Relationships of Choice

In describing his views of heaven and hell, Swedenborg presents a world where people choose their own environments, but these are not, as it were, geographical. Souls select communities in which they feel at home. Therefore the condemned want to be in hell; the saved choose a heaven that suits them. Indeed we see souls, as it were, doing their real estate shopping by visiting these high communities. If they sense mutual agreement, they settle; if not they move on. There is, to be sure, also an intermediate region that reminded me of purgatory, a region where the initial sorting happens.

When I first encountered this view a German word presented itself spontaneously, die Wahlvervandschaften. The word literally means relationships of choice, but Goethe’s novel of that title is rendered as Elective Affinities, a novel I’d read, but only in part. A couple invite a man and a woman for a weekend, as it were, and wouldn’t you know it, the result is a kind of mixing of affinities. Goethe’s reference is to chemistry. In the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century chemists used “affinity” as the handy concept to explain why some elements attract each other while others won’t compound.

Reading that book, as soon as I discerned what would be coming down, I lost all interest. “Chemistry?” I muttered. “In that case there is no genuine choice. So why use that word?” A kind of determinism in elegant guise. Goethe’s novels are also incredibly longwinded, hence I’ve only ever sampled them. But I liked the title and the concept—but only if real choice is actually involved.

By contrast I’ve spent quite a lot of time—usually on walks—pondering Swedenborg’s projection. In that view the choice is real. We see such choice in this dimension too. Like clings to like, although what like means is often rather coarsely spun. Thus, for instance the wealthy live together, the artsy have their quarters. The poor endure their slums but, having endured them, feel more comfortable there. Freed of the weight of matter and its rude demands? In a realm where matter does not weigh us down, in a world where residence is not a matter principally of income and proximity to work—and the need for work seems also suspended and, per Swedenborg, is also a matter of choice—surely there people would then relate with those who genuinely please them. The Internet has created a new version of such odd, virtual spaces where we may cultivate Relationships of Choice. Blogs. Here they are, floating in the immaterial world of cyberspace. Each blog creates a kind of cultural environment readers are never compelled to visit. They do so at their choice.

Couldn’t Help Myself!

Here we go again. Once more the stimulus is a Goethe quotation and a translation of it on Laudator Temporis Acti here. The excellent translation Michael Gilleland includes is by R. Dillon Boylan, a nineteenth century author and translator—but coming from that period the rendering has an archaic sound that the German does not have. German has changed much less than English. Formations like knowest, thou, thither, and thee are out of place in modern English while their German equivalents kennst, du, dahin, and dir are very much part of modern German today. Hence I was tempted to give my own translation. It is much closer to the actual literal meaning than Boylan’s except for the last line. There I use the word dwell whereas Goethe uses the still prospective word move.

Herewith the German and then my translation:

Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht?
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! dahin
Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn.

D’you know the land where lemons bloom,
Gold-orange glows in dark leaves’ gloom,
Where soft wind from blue heaven blows,
Where myrtle silent, laurel high repose?
You know it well?
O there, O there
Would I, with you, beloved, dwell.

Couldn’t Stop Myself

In his blog (here) for November 4, 2010, Gilleland published a brief Goethe poem, the Wanderer’s Night-Song, with eight translations into English. Many of these are quite superb, but none attempts a strict translation matching the tiny poem’s meter and rhyme scheme. This sort of thing is irresistible for me—especially if the item is short. Thus I will here reproduce the original German and my translation. It too lacks in some ways. Peaks and leaves? Not quite the rhyme I’d like—if you can even speak of rhyme. In the next to the last line, could is used for rhyme, but Goethe’s meaning is can.

This sort of thing will be pleasing, alas, only to those who speak both languages well. German is in many ways closer to its ancient origins and uses fewer Latin-rooted words. This makes the language, in the hands of poets, more crisp and parsimonious. Goethe’s poem uses 24 words and a mere 116 characters. Mine uses 33 words and 136 characters. All the translators use more words and characters than Goethe. Longfellow beats me—31 words and 135 letters. But there goes a poet of first rank. And he does not follow Goethe’s meter—and rhymes breath with rest. Believe me, I know how that must have irritated him.

