many of his literary works: time and again, he confronts his characters with situations over which they have no control and to which they must then react. In Schroffenstein, chance happenings are heaped upon one another in such a way as to both blunt much of the originality of the constellation, and to strain reader credulity after the fashion of the Gothic tale – it is not without reason that Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk has been cited as a possible source of inspiration. The outcome is a demonstration of the operations of fate and contingency which, viewed in a narrow sense, seems at times laboured and contrived. The design of the inquiry is, however – in a further parallel to Romeo and Juliet – overlaid with a deeper disquisition on the limitations of human awareness. Ursula’s laconic words to Rupert and Sylvester, ‘If you kill one another, it is an error’, acquire, in this context, special relevance, pointing as they do towards the movement of error and the instances of misunderstanding that drive the action to its tragic close. Here one can detect the influence of Kleist’s encounter with Kantian philosophy, which appears to have shattered his faith in the possibilities of absolute truth and knowledge. The fallibility of perception emerges, as a consequence, as a dominant theme and subject of reflection in Kleist’s work, and remains so across his entire literary corpus. In Schroffenstein, this manifests itself through the frequent recurrence of error and confusion, bred by the characters’ inability to communicate and their attendant susceptibility to misreading reality. Typically, Kleist drives the issue towards aesthetic extremes, crafting an enveloping atmosphere of illusion, deceit and suspicion within the extended family which, in turn, calls forth gruesome acts of vengeance and retributive violence. In this regard, the drama can perhaps be seen as the most Jacobean and Sturm und Drang-like of Kleist’s works – as a grizzly, though at times darkly comedic, exploration of the workings of fate and the human capacity for misunderstanding, and of their effects in unleashing man’s violent potentialities.

Kleist's grave alongside that of Henrietta Vogel, his terminally ill lover whom he shot before shooting himself in a suicide pact on the banks of Kleiner Wannsee near Potsdam. The inscription on Kleist's grave reads 'Now, oh immortality, you are all mine'.
(Photo by Jochen Jansen, published under a CC-BY-SA license).

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that the tragedy be approached solely through the lens of metaphysical and epistemological concerns. For the very issue of error that stands at the heart of the drama raises the question of interpretation, and with it that of the extent to which cultural and social codes give shape to the individual’s understandings and perceptions. In particular, the text displays how the nature of the conflict between the two houses fosters a socially-conditioned prejudice that colours and impairs judgement, and which speaks to a deeper cultural critique embedded within the drama. The major point of reference and orientation here is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, both put into question the Enlightenment faith in human progress and delivered a searing assault on the conditions of modernity. The opening scene of the play already bears the mark of Rousseau’s sway: when Rupert’s wife, Eustache, refers to her natural feminine tenderness in response to his calls for her to swear the oath of vengeance, he objects, ‘Nothing more of nature. It is but a sweet, delightful fairytale from childhood’. What follows does so under the sign of Rousseau’s condemnation of man’s fall from natural goodness into socio-moral decay: the terms of the inheritance contract, for instance, as both agent and symbol of the conflict between Rupert and Sylvester, casts into relief the lure of wealth and property, the original idée fixe, which Rousseau identifies as a root cause of modern inequality and conditions of violence. In its presentation of the trials of the lovers, meanwhile, the text also plays on the anthropology of identity laid down in the Discourse, in which the dilemma of man’s ruinous modernity is diagnosed in terms of the tensions between subject and world. In this instance, that dilemma is telescoped through the relationship between love and society, with Ottokar in particular forced to struggle with the contrast between the demands of his father and his feelings for Agnes. In such a way, the text also points to a modern view of identity as an active positioning of the self in relation to cultural discourses – a theme to which Kleist was to frequently return, perhaps most notably in his portrayal of the cross-cultural relationships between Gustav and Toni in The Betrothal in St. Domingo, and between Achilles and Penthesilea in the drama of the latter name.
These fundamental tensions between nature and culture, between individual and society, serve as a central axis for the greater part of Kleist’s literary oeuvre, and it is perhaps in this sense, above all, that Schroffenstein can be seen to point the way towards his later – and greater – dramatic achievements. On the one hand, his works dwell on the onslaught of fate that upsets the secure ideals of enlightenment rationalism; on the other, however, this aspect is only ever a corollary to a deeper sense of the cultural rift between subject and world, and the attendant instabilities of agency and identity. Behind this lies the experience of the French Revolution and the turmoil it left in its wake, as existing hierarchies of power and status collapsed, and Europe was plunged into a period of instability and conflict. Against this backdrop, Kleist, like so many of his Romantic contemporaries, critically explores the paradigms of eighteenth-century humanist discourse, taking up the tensions and paradoxes embedded therein and exhibiting them in the full light of his imagination. In particular, it is the complex relationship between nature and culture to which he time and again returns, with most of his texts turning upon an exploration of the psychological and moral conflicts between the individual and his or her environment. Frequently, such struggles escalate to a sudden unleashing of the self, to acts of violent rebellion or assimilation. It is this readiness to plumb the extreme depths of human psychology and conduct under conditions of stress that lends Kleist’s work its peculiar modernism, and which ensures that even now, some two hundred years on from his death, he retains the ability to excite, engage and trouble his readers.

