I was recently enjoying Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus
Project, in much the same way one enjoys a dish of ice-cream.
The dust-jacket of this volume, handsomely produced by Mr.
Farrar and Mr. Straus, ably aided by Mr. Giroux, is French-vanilla, with
touches of peaches-and-cream.
The paper is like fresh butter.
The translation, by Mr. Franzen (with, one suspects,
an occasional or possibly frequent assist from Messers. Paul Reitter and Daniel
Kehlmann[**], absent from the dust-jacket
but present in the notes to the text), is superb.
Really, truly superb.
Occasionally, the German original
even reads like an awkward back-translation from the English, as “Der Gedanke
ist ein Gefundenes, ein Wiedergefundenes” => “… a discovered thing, a
recovered thing”. (And later: "erfindet das Gefundene" => "invents what he has found": a perfect description of
found poetry.)
Yet, rather than now praise it further (that for
later), I’ll now talk back to it a
bit.
[**
This is the
same Daniel Kehlmann who wrote the best-selling
Die Ermessung der Welt.
We examine the film version
here.]
Kraus (“Heine und die Folgen”), in the course of his long dismantling-job
on Heinrich Heine, writes and quotes:
Kein Dichter ruft einem Fräulein,
das den Sonnenuntergang gerührt betrachtet, die Worte zu:
Mein Fräulein, sein Sie munter,
Das ist ein altes Stück;
Hier vorne geht sie unter,
und kehrt von hinten zurück.
Franzen chimes in
in a footnote (p. 83):
Boy, does Kraus nail what’s wrong
with Heine’s sunset poem. And yet,
when I was twenty, I found this poem hilarious. … [And yet again:] Heine’s poem about the girl and the sunset is smart-ass. It shouldn’t wear well as you get older.
Now, I cannot testify as to that, since this is the first
time I read it. But I found it -- mildly amusing: and this, though fall’n into the sere,
the silver leaf. Certainly not worth making a fuss
against. Smart-ass? -- freilich; but so is that indispensable reference-work, The Onion.
Yet I wish to say something more substantial than to defend
a limerick against the charge of not being an epic.
*
Falls Sie im
Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium
weiterblättern
möchten,
Bitte hier
klicken:
*
[Sprightly background music for this section:
The
Forellen-quintett,
splendidly performed by some young Asian guys you never heard of.
The prejudice (as we watch young Asians take over, say, my
meta-alma-mater, UC Berkeley) is:
Technical brilliance, to be sure;
but they can scarcely capture the echt
Viennese Gspaß und Gemütlichkeit.
-- Only, they do.
They do not at all overdo the technique; the performance is full of humor. And -- like that quatrain of Heine -- as simple and silver
as a fish.]
Let us take that rhyming trifle, not “on its own terms” (in
the anemic way of New Criticism) but as having been written by a Man in Full, Heinrich Heine. And the literalistic
simplicity of the poem’s depiction of the eternal wheeling of the Sun, suggests
an equally literal simplicity at the human level. I had spent much of the morning reading his Viennese countryman and
contemporary Sigmund Freud;
perhaps that suggested this unchaste thought to my mind, but in any
event: Any red-blooded poet or
artist, beholding some buxom
Mädchen waxing wet around the edges at the spectacle of the beauties of Nature,
has only one natural reaction:
Invite her up to your Bude “so that I may show you my etchings”. Then -- vorne slides the
Schlüpfer
down;
while the frock comes up
behind.
Following which instruction, the girl is certain to emerge
with a more deeply deepened
appreciation of the cycles of Nature (even if her own might be somewhat
disrupted by the aftermath). The
only point being, that while that “snatch” of doggerel (permit me the word) still
falls sort of the Iliad, neither is it purely deflationary, but on one natural reading points forward and upward and inward,
to a more fructuous development, which could even result in the birth of a
child.
~
So much for the smutty reading. But there is also -- as so often -- an anagogic, of a
sort especially perceptible to the more contemplative elderly gentlemen, who
are long past de-frocking Fräuleins.
For indeed, there is a subtlety here.
[Background music
for this part of the essay:
This symmetry of the sun setting before us, and rising behind,
is not an elementary fact of perception,
but is a non-obvious cosmological hypothesis, and fallible as such. Certainly, as a child, it never
occurred to me to connect the two widely-separated events. You see the sunset, you go to
bed; sleep happens; you get up and eat your oatmeal, and
run out to play; the sun is
already back in the sky, just as Mom & Dad are once again up and about. What’s to explain?
Later, in school, or from our parents in a pedagogic mood,
we learn abstruse suppositions about things called “East” and “West” -- not
easily observable in themselves, and which go all cock-eyed the instant you
race your bicycle around the corner, but in principle localizable via
consultation of a completely magical and paradoxical little novelty-item called
a “compass”: you turn the thing
this way and that way, trying to get the little needle to move, but it’s like
herding hamsters. Later still,
they teach you poems to memorize: “The
Sun rises in the East, and sets in the West.” (Or is it the other way about? One can never remember.) As with the Alphabet Song, and
the one about Columbus and the Ocean Blue, knowing such poems is constitutive
of becoming an educated grown-up.
And superficially, Heine’s ditty is bringing in that magisterial scientific description, with
deflationary intent, to crush the girl’s vesperal (and vestal)
sentimentalism. But, note: it does not.
It does not evoke a uniform isotropic curvilinear coordinate
system in a comoving Lorenzian reference frame, together with (all the fixings):
Rather, it leaves the human perceiver still planted in the
center; unbudging from sundown to sunup, so that the
great renewal of the diurnal earth
now sneaks up on her from behind,
like a jack-in-the-box popping up to surprise you. The bland planetary fact of a hemi-diurnal rotation is here collapsed into a single poetic
instant; the sentient experiencer
is at once epiphanically aware of
the unity of these mirror occurences, much like that of the right and left
hand. This vision is -- strictly
mystical. More fundamentally
even than the astronometric account, this perspective succeeds in taking a
literally quotidian fact of existence, and making
it new -- making it strange.
~
~ Posthumous Endorsement ~
"If I were alive today, and
in the mood for an epiphany,
this is what I would be reading:
"
(Ich heisse Heinrich Heine, and
I approved this message.)
~
Indeed, the Kraus-quoted quatrain
immediately called to mind one of Rilke, about Symmetry as
observed by a mooncalf (we quote it as part of an essay
here):
Ach was ist das für ein schöner
Ball !
Rot und rund wie ein Überall.
Gut, dass ihr ihn erschuft.
Ob der wohl kommt wenn man ruft?
Superficially, in both rhymes, the language is naïve; in reality, faux-naïf. On the
surface, rather unpleasantly, immaturity is being mocked, here in a simpleton,
there in a Backfisch. More profoundly -- Ah, but, it is difficult to plumb the
profound. I have simply circled
around it, approached it from different faces and facets, in a series of poems
and parables, which you may sample
via any of the following thematic labels:
