Customer Reviews

Hymns to the Night (English and German Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The German culture can be said to oscillate between two extremes. The first is the predisposition to obsessively systematize and classify life's experience into knowledge with a calm and indifferent demeanor. The second is the reverse tendency to discard the rational and dive off into the realm of the fantastic and the perverse, the moody and the emotionally erratic. Novalis presents a fascinating case study in paradoxically representing both of the tendencies. His "Hymns to the Night" are filled with despair, longing, and a visionary quality that sort of puts one into a trance when reading. However hidden beneath this highly charged emotional atmosphere are layers of allegory and thought. Hence what we have here is that unique poem which combines a very human story of loss, sorrow, and grief with intriguing philosophical meditations on love, [end of life], religion, resurrection, and the relation of mind and body. Much more could be said and should be said. But additional details would spoil the joy of discovering the beauty of the poem on your own....

Five stars for the *Hymns*; zero stars for the (mis)translation

Novalis's *Hymns to the Night* are a true gem of late 18th-Century Romantic poetry. A brilliant and original mingling of prose-poetry and verse, the *Hymns* celebrate night, darkness, and death as bearers of tremendous revelation. They do so in supple, elegant, and sensuous language filled with yearning for a deeper reality than that which gaudy daylight reveals. Particularly notable is the erotic dimension of this Romantic yearning, or *Sehnsucht*, that Novalis daringly offers the reader.

Given the above, one can only react with disgust at Dick Higgins's vulgar travesty of the *Hymns*. His specious and, not to put too fine a point on it, idiotic rationalization for butchering this work is that Novalis's language was modern for its time; therefore, to preserve that flavor, it should be rendered into the modern "poetic" idiom of, say, William Carlos Williams and other banal writers of simple prose disguised as poetry by dividing it into lines and pseudo-stanzas. Higgins has simplified Novalis to the point of idiocy.

Those English-speaking readers who wish to read the *Hymns* as Novalis wrote them should consult the Charles Passage and George Macdonald translations. They are hardly perfect, but, unlike Higgin's's misbegotten manglings, they represent Novalis's magnificent *Hymns* with at least a modicum of their original dignity intact. It would be wonderful to have a competent and faithful contemporary English translation of the *Hymns*. Higgin's translation, however, is not that work. *Caveat lector*.

This translation is almost freakishly literal. As a result it doesn't work as poetry. The old George Macdonald translation is much better at capturing the spirit of the poem in poetic language. Having the German original in this edition on facing pages is nice, and some of Higgin's translation is illuminating, but ultimately it does not do justice to the original.

Novalis can be seen as one of the very first German poets who abandoned the classic German way of writing. "Hymns to the night" in particular is a collection of poems characterised by a mysterious dark lyricism and an accult atmosphere, blended in a way that cannot possibly provoke, annoy or "puzzle" ANY reader. On the contrary, Novalis' unique way of writing sounds like ones' beautiful ancient prayer to ones' ancient Gods

This is Novalis' masterpiece. An absolutely sublime collection of six poetic hymns, each of which centering on a deeply routed problematic configured within Novalis' complicated commitments. The symbolism and imagery of the night is particularly luminous here-it is clear that Novalis was preoccupied with an implicit death-drive. This work is also the thinker's most decisively Christian work, which has turned off readers to it in the modern era. Considered in terms of its place in the history of the Romantic movement, this work should be regarded among the masters like Tieck, Goethe, and the like.

Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (May 2, 1772 - March 25, 1801), better known as Novalis, accomplished with his short but mercurial, explosive chronicle of God, a dark romantic faith, the fecund subconscious, the dark underbelly of poetry (described by William Blake as "the eternal night") what no poet has done before or since. That is, to reconcile Jung's "shadow self" with the Divine Light we hear in Beethoven and Bach. A tremendous inspiration for all seers or would be seers, Novalis placed himself in the company of Keats, Stravinsky (when he composed "The Rite"), Rimbaud, and all artists of any kind who sacrificed themselves entirely in the name of a a certain holy quest for God's answer to man in the form of the Word, Logos.

With the death of his beloved fiancee Sophie Von Kuhn at only 15 years old from tuberculosis, a fate Novalis would also succumb to in the following years, the grief and mourning which followed did not produce the madness or the loss of faith of a Poe: indeed, the "Blue Flower" blossomed in this Romantic's mind like never before.


"Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love's hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set: but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night" (pg. 11).

The death of this young woman whom Hardenberg's biographer described as "giving an impression which--because it was so gracious and spiritually lovely--we must call superearthly or heavenly, while through this radiant and almost transparent countenance of hers we would be struck with the fear that it was too tender and delicately woven for this life, that it was death or immortality which looked at us so penetratingly from those shining eyes; and only too often a rapid withering motion turned our fear into an actual reality" had finally torn away all that was irrelevant and trivial from Novalis' mind. He knew that the night, dark green with the wisdom of Yeat's fairies
and Rimbaud's "singing flower bells" was all that was left to pursue.

Christ, the presence of the living God *through* Sophie, the intermediary, is made crystal clear through a focused reading: "More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts. Needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul that fills a loftier region and bliss ineffable. Glory to the queen of the world, to the great prophetess of holier worlds, to the foster-mother of blissful love! she sends thee to me, thou tenderly beloved, the gracious sun of the Night" (page 10).

Sophia, a name for Wisdom in early Christian mysticism, had been reconciled in these lines with Lorca's duende, the daemon chasing Van Gogh, the psychotic prophecies of British poet David Gascoyne.

This is not an easy text to understand (sacred texts never are) but is essential for anyone who wants to understand what poetry is and is not. A beautiful and eternal work.