Steven Howe is Associate Research Fellow in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter. He is currently working, together with Ricarda Schmidt (Exeter) and Sean Allan (Warwick), on a large-scale, AHRC-funded project – timed to coincide with the bicentenary of the author’s death – exploring discourses of education and violence in the works of Heinrich von Kleist (Kleist, Education and Violence: The Transformation of Ethics and Aesthetics). He has previously written a full-length study on Kleist’s engagement with the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and published further articles regarding the representation of violence in Kleist’s texts, and on aspects of their popular and critical reception.

Links to Works

Text version of Die Familie Schroffenstein (in German)
- text
Sämtliche Werke und Briefe – Vol. 1 (1908) by Heinrich von Kleist featuring Die Familie Schroffenstein.
- pdf online
- Internet Archive link
Tales from the German, comprising specimens from the most celebrated authors (1844) containing Kleist’s classic Michael Kolhaus translated into English by John Oxenford and C.A. Feiling.

Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin

2011-11-24T16:45:00.001-06:00

In English translation by David Constantine

A sampling from the book
Friedrich Hölderlin
Selected Poems
translated by
David Constantine
Second, expanded edition 1996
Published by Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle upon Tyne

Ages of Life
Euphrates' cities and
Palmyra's streets and you
Forests of columns in the level desert
What are you now?
Your crowns, because
You crossed the boundary
Of breath,
Were taken off
In Heaven's smoke and flame;
But I sit under clouds (each one
Of which has peace) among
The ordered oaks, upon
The deer's heath, and strange
And dead the ghosts of the blessed ones
Appear to me.

'Another day'
Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere
Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation...
Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on
My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.
For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

'Once there were gods'

Once there were gods, on earth, with people, the heavenly muses
And Apollo, the youth, healing, inspiring, like you.
And you are like them to me, as though one of the blessed
Sent me out into life where I go my comrade's
Image goes with me wherever I suffer and build, with love
Unto death; for I learned this and have this from her.
Let us live, oh you who are with me in sorrow, with me in faith
And heart and loyalty struggling for better times!
For such we are! And if ever in the coming years they knew
Of us two when the spirit matters again
They would say: lovers in those days, alone, they created
Their secret world that only the gods knew. For who
Cares only for things that will die the earth will have them, but
Nearer the light, into the clarities come
Those keeping faith with the heart's love and holy spirit who were
Hopeful, patient, still, and got the better of fate.

The Journey

Suevia, my mother, happy land!
You also are like your more shining sister
Lombardy over there
Flowed through by a hundred streams
And trees in plenty, white with blossom or reddish
And the darker, deep, full green, the wild trees
And the Alps of Switzerland overshadow you too,
Neighbourly; for near the hearth of the house
Is where you live and you can hear
Inside from silvery vessels
The spring rushing that issues
From pure hands when touched
By warm rays
Crystal ice and tipped over
By the lightly quickening light
The snowy summit drenches the earth
With purest water. For that reason
You are born loyal. Hard
Living near the source to quit the place.
And your children, the towns
On the long lake in the haze
On the willowy Neckar and on the Rhine
All think
Nowhere would be better to live.

'When I was a boy'

When I was a boy
A god often rescued me
From the shouts and the rods of men
And I played among trees and flowers
Secure in their kindness
And the breezes of heaven
Were playing there too.
And as you delight
The hearts of plants
When they stretch towards you
With little strength
So you delighted the heart in me
Father Helios, and like Endymion
I was your favourite,
Moon. 0 all
You friendly
And faithful gods
I wish you could know
How my soul has loved you.
Even though when I called to you then
It was not yet with names, and you
Never named me as people do
As though they knew one another
I knew you better
Than I have ever known them.
I understood the stillness above the sky
But never the words of men.
Trees were my teachers
Melodious trees
And I learned to love
Among flowers.
I grew up in the arms of the gods.

Titles of the original poems: Lebensalter, Wohl geh ich täglich..., Götter wandelten einst..., Die Wanderung, Da ich ein Knabe war...

From the back cover of Friedrich Hölderlin Selected Poems:

FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN (1770-1843) was one of Europe's greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in these remarkable verse translations. This is a new edition of Constantine's widely-praised HÖLDERLIN Selected Poems, containing several new translations, including one of the great elegy Bread and Wine. The odes and hymns are more fully represented and there are further extracts, in an equivalent English, from Hölderlin's extraordinary German versions of Sophocles. Notes on the poems have also been expanded. This new volume is a stimulating introduction to the work of a poet who, writing around 1800, addresses us ever more urgently as the millenium ends.
'Hölderlin is a poet we can read with our own atrocious times in mind. He is a deeply religious poet whose fundamental tenet is absence and the threat of meaninglessness. He confronted hopelessness as few writers have, he was what Rilke called "exposed"; but there is no poetry like his for the constant engendering of hope, for the expression, in the body and breath of poems, of the best and most passionate aspirations' - David Constantine
'Constantine goes for an "equivalence of spirit" in a more familiar idiom. This is at once a bold and humble undertaking, and has produced poetry of a remarkable luminosity and intensity, written in rhythms and cadences which recreate, both in their extremities of grief and their urgent hope, the immediacy of the original' - Karen Leeder, Oxford Poetry

David Constantine has published five books of poems, three translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His latest poetry books are Selected Poems (1991), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Caspar Hauser (1994), a poem in nine cantos. His co-translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet in the Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets series. His critical introduction to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin was published in 1988, and his translation of Goethe's novel Elective Affinities in 1994, both from OUP. He is Fellow in German at the Queen's College, Oxford.

A lot of Chicago's Bootlegs

2011-11-21T16:26:00.001-06:00

CHICAGO - This is the beginning of what will become the Most Ultimate Megapost featuring Chicago which will span basically their entire career. When i am done there should be around 100+ shows in either an MP3 or M4A format in various formats (FM, SDB, AUD, etc, etc,). I will be adding shows throughout time to this thread ONLY until i am finished so please keep checking back to see what more has been added.

I know that there are shows in here that have been added here onto Guitars 101 before by myself and many others and i am not trying to step on anyones toes and am very greatful for what has been added onto here in the past. I'm only trying to keep their music alive and to give people something that they might not have had before.

Unfortunately the eve infamous show of December 2, 1977 from Oakland, CA which was Terry Kath's last ever with the band still eludes me to this day.

All show uploads are courtesy of Micheal B and i hope that everyone will enjoy...

Dave

Live At Barnabys May 1, 1968
www.megaupload.com/?d=9TNM2YAZ

Live At Barnabys June 2, 1968
www.megaupload.com/?d=IAJ11US9

Live At The Itchy Foot Moose September 1, 1968
www.megaupload.com/?d=R165IEDC

Live At The Filmore West August 15-17, 1969
www.megaupload.com/?d=UBPPANAH

Live In Lewisville August 31, 1969
www.megaupload.com/?d=3TNEEDFO

Live In Milwaukee, WI July 19, 1970
www.megaupload.com/?d=D87R9Q0K

Live In Lenox (Tanglewood) July 21, 1970
www.megaupload.com/?d=HKK3RBFH

Live In Hampton August 22, 1970
www.megaupload.com/?d=WJ1QCAGO

Live At The Isle Of Wight August 28, 1970
www.megaupload.com/?d=HNZZ9TT1

Live In Hollywood, CA September 18, 1970
www.megaupload.com/?d=L6SBDTTJ

Live In Port Chester (First Show) October 13, 1970
www.megaupload.com/?d=ZS4078ZA

Live in Port Chester (Second Show) October 15, 1970
www.megaupload.com/?d=TJTJ55H0

Live In Albequerque, NM 1971
www.megaupload.com/?d=R2VQHOHD

Live In Oklanhoma City, OK March 13, 1971
www.megaupload.com/?d=1SUBC01W

Live In Phoenix, AZ April 23, 1971
www.megaupload.com/?d=41H1Q4NH

Live In Inglewood, CA April 24, 1971
www.megaupload.com/?d=N2SKUG5Y

Live In Frankfurt June 2, 1971
www.megaupload.com/?d=97X2WZ5N

Live In Stockholm June 7, 1971
www.megaupload.com/?d=5WBM15GR

Live In Osaka, Japan June 16, 1971
www.megaupload.com/?d=SVCL2FAB

Live In Saratoga September 3, 1971
www.megaupload.com/?d=Y4KQBAVR

Live In Baltimore, MD September 4, 1971
www.megaupload.com/?d=K87PO2M7

Live In Inglewood, CA February 12, 1972
www.megaupload.com/?d=D5V6P565

Live In New York, NY May ??, 1972
www.megaupload.com/?d=9JGCGW48

Live In Tokyo, Japan (Budokan) June 8, 1972
www.megaupload.com/?d=AEOG5I1L

Live In Seattle, WA July 24, 1972
www.megaupload.com/?d=LXZBX097

Live In Toronto, ON August 10, 1972
www.megaupload.com/?d=TK2TU9E3

Live In Buffalo, NY August 31, 1972
www.megaupload.com/?d=DAAYHYZB

Live In Chicago, Illinois November ??, 1972
www.megaupload.com/?d=T4S7ORTQ

Live In New York, NY 1973
www.megaupload.com/?d=NH1RG09F

Live In Amsterdam February ??, 1973
www.megaupload.com/?d=RWT5S9BP

Live In Australia February ??, 1973
www.megaupload.com/?d=33ZWTGXU

Live In Sapporo, Japan April 6, 1973
www.megaupload.com/?d=358WZI4W

Live In Tokyo, Japan (Budokan Theater) April 9, 1973
www.megaupload.com/?d=138HVD5Y