The link above is not exact because Gilleland does not make it easy to access individual posts. Nor does he permit comments, or I might have sent this to him as a comment. So, instead…

Goethe’s Poem:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch,
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

My Translation:

Above all mountain peaks
It’s still,
In all the trees’ leaves
You feel nil,
Nary a sigh.
Silent the little birds in the wood.
Wait! Soon you too could
Rest for a while.

Schiller Recalled

The other day Brigitte remembered a difficult essay assignment in her school days. It came when she was in what here we would call middle school, thus when she was in her earliest teens. The assignment, furthermore, came on the first day of school one year. The professor assigned the title of the theme. It was a single sentence: Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht—Life is not the highest of the goods. At her young age this theme was challenging—and more. She recalled her agonized efforts to produce something fitting. The sentence in German has a more poetic, unusual word-order than my version in English. And discussing it we speculated that it must be a famous line. And, Yes, that turned out to be true. It occurs in the last verse of The Bride of Messina, the work of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller who, alongside Goethe, is Germany’s most famous poet:

I stand here shaken, know not if I ought
To pity or instead to praise his lot.
This one thing do I feel and clearly know:
Life is not the highest of the goods;
But of evils surely guilt’s the greatest.

We have minimally two complete works of Schiller on the shelves in German—none in translation. When such things appear, I set myself to work. Much later, on an impulse, I consulted Bartlett’s hoping to find the line. Not there. Then I turned to the older The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Not there either, but in that work the few quotations actually included showed both the German and the English.

The featured quote in both is the first stanza of “Ode to Joy”—which Beethoven who, alongside Bach, is Germany’s greatest composer, set to music. The translation in the Oxford version is somewhat baroquely decorated; the text in Bartlett’s is much better. The translators try to render Schiller’s seven to eight-syllable beat but don’t always succeed. This set me scribbling. The results are here, the original first:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt,
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Translation in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (unattributed)

Thou radiance sprung from God Himself,
Thou daughter of Elysium, Joy,
Thy shrine we tread, Thou Maid Divine,
Though light’s excess our sense destroy.
What harsh world-use has rent apart,
Thy healing spells restore again;
Where’er Thy gentle wings may rest,
Brothers we find our fellow-men.

Translation in Bartlett’s, by Theodore Spencer

Joy, thou spark from Heav’n immortal,
Daughter of Elysium!
Drunk with fire, toward Heaven advancing
Goddess, to thy shrine we come.
Thy sweet magic brings together
What stern Custom spreads afar,
All men become brothers
Where thy happy wing-beats are.

Herewith then my own, which preserves Schiller’s beat and sticks close to his wording:

Joy, the lovely spark divine,
Daughter of Elysium,
Fire-drunk we enter here,
Heavenly, your holy home.
Your magic’s power binds again
What custom strict divides,
All join a single brotherhood
Where your gentle wing presides.

In the background of this post lingers another experience, a recent and quite strikingly insightful essay in the New York Times by Michael Cunningham on the subject of translation that Brigitte found and we both delighted in reading and discussing. I’ve long held Cunningham’s view (and we share it, no doubt, with many other writers) that all writing is translation. The first captures the inspiration from on high. And when a piece of writing is rendered into another language, the act of translation is, once more, the capture, by a kind of incarnation, of something ineffable. As Cunningham puts it, “The translator is translating a translation.” But reading is translation too; the reader will behold what her or his inner powers are able to catch of something that barely touches down and then flies off again.

Economies

The thought occurs that fabled beasts, “economies,” appeared in history just the other day. They date from a time when, for the first time in history, the majority of humans earned their living doing something other than tilling the soil, herding animals, fishing, or harvesting forests.

Cycles existed in those times as well, but they depended on climate or disease. Drought brought famine. So did excessive rain or short growing seasons. That the latter also occurred is documented. Ever inclined to be a contrarian, I read with interest a while back a book entitled The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan (2000, Basic Books). This period extended from 1300 to 1850; during this time the sun had an extraordinarily quiet period; sunspot activity was at a minimum; the cause-effect relation between the two phenomena (no spots up there, cold weather down here) is speculative, but there you are. The Little Ice Age is not my subject; I point to it by way of saying that the old days had their recessions and Great Depressions too, but these came as a consequence of weather—and sometimes they really lasted. They also came because plagues abruptly decimated populations (or, worse, took more like 4 in 10), and shortages of labor caused drastic decline in what were then not yet called economies. That term apparently dates from the 1650s as applied to nations; it was applied to households before that time and comes from the Greek for manager, steward (oikonomos).

