The fearful libertine
Colin Welch
GOETHE: ROMAN ELEGIES AND THE DIARY verse translation by David Luke, with an introduction by Hans Rudolf Vaget Libris, f22.50, pp.136 For a few decades before 1800 and for many decades after, wasn't German poetry at its peak, a wonder of the world? To hear it read or sung, to hear it nobly declaimed by a well-trained German actor or actress of the old school: doesn't it thrill, send shudders up and down the spines even of those of us whose German, like mine, is shaky and incomplete? Isn't it a great luxury to read German poetry in the original, but with a literal prose crib on the opposite page, as in some Penguin edi- tions, to turn to when we get stuck? Mr Luke, a poet as well as German scholar, gives us more. Opposite each Elegy and each page of the Diary appears a verse rendering, in effect, of course, a new poem by Mr Luke, as closely based on the original as he can manage. He reproduces the original metres and, in the Diary, the original difficult rhyme scheme. These demands inevitably mean that the transla- tions are less literal than they could other- wise be. A fault? Not perhaps for those who read for pleasure. With its eccentric word order and ambi- guities, German anyway presents horrible difficulties to the translator. The old Ox- ford don asked his pupil, 'Have you read Faust?"Yes, sir, Part One."Oh, you must read Part Two. You'll find all the verbs there.' Old-fashioned German has re- minded me of a theatre in which the play is slow to start because some ass has bolted the stage door, and all the actor-verbs have to jostle and queue up behind the audience to get in. To get all these unruly German words 'fell in', dressed right and looking natural in any sort of English parade order is a formidable task. To do it in the complex Byronic ottava rima used by Goethe in the Diary, as Mr Luke has done, fairly takes the breath away. 'Hats off, gentlemen', as Schumann said of Chopin (wasn't it?), 'a master!'
Those fitted to do so will judge Mr Luke's Elegies as they would a portrait: are they good likenesses? Are they beautiful in themselves? My humble answer would be yes, twice.
Most of Mr Luke's Elegies have been published before. They appear now revised and with two suppressed Elegies restored. They recapture to a miraculous extent the protean variousness and vigour of the young Goethe in love in Rome. But wait: was Goethe really in love in Rome? An older Goethe reproved those insatiably curious about the 'facts' behind the Ele- gies: 'People seldom reflect that a poet can generally make something good out of very little'. Who was the lady in Rome, Faustina as he calls her? In his introduction to the earlier edition, Mr Luke was confident that she was really Christiane Vulpius in Weimar, not in Rome, first his mistress, then his wife. She was transposed to a Rome from which he had just returned in order to link two great awakenings, one sexual, the other intellectual. The latter an awakening to a mature and sensuous clas- sicism. Mr Luke appears less confident now, which seems to me a pity. If he was right the first time, then, just as Christine was belatedly made into 'an honest woman', so are the Elegies retrospectively `moralised', so to speak, rendered 'respect- ably bourgeois' by a union more durable than anything described in the Elegies would lead one to expect. Did a passionate but seemingly fugitive dalliance in fact turn into a lasting and loving marriage? The earlier edition had on its jacket a beautiful drawing of Christiane by Goethe himself. It is possible to regret her supersession, but not what has replaced her — two equally beautiful drawings of Goethe in Rome by the excellent Tischbein, member of his German table there.
We find in the Elegies bold changes of tone, dazzling mixtures of the exalted and the domestic commonplace (these last very endearing), of the sublime and the gently ridiculous, of shameless eroticism (never pornographic) and shrewdness, of joyous classical scholarship and pulsing life, the one getting in the other's way with results at once both comic and true. We are half stupefied by vertiginous swerves from sub- lime eloquence to earthy coarseness, by all the multifarious riches which make Goethe so hard for pedants to classify, so hard for poets to translate. Goethe relates how `Often I even compose my poetry in her embraces t Counting hexameter beats, tapping them out on her back / Softly, with one hand's fingers. . .'. It is not perhaps necessary or even possible for a translator to proceed thus, but, by experience or imagination, he must know, as Mr Luke knows, the land where the lemon trees flower, where Goethe flowered, where everything flowers.. .
You could say of Goethe, as of the old News of the World, that all human life is there, that nothing human was to him alien — nothing, that is, save religion, the more remarkably absent, except for a few vague- ly anti-clerical jibes, in Rome of all places. Before reading Professor Vaget's formid- able introduction, I had not fully realised how anti-Christian Goethe was. Indeed, I have some reservations still. Is it even possible that Professor Vaget's emphasis on Goethe's ferocious irreligion has en- couraged Mr Luke not into mistranslation, to be sure, but into a rendering which might mislead of notorious lines in the Diary? Goethe relates how his hero (he himself?) got an erection at his own wed- ding, yes, 'Before that altar and that priest,' so Mr Luke translates, 'before / Thy wretched bloodstained cross, domine Christe, / God pardon me!' An unseemly revelation, some might think, if perhaps truthful and forgivable and not, in my humble view, so blasphemous in the origin- al. 'Wretched . . . cross' was in German `Jammerkreuz'. 'Jammer ' means 'extreme misery'. 'Wretched' is a word which can cover that. But we more often use it for what merely annoys or irritates us. Didn't Mr Quelch call Bunter 'wretched boy'? Would even an unbeliever nowadays apply the word 'wretched' to the cross, unless deliberately to give offence? And didn't Goethe, whether or not he believed in Christ, surely believe in good manners, in which he found deep moral truths express- ed? And isn't blasphemy very bad manners indeed?
Mr Luke and Professor Vaget both seem to make slightly more fuss about the morality and ambiguities of the Diary than the text to a layman seems to warrant. Eckermann called it 'moral in tendency'. Our scholars warmly agree, as I do, but they can't leave it at that. The Diary is that of a man who, travelling, is restrained from seducing a pretty servant girl by thoughts of his wife at home, which render him impotent. Is there any need to call in Freud and Maximilian Steiner to explain a situa- tion which, mutatis mutandis, must be familiar or readily intelligible to every normal man? To be sure, the hero's thoughts of his wife are erotic, or soon become so. It is not therefore Christian duty which restrains him, but Eros, so often the subverter of orthodox marriage, on this occasion its powerful if unexpected friend. The strict Pauline moralist might deplore the cause yet grudgingly approve the effect. Surely a sin avoided for wrong reasons is more acceptable than a sin committed for any reason? Others will
think it no bad thing that love and duty can combine to protect the weak.
May there not be another reason for our hero's forbearance, however, one to which our scholars oddly make no reference that I can find in the introduction and copious notes? In touching terms, the girl has just confessed herself a virgin. The satyr might be further provoked by such a revelation. Wouldn't any decent normal man hear it with a sudden pang of dread, as a solemn reminder of his awful responsibility for the young? Wasn't Goethe among other things a decent normal man? Could the genius who had described in such moving terms the inexorable ruin of Gretchen have heard the confession without a profound shock, without being abashed by such innocence? Again, the morality which restrains him is not specifically Christian morality. But it is wholly consonant with it, may have distant origins as well as present effects in com- mon.
The Diary was long suppressed. The Jammerkreuz passage was always excised or garbled till 1914. Was it really morality or squeamish prudery which hid and muti- lated the poem? The literalness of my own mind inclines me to blame the latter. By juxtaposing the phallus and the Cross, Goethe intended, according to Professor Vaget, an openly defiant, provocative, polemical gesture, a la D. H. Lawrence, from a 'decided non-Christian', as he liked to call himself. Maybe: but a careful court, studying the text alone, might in doubt acquit him.
Far more queasy to my mind is the moral tone of some of the Elegies, only one or two, agreed, but like rotten apples they infect the rest. I don't single out the long suppressed opening and closing Elegies, in which respectively the whole series is dedicated to Priapus and the god expresses thanks for his rehabilitation. In the first, incidentally, Priapus is adjured to punish hypocrites and denigrators 'with one thrust' of his huge member. I can't find `thrust' in the original: wasn't a whack what was intended? Priapus might not have found his stuffy enemies very appetising! The restoration of these two Elegies cer- tainly emphasises what before might be disputed — the openly erotic, Priapic intent of the whole lot.
The scoffers and denigrators may thus find them even less edifying than before. If they are fools enough to search for one, they will search in vain for any moral code. They will find rather a libertine's code, its roots in heedless ecstasy, in passionate ardours and self-gratification, without much thought of one's own morrow, the loved one's or anyone else's, its rules expressing only taste and style, enjoying not virtue but only what is dashing and galant, elegant and dandyish. Who can deny that such a code may have a sort of fragile consistency of its own, as also a potent, nigh irresistible charm which, alas, the years corrupt and which a single tap from reality may shatter.
A very grim reality taps Goethe's shoul- der once or twice in Rome. Its effect on him is like that of the cannon's opening roar on the revellers in Brussels. It is a craven fear of the pox. More than any more worthy feeling, it keeps him faithful to one mistress, even should she become 'tedious'. It forbids that happy promiscuity which Lucretius commends and Goethe envies. It fills him with mistrust of all women: 'Who in his own wife's lap now lays a confident head?' — a line which shocked his contemporaries. He is beside himself with rage against the pox. Unlike the Hesperian dragon, which guarded the golden apples, this monster has nothing to guard, for it destroys whatever it touches. One might mildly retort that it guarded chastity and monogamy, thereby only in- creasing Goethe's wrath. In grovelling terms he beseeches 'the Graces' to fend off diseases, to keep him 'carefree', to keep fear and danger, 'serpents and poisons' at bay.
Aren't such abject sentiments a bit base and unworthy, natural enough in the cir- cumstances, to be sure, but best kept to oneself? Did not Goethe himself elsewhere praise courage above all? Goods lost, bad; honour lost, worse; but courage lost, all lost — better you'd never been born! And here is windy Wolfgang (or should it be yellow Johann?) gibbering with petulant terror, totally bereft for a time of that cool nonchalance, that contemptuous courage and reckless boldness without which the God-defying dandy loses all dignity! There are many pretty pictures in the Elegies, but this is not one of them. Goethe has broken his own code, or the one by which he lived at the time. Take what you want, says God in Spanish, and pay for it. The libertine may grandly take more than he ought, but it is not gentlemanlike in him to whine when the bill is presented.
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