Live In Osaka, Japan April 18, 1973
www.megaupload.com/?d=B7FUVCH1

Live In Chicago, Illinois August 19, 1973
www.megaupload.com/?d=KG6AB06J

Live In Paris, France September ??, 1973
www.megaupload.com/?d=SEY54RMK

Live In Amsterdam September 7, 1973
www.megaupload.com/?d=YW7G4ZTK

Live In Houston, TX May 4, 1974
www.megaupload.com/?d=4HVITXHX

Live In Dallas, TX May 10, 1974
www.megaupload.com/?d=3APXVF7B

Live In Louisville, KY June 12, 1974
www.megaupload.com/?d=VJ7WP544

Live In Saratoga 1975
www.megaupload.com/?d=DJJDNDNY

Live In New York May ??, 1975
www.megaupload.com/?d=C8QOLGL0

Live In St. Louis, MO May 19, 1975 (Complete)
www.megaupload.com/?d=WVRBFXP8

Live In St. Louis, MO May 19, 1975
www.megaupload.com/?d=1RO3F1SH

Live In Cleveland, Ohio May 31, 1975
www.megaupload.com/?d=ECA1DN10

Live In New York June 12, 1975
www.megaupload.com/?d=7F95LVIK

Live In Providence August 17, 1975
www.megaupload.com/?d=4BJK5K30

Live In Portland September 18, 1975
www.megaupload.com/?d=XNSPJVR1

Live In Denver March 26, 1976
www.megaupload.com/?d=TLD5O5GT

Live In Los Angeles, CA March 29, 1976
www.megaupload.com/?d=87BSJVMJ

Live In Paris, France February 4, 1977
www.megaupload.com/?d=L9GRPTZA

Live In Amsterdam February 10, 1977
www.megaupload.com/?d=VYV8Y1EJ

Live In Essen February 12, 1977
www.megaupload.com/?d=FWSQQLJU

Live In Gothenburgh March 2, 1977 (incomplete)
www.megaupload.com/?d=N67K6QNK

Live In Gothenburgh March 2, 1977
www.megaupload.com/?d=8MPYZ1J3

Live In Long Island, NY June 20, 1977
www.megaupload.com/?d=0QOR5JND

Live In Verona August 31, 1977
www.megaupload.com/?d=QS2FFLS6

Live In Chicago, Illinois September 24, 1977
www.megaupload.com/?d=UZAFBBIP

Live In Pittsburgh, PA October 5, 1977 (complete)
www.megaupload.com/?d=V046Q3FJ

Live In Pittsburgh, PA October 5, 1977
www.megaupload.com/?d=FV5GD589

Live In Houston, TX October 13,1977
www.megaupload.com/?d=D8RF2JT7

Live In Los Angeles, CA November 21, 1977 (Last known circulated Terry Kath Show)
www.megaupload.com/?d=C4M245ZW

Live In Los Angeles, CA August 11, 1978
www.megaupload.com/?d=HP9SZL5O

Live In Chicago, Illinois August 19, 1978
www.megaupload.com/?d=4XV2FTAU

Live In Rockland November 3, 1978
www.megaupload.com/?d=CTUD6Q9C

Live In Sydney, Australia January 20, 1979
www.megaupload.com/?d=IUAX4YML

Live In New York April 6, 1979
www.megaupload.com/?d=IMSKWWKN

Live In Cleveland, Ohio August 1, 1979
www.megaupload.com/?d=7SJCJK1O

Live In Chicago, Illinois August 12, 1979 (alternate version)
www.megaupload.com/?d=JYVA1LS0

Live In Chicago, Illinois August 12, 1979
www.megaupload.com/?d=UNQNTYWU

Live In Clarkston, MI September 3, 1979 (Pine Knob)
www.megaupload.com/?d=KS5Q2PMA

Live In Poplar Creek August 24, 1980
www.megaupload.com/?d=6GRXGUYL

Live In Werchester September 14, 1980
www.megaupload.com/?d=B07OMLBU

Live In Worchester September 16, 1980
www.megaupload.com/?d=J6V5249X

Live In Chicago, Illinois August 1, 1981 (only show of the year i believe)
www.megaupload.com/?d=GFNXTWVY

