Hermann Hesse: Poem for a Friday Afternoon

Photo by 8#X

The First Flowers
 
Beside the brook
Toward the willows,
During these days
So many yellow flowers have opened
Their eyes into gold.
I have long since lost my innocence, yet a memory
Touches my depth, the golden hours of morning, 
And gazes brilliantly upon me out of the eyes of flowers.
I was going to pick flowers;
Now I leave them all standing
And walk home, an old man.

- Hermann Hesse 
  translated by James Wright

This poem comes from a collection selected and translated by esteemed American poet, James Wright. Though a relatively brief selection of his works (and a selection from that selection may be found here), the poems all center around one of Hesse's, and James Wright's, important themes: the concept of home. 

Coincidentally, something I'm reading for a bookclub I'm in deals with the spatial aspects of the house and the broader concept of home. 

Or, maybe not so coincidentally.

The Hesse volume has been around and in print since the early 70s and is available both in inexpensive used copies from abebooks and new copies from the same source (priced lower than that big box website). And, though this is not a small press item, shopping at abe supports independent booksellers, used, rare, and new, which is a nice thought to end the week on.


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 Photo by Tanaka Juuyoh

in a village of people
they grow crooked...
field chrysanthemums

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

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The Glass Bead Game: Issa's Sunday Service, #96

Today's featured song is only the second instrumental so far in this ongoing literature meets rock and roll project - the first actually did have a few words, but was largely instrumental.  Today's selection is courtesy of The Thievery Corporation.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, the inspiration for today's selection, is one of my favorite novels by one of my favorite authors.  Largely overlooked by fans and readers in general, it is certainly one of the finest novels of the 20th century, well deserving of the Nobel Prize that it garnered for its author.  It reprises all the great themes of Hesse's career, from duality through transcendence.  There are bits of all of his great books here, if in slightly disguised forms: Siddharta, Demian, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Journey to the East, as well as many of his early student novels.

Narrated by a fictional biographer, with introductory and supplementary material, the larger part of the book passes for a partial biography of Joseph Knecht, a great Masters of the Bead Game or Magister Ludi.   Set in the 25th century, it relates the story of the intellectual province of Castalia, where the students all learn the glass bead game, a sort of interdisciplinary exercise of connections among all the great fields (literature, music, science etc.).

The folly of such an exercise, removed as it is from "the real world," slowly and steadily becomes apparent, no matter how attractive the concept.  And attractive it is; witness the proliferation of exercises online attempting to recreate its chief philosophical premise (& that's just a handful).

Some have gone so far as to suggest that the internet itself is the glass bead game manifest.  We won't go down that road but we will take some time to chill to the groove of The Thievery Corporation, a dance-acid jazz-trip hop band, that knows the ins and outs of the outs and ins.  I just learned of them last week and I'm already listening to third of four albums I could rustle up from the library and, well, they make me relax and smile.

So there you go.   The cut may have nothing more to do with The Glass Bead Game than a shared title, but if it made me mellow, well there will be no argument from me.

Sticking with the theme of the unusual, here is a composition performed by Jacques Burtin performed on the kora, entitled "La Lumiere Matin (Morning Light)," a piece the composer describes as a prelude to The Glass Bead Game.








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This week's featured poems come from Lilliput Review, #102.   It is a triad of pieces that all appeared together on a single page, the stitch just tight enough to pull us through ...

Our hearts are empty for the Beloved,
and streetlamps are endless in the night.

W. T. Ranney

Dangerous kisses
pull us closer to heaven
Nowhere left to go

Kate Isaacson

The Goddess's Sweethearts

All those guys
holding hands with Kali are
already rotting away

Tom Riley

even the heavenly gods
crowd 'round...
plum blossoms

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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Hear 'em all at once on the the LitRock Jukebox

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James Wright:: "The Mini-Series"

In a past post, I believe I mentioned the fact that Wesleyan University Press has issued a teeny version of perhaps my favorite book of poetry, The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright. It occurred to me I didn't show how teeny it is, so here it is above. It is a hardcover and I just weighed it on my mail scale: 1.1 ounces. I have the ability to have this with me at all times and usually do. It weighs less than my mp3 player, fer chrissakes, and though that has over 900 songs, the set of songs is no where near as lyrical as these 43 poems. Or nearly as boring. How can you get bored with 900 songs?