In this little reverie I’ll neglect—but point out that I do—that wars are another major source of collective misery.

All this comes to mind because drums have been beating for a while—leading up to the G20 summit in Canada and continuing still—for and against Keynesian solutions to managing the economy. To draw a quick caricature, the Keynesian approach is to replace faltering consumer demand by stimulative government expenditures. Assuming that tax revenues and government spending are more or less in equilibrium, this translates into deficit spending—but that’s Okay because the recovering economy will eventually erase the deficit. Bookish sort that I am, I first encountered this Keynesian notion in Goethe’s Faust (Part II), presented more or less tongue in cheek as notes to be printed based on gold not yet discovered but sure to be buried somewhere in the earth. For Goethe this was a Mephistophelian solution because Mephistopheles introduced the notion. Ah, yes. I know…

Now I pondered this on my walk yesterday. The weather is wonderful; walking is a pleasure now, not something undertaken as penance for my many long-forgotten sins. The situation—namely the very notion that we can manage our economy—arises only because more of it, much more than half, is now, as it were, optional. We must have food, clothing, and fuel. And those portions of the economy don’t really flag. What flags is the optional part. And it flags not because something hard and real out there is denying us resources. It flags because our confidence has failed. The Keynesian approach, therefore, intends to build confidence. If you won’t spend money, the collective will. And so, gradually, the old habit of consumption, consumption of all those things we do not need, will once more return—and the balls thrown in the air will stay up there as the juggler gets busy again.

Now this game of ours—and it is at least two-thirds game and only one third necessity—ought to be so arranged that the necessary part is always hale. That would mean that all people will have adequate income for the necessities, no matter where confidence goes. We have more than enough wealth to set aside in times of roaring confidence to weather these periods with very little pain, except for that pouty feeling that we can’t play with our toys. We should have a real economy and protect it. It would be possible to arrange things that way. It really would. Humanity is capable of the most arcane and fantastic arrangements—and taking them as seriously as if they were the equivalent of breathing. The first step in that direction would be, for instance, to extend unemployment benefits to people—something that, even as the G20 drums were beating, we lacked the votes to achieve.

We’re supposedly so creative, innovative, etc., etc. This transformation requires some kind of new myth, put into forms everyone will understand. A movie, maybe? Let’s call it The Two Economies. We’ll concentrate on one, and let the other float—as we let currencies float. When confidence wanes, and the other one turns into vapor, we can sober up from our orgy of consumption but still remain humbly able to pay our rent, insurance, and our grocery bills. Two economies, stupid. Not one. And a big wall between them. Let the fabled beast have a little offspring. And let's protect it from being eaten by its mother.
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The image is an edited portion of the Chinese Nine Dragon image visible on Wikipedia here.

Two—At Least

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust,
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
One wills to part, to rid itself, to cleave;
One would hold fast with savage love-lust
To the world with gripping hard organic force;
The other hoists itself by power from the dust
To the domains of higher ancestors.
    Goethe, Faust, Act I.

In my generation certainly—and I assume continuing to this day—that first sentence from this part of Goethe’s Faust—has served as a kind of marker in the lives of most thoughtful people who grew up in a German culture. The two souls within our breast are a matter of experience. Then as the years roll on and different ranges of experience mold us, we become aware of even more layering within. We discover more personae within ourselves, each the product of structures of experience that can be differentiated.

This came to mind today when, troubled by an article in the New York Times, I let myself comment on it without the usual restraints. To be sure, awareness of our various persons is better than ignorance. Attempts to force the self to express itself in a single mode is a kind of violence to nature. I’m well aware that I’m quite attached to many things that, from another perspective, I can view with equanimity—and that that attachment in itself, if it is permitted expression, can serve as a kind of teacher. But my own awareness of these differences causes me to put my thoughts on three different blogs, each with its own boundaries.

Needless to say, multiple personalities suggest a lack of integration. Here I turn