Live At Rockpalast 1982
www.megaupload.com/?d=W5ADSRB6

Starsessions June 1, 1982
www.megaupload.com/?d=8EF0Y4SC

Live in Irving Meadows June 6, 1982
www.megaupload.com/?d=ZE57MSOX

Live In Warwick July 20, 1982
www.megaupload.com/?d=AHO50NUW

Live At Park West Chicago, Illinois August 5, 1982
www.megaupload.com/?d=RX678MOR

Live At Park West Chicago, Illinois August 6, 1982 (alternate)
www.megaupload.com/?d=WRBEUHWX

Live At Park West Chicago, Illinois August 6, 1982
www.megaupload.com/?d=PI35LHI3

Live In Dortmund December 18, 1982
www.megaupload.com/?d=595I5P9Q

Live In Los Angeles, CA September 1, 1983
www.megaupload.com/?d=3UOQ69F0

Live In Budokan, Japan January 10, 1984 (Complete)
www.megaupload.com/?d=8NNYLO33

Live In Budokan, Japan January 10, 1984
www.megaupload.com/?d=DGLHHYZJ

Live In Budokan, Japan January 10, 1984
www.megaupload.com/?d=ME44705O

Live In New Jersey (Garden State) August 10, 1984
www.megaupload.com/?d=R4JGKT89

Live In Houston, Texas March 31, 1985
www.megaupload.com/?d=S5ZYV2PD

Live In Reno, Nevada April 25, 1985
www.megaupload.com/?d=6CYH9VHZ

Live In Oakland, California March 26, 1985
www.megaupload.com/?d=2JURG05C

Live In St. Paul, Minnesota November 15, 1986
www.megaupload.com/?d=PHSJJ142

Live In Philadelphia, PA ??/??/1986
www.megaupload.com/?d=LO5EGJNS

Live In Tokyo, Japan April 26, 1987
www.megaupload.com/?d=S323NJRL

Live In Mountain View, CA July 18, 1987 (Part Two)
www.megaupload.com/?d=86WD4LFW

Live In Mountain View, CA July 18, 1987
www.megaupload.com/?d=02JQ31WO

Live In Stanhope July 24, 1988
www.megaupload.com/?d=S8GU8YV0

Live In Tacoma, Washington September 24, 1988
www.megaupload.com/?d=KPULZK4L

Live In Atlanta, Georgia July 29, 1989
www.megaupload.com/?d=6MJNMS5G

Live In Tokyo, Japan September 21, 1989
www.megaupload.com/?d=9TY4JBT0

Live In Taipei September 24, 1989
www.megaupload.com/?d=11H5BJ5A

Live In Tampa, Florida October 10, 1989
www.megaupload.com/?d=EIJTWWVR

Live In Pittsburgh 1990
www.megaupload.com/?d=VC2VDV30

Live In Dublin, Ireland March ??, 1990
www.megaupload.com/?d=T6ZYEUP9

Live In Pittsburgh 1990
www.megaupload.com/?d=VC2VDV30

Live In Dublin, Ireland March ??, 1990
www.megaupload.com/?d=T6ZYEUP9

Live In St. Louis, MO June 20, 1991
www.megaupload.com/?d=2EEWSO0M

Live In Clarkston, Michigan (Pine Knob) June 13, 1992
www.megaupload.com/?d=XS3R1NQU

Live In Jones Beach, NY June 27, 1992
www.megaupload.com/?d=WF7VUQML

Live In Columbus, Ohio October 7, 1992
www.megaupload.com/?d=6WD77CFJ

Live In St. Louis, MO June 20, 1991
www.megaupload.com/?d=2EEWSO0M

Live At Pine Knob Clarkston, Michigan June 13, 1992
www.megaupload.com/?d=XS3R1NQU

Live In Jones Beach, NY June 27, 1992
www.megaupload.com/?d=WF7VUQML

Live In Columbus, Ohio October 7, 1992
www.megaupload.com/?d=6WD77CFJ

Live In Devon June 10, 1993
www.megaupload.com/?d=EBXF8EXK

Live In Saratoga July 6, 1993
www.megaupload.com/?d=6E2JIYRF

Live In Los Angeles, CA July 9, 1993
www.megaupload.com/?d=HD20VRNV

Live In Devon June 10, 1993
www.megaupload.com/?d=EBXF8EXK

Live In Saratoga July 6, 1993
www.megaupload.com/?d=6E2JIYRF

Live In Los Angeles, CA July 9, 1993
www.megaupload.com/?d=HD20VRNV

Live In Budokan 1995
www.megaupload.com/?d=SOX2KP3A

Live In Los Angeles, CA May 9, 1995
www.megaupload.com/?d=8GHQVLPY

Live In Los Angeles, CA June 1, 1995 (Radio Show)
www.megaupload.com/?d=JTC4D5P8

Live In Las Vegas, NV July 27, 1995
www.megaupload.com/?d=KNI5GC6S

Live In Nayoya December 16, 1995
www.megaupload.com/?d=1YZLLFKU

Live In Las Vegas, NV March 18, 1997
www.megaupload.com/?d=9VDRVSES

Live In New York April 18, 1997
www.megaupload.com/?d=60DYIJ80

Live At The Rose Bowl Pasedena, CA May 10, 1997
www.megaupload.com/?d=FGH59V8J

Live In Boston, MA July 7, 1998
www.megaupload.com/?d=WGR9FQV2

Live In Binghampton August 19, 1998
www.megaupload.com/?d=LDV91YS9

Live In Los Angeles, CA December 8, 1998 (House Of Blues)
www.megaupload.com/?d=WKJX9W9F

Live In Los Angeles. CA December 8, 1998
www.megaupload.com/?d=F8N95YQ2

Live In Cerritos March 30, 1999
www.megaupload.com/?d=JYQOJM9S

Live In Osaka November 1, 2000
www.megaupload.com/?d=KP7ZYAD9

Live In Clearwater, Florida may 31, 2002
www.megaupload.com/?d=BNA7M6YC

Live In Kansas City August 1, 2004
www.megaupload.com/?d=1EEKFNIX

Live At The Greek Theatre Los Angeles, CA 2005 (Radio Special)
www.megaupload.com/?d=5AV4UOVT

Live In Los Angeles, CA September 6, 2005
www.megaupload.com/?d=7CZ31Q7U

Live In Ontario November 4, 2005
www.megaupload.com/?d=GLCPCQXO

Live In New York May 9, 2006
www.megaupload.com/?d=46OAFJM4

Live In Morrison June 20, 2006
www.megaupload.com/?d=L8ZZC6QL

Live In Hartford July 20, 2006
www.megaupload.com/?d=UWCGXQRS

Live In Willow Grove September 15, 2006
www.megaupload.com/?d=9GECRMRN

Live On Artist Confidential October 2, 2006
www.megaupload.com/?d=ZMKUU226

Live In South Bend, Indiana November 4, 2006
www.megaupload.com/?d=QHODL13F

Live In Las Vegas, NV December 31, 2006
www.megaupload.com/?d=HB3LX9VG

Live In Clarkston, Michigan (Pine Knob) July 29, 2007
www.megaupload.com/?d=8Z5I48XC

Live In Little Creek July 27, 2007
www.megaupload.com/?d=S1EKPMN3

Live In Tuscany (Lucca) July 26, 2008
www.megaupload.com/?d=1QA4YXZ1

Live In Woodinville August 23, 2008
www.megaupload.com/?d=NBRLGN50

Live In Albuquerque, NM July 13, 2009
www.megaupload.com/?d=S8LBSEBT

Live In Laguna Hills March 27, 2010
www.megaupload.com/?d=E3LXE1HN

Live In Las Vegas, NV May 29, 2010
www.megaupload.com/?d=IKN8XSYU

Live In Oskosh, WI July 26, 2010
www.megaupload.com/?d=JERBX67L

Live In Tokyo, Japan ??/??/2010
www.megaupload.com/?d=WJ6V2GH1

Live In Thackerville (Winstar Casino) January 7, 2011
www.megaupload.com/?d=CZFE57K3

and a special thanks goes out to all of those throughout the years who taped the shows that helped make this megapost possible for our enjoyment...

An english translation

2011-11-21T11:53:00.001-06:00

FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN (1770–1843), whose work has influenced such figures as Rilke, Celan, Heidegger, Adorno, and Benjamin, is considered by many to be one of the most important German lyric poets. NICK HOFF is a writer and translator who lives in San Francisco. His translations have been published in Telos, Left Curve, and other journals.

Endorsements:

"Hölderlin, the greatest of all German poets, explored the outer limits and the deepest depths of the German language, and has been considered untranslatable. We have waited so long for an English translation that does justice to the inexplicable mystery of his early mature work; with Hoff’s beautiful versions we have one at last."—Werner Herzog, director of Rescue Dawn

“The poems come out as English poems, but—as Dryden would have put it—poems Hölderlin might have written, had he been writing in English.”—Keith Waldrop, translator of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil

From the Book:

Gladly the boatman turns home to the river’s calm
From his harvest on faraway isles;
If only I too were homeward bound;
Yet what harvest have I but sorrow?—

O blessèd riverbanks that raised me,
Can you ease the sorrows of love? Ah, when I come
To you, woods of my youth, will you
Grant me peace once again?
—From “Home”

Hölderlin's “The Poet’s Vocation”

2011-11-15T14:14:00.001-06:00

Hölderlin's “The Poet’s Vocation”:But if he must, the man remains fearless.Alone before god, simplicity keeps him safe.He needs no weapons and no cunning,As long as God’s absence comes to his aid.