That's another story, for 21st century historians to cogitate. I'm afraid the verdict will not be good.

So while I have it in hand, literally, let me share another little gem from this groundbreaking volume. Besides being a lyrical poet of the first order, Wright was an accomplished translator. I will forever be in his depth for his translations of Hermann Hesse, in the volume simply entitled Poems. Though narrow in scope, Wright strictly selected work concerned with what might loosely be described as "homesickness," a theme the two poets shared. It is nonetheless a valuable collection, one of only a few in English by the prolific poet, Hesse (yes, we have lots of his great fiction, but a truly miniscule amount of his poetry - if there are any translators out there who want to see Hesse's work see the light of day, I'm interested).

In a footnote to the following translation, Wright says: "These three stanzas are from Goethe's poem Harzreise im Winter. They are the stanzas which Brahms detached from the poem and employed as the test for his Alto Rhapsody of 1869."

Three Stanzas From Goethe

That man there, who is he?
His path lost in the thicket,
Behind him the bushes
Lash back together,
The grass rises again,
The waste devours him.

Oh, who will heal the sufferings
Of the man whose balm turned poison?
Who drank nothing
but hatred of men from loves abundance?
Once despised, not a despiser,
He kills his own life,
The precious secret.
The self-seeker finds nothing.

Oh Father of Love,
If your psaltery holds one tone
That his ear still might echo,
Then quicken his heart!
Open his eyes, shut off by clouds
From the thousand fountains
So near him, dying of thirst
In his own desert.

Goethe
translated by James Wright

The subject, tone, and even style perfectly fit the poems this translation is surrounded by in The Branch Will Not Break. As with Hesse, it shows how a translator/poet, in a sense, makes another's work his own.

So if you'd like something to carry along while waiting around for your front-end to be aligned, your wisdom teeth to be extracted, or your boss to stop talking, this tiny little volume may do the trick. I purchased it directly from Wesleyan University Press (see "teeny version" link above) but be forewarned: they charge an outrageous amount to ship it. Though my amazon link boycott stands and I like to buy direct from small presses when I can, you can get it from amazon at a slightly less outrageous rate. Search via isbn (978-0-8195-6841-0) to make sure you get the right version.

No matter what the size, this is a near perfect book of poems.

best,
Don

A German Near Perfect Poetry List ...

Funny, how ideas catch on. Through a Technorati link, I found this

http://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/
2008/08/50-near-perfect.html

A list of 50 20th century "near perfect" books of German poetry published since 1900 from Dialog International, with a tip of the hat to Lilliput/Issa's Untidy Hut for the idea.

If you read German poetry and don't see a poet on the list you think should be, send along a recommendation. I did. They are on a hunt for 100 titles.

The First Flowers
Beside the brook
Toward the willows
During these days
So many yellow flowers have opened
Their eyes into gold.
I have long since lost my innocence, yet a memory
Touches my depth, the golden hours of morning,
And gazes brilliantly upon me out of the eyes of flowers.
I was going to pick flowers;
Now I leave them all standing
And walk home, an old man.

translated by James Wright

best,
Don

Hermann Hesse and Evil Times

Today is the anniversary of the birth of one of my favorite writers, Hermann Hesse. Over the years I've read lots about his irrelevance, about his rise in popularity during a time of wild-eyed, romantic enthusiasm, which has since dimmed in what I believe he would characterize as the shadow of lost dreams. He always considered himself a poet first and foremost and we have only 3 slim volumes of verse in English. In recent years, I have reread the major works and am happy to report that, unlike the wild-eyed romantic enthusiasm of an entire generation, they have not dimmed. He lived through tumultuous times and here is a short poem of his, translated by the incomparable James Wright, that captures the dark times through which we are currently passing as well as it does his own:



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Evil Time

Now we are silent
And sing no songs anymore,
Our pace grows heavy;
This is the night, that was bound to come.

Give me your hand,
Perhaps we still have a long way to go.
It's snowing, it's snowing.
Winter is a hard thing in a strange country.

Where is the time
When a light, a hearth burned for us?
Give me your hand!
Perhaps we still have a long way to go.

Hermann Hesse

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For more on Hesse, with a short, brilliant poetry excerpt, check out today's Writer's Almanac. Pictured at the beginning of this post is one of the excellent covers for Hesse's works by Milton Glaser.


best,
Don