Hölderlin's "The Poet's Vocation": Fearless yet, if he must, man stands, and lonely Before God, simplicity protects him, No weapon does he need nor subterfuge Until God's being "not there" helps him.

Hölderlin's Original German Text "Dichterberuf":

Furchtlos bleibt aber, so er es muß, der Mann
Einsam vor Gott, es schützet die Einfalt ihn,
Und keiner Waffen brauchts und keiner
Listen, so lange, bis Gottes Fehl hilft.

Texto en español, antología poética, Ed. Cátedra. {Versión completa}

Mas permanece el hombre, como debe, sin miedo,
      a solas ante Dios, su candor le protege
             y no precisa armas ni argucias, en tanto
                    que la ausencia de Dios no acude en su socorro.

Texto en español, antología poética, Ed. 29. {Versión completa}

Pero el hombre puede quedarse, cuando es preciso,
      solo frente a Dios. Su candor lo protege.
             Y no necesita armas ni argucias, hasta el momento
                    en que la ausencia de Dios lo ayude.

Saramago en el País.com

2011-11-15T11:00:00.001-06:00

TRIBUNA: JOSÉ SARAMAGO / Dios como problema

No tengo ninguna duda de que este artículo, empezando por el título, obrará el prodigio de poner de acuerdo, al menos por una vez, a los dos irreductibles hermanos enemigos que se llaman Islamismo y Cristianismo, sobre todo en la vertiente universal (es decir, católica) a la que el primero aspira y en la que el segundo, ilusoriamente, todavía sigue imaginándose. En la más benévola de las reacciones posibles, clamarán los biempensantes que se trata de una provocación inadmisible, de una indisculpable ofensa al sentimiento religioso de los creyentes de ambos partidos, y, en la reacción peor (suponiendo que no haya peor), me acusarán de impiedad, de sacrilegio, de blasfemia, de profanación, de desacato, de tantos cuantos delitos más, de calibre idéntico, sean capaces de descubrir, y, por tanto, quién sabe, merecedor de una punición que me sirviera de escarmiento para el resto de mi vida. Si yo mismo perteneciera al gremio cristiano, el catolicismo vaticano tendría que interrumpir durante un momento los espectáculos estilo Cecil B. de Mille en que ahora se complace, para darse el enojoso trabajo de excomulgarme, aunque, cumplida esa obligación burocrática, se quedaría de brazos caídos. Ya le escasean las fuerzas para proezas más atrevidas, puesto que los ríos de lágrimas llorados por sus víctimas empaparon, esperemos que para siempre, la leña de los arsenales tecnológicos de la primera inquisición. En cuanto al islamismo, en su moderna versión fundamentalista y violenta (tan violenta y fundamentalista como fue el cristianismo en los tiempos de su apogeo imperial), la consigna por excelencia, todos los días insanamente proclamada, es "muerte a los infieles", o en traducción libre, si no crees en Alá no eres más que una inmunda cucaracha que, pese a ser también una criatura nacida del Fiat divino, cualquier musulmán cultivador de los métodos expeditivos tendrá el sagrado derecho y el sacrosanto deber de aplastarla bajo la babucha con la que entrará en el paraíso de Mahoma para ser recibido en el voluptuoso seno de las huríes. Permítaseme, por tanto, que vuelva a decir que Dios, habiendo sido siempre un problema, es ahora el problema.

Como cualquier otra persona para quien la situación del mundo en que vive no le es del todo indiferente, vengo leyendo algo de lo que por ahí se escribe sobre los motivos de naturaleza política, económica, social, psicológica, estratégica, y hasta moral, en que se presume que han echado raíces los movimientos islamistas agresivos que están lanzando sobre el denominado mundo occidental (aunque no sólo en ése) la desorientación, el miedo, el más extremo terror. Fueron suficientes, aquí y allí, unas cuantas bombas de relativa baja potencia (recordemos que casi siempre fueron transportadas en mochilas hasta el lugar de los atentados) para que los cimientos de nuestra tan luminosa civilización se estremecieran y se abrieran brechas, a la vez que se tambaleaban aparatosamente las precarias estructuras de seguridad colectiva con tanto trabajo y gasto levantadas y mantenidas. Nuestros pies, que creímos fundidos en el más resistente de los aceros, eran, a la postre, de barro.

Es el choque de civilizaciones, se dice. Será, pero a mí no me lo parece. Los más de siete mil millones de habitantes de este planeta, todos ellos, viven en lo que sería más exacto llamar civilización del petróleo, y hasta tal punto, que ni siquiera están fuera de ella (viviendo, claro está, su falta) quienes se encuentran privados del precioso oro negro. Esta civilización del petróleo crea y satisface (de manera desigual, ya lo sabemos) múltiples necesidades que no sólo reúnen alrededor del mismo pozo a los griegos y troyanos de la cita clásica, sino también a los árabes y no árabes, a los cristianos y a los musulmanes, sin hablar de los que, no siendo ni una cosa ni otra, tienen, donde quiera que se encuentren, un automóvil que conducir, una excavadora que poner en marcha, un mechero que encender. Evidentemente, esto no significa que bajo esta civilización del petróleo que es común a todos no sean discernibles los rasgos (más que simples rasgos en ciertos casos) de civilizaciones y culturas antiguas que ahora se encuentran inmersas en un proceso tecnológico de occidentalización a marchas forzadas, y que, sólo con mucha dificultad, ha logrado penetrar en el meollo sustancial de las mentalidades personales y colectivas correspondientes. Por alguna razón se dice que el hábito no hace al monje...
Una alianza de las civilizaciones, en feliz hora propuesta por el presidente del Gobierno español y cuya idea ha sido recientemente retomada por el secretario general de la Organización de Naciones Unidas, podrá representar, en el caso de que llegue a concretarse, un paso importante en el camino de una disminución de las tensiones mundiales de que cada vez parece que estamos más lejos, aunque sería insuficiente desde todos los puntos de vista si no incluyera, como ítem fundamental, un diálogo de religiones, ya que en este caso queda excluida cualquier remota posibilidad de una alianza... Como no hay motivos para temer que chinos, japoneses e indios, por ejemplo, estén preparando planes de conquista del mundo, difundiendo sus diversas creencias (confucionismo, budismo, taoísmo, sintoísmo, hinduismo) por vía pacífica o violenta, es más que obvio que cuando se habla de alianza de las civilizaciones se está pensando, especialmente, en cristianos y musulmanes, esos hermanos enemigos que vienen alternando, a lo largo de la historia, ora uno, ora otro, sus trágicos y por lo visto interminables papeles de verdugo y de víctima.

Por tanto, se quiera o no se quiera, Dios como problema, Dios como piedra en medio del camino, Dios como pretexto para el odio, Dios como agente de desunión. Pero de esta evidencia palmaria no se osa hablar en ninguno de los múltiples análisis de la cuestión, tanto si son de tipo político, económico, sociológico, psicológico o utilitariamente estratégico. Es como si una especie de temor reverencial o de resignación a lo "políticamente correcto y establecido" le impidiera al analista entender algo que está presente en las mallas de la red y las convierte en un entramado laberíntico del que no hemos tenido manera de salir, es decir, Dios. Si le dijera a un cristiano o a un musulmán que en el universo hay más de 400.000 millones de galaxias y que cada una de ellas contiene más de 400.000 millones de estrellas, y que Dios, sea Alá u otro, no podría haber hecho esto, mejor aún, no tendría ningún motivo para hacerlo, me responderían indignados que para Dios, sea Alá, sea otro, nada es imposible. Excepto, por lo visto, añadiría yo, establecer la paz entre el islam y el cristianismo, y de camino, conciliar a la más desgraciada de las especies animales que se dice que ha nacido de su voluntad (y a su semejanza), la especie humana, precisamente.

No hay amor ni justicia en el universo físico. Tampoco hay crueldad. Ningún poder preside los 400.000 millones de galaxias y los 400.000 millones de estrellas que existen en cada una. Nadie hace nacer el Sol cada día y la Luna cada noche, incluso cuando no es visible en el cielo. Puestos aquí sin saber por qué ni para qué, hemos tenido que inventarlo todo. También inventamos a Dios, pero Dios no salió de nuestras cabezas, permaneció dentro, como factor de vida algunas veces, como instrumento de muerte casi siempre. Podemos decir "aquí está el arado que inventamos", no podemos decir "aquí está el Dios que inventó el hombre que inventó el arado". A ese Dios no podemos arrancarlo de dentro de nuestras cabezas, ni siquiera los ateos pueden hacerlo. Pero por lo menos, discutámoslo. No adelanta nada decir que matar en nombre de Dios es hacer de Dios un asesino. Para los que matan en nombre de Dios, Dios no es sólo el juez que los absuelve, es el Padre poderoso que dentro de sus cabezas antes juntó la leña para el auto de fe y ahora prepara y coloca la bomba. Discutamos esa invención, resolvamos ese problema, reconozcamos al menos que existe. Antes de que nos volvamos todos locos. Aunque ¿quién sabe? Tal vez ésa sea la manera de que no sigamos matándonos los unos a los otros.

José Saramago es escritor portugués, premio Nobel de Literatura. Traducción de Pilar del Río.

Michael Augustin

2011-11-12T11:49:00.000-06:00

Michael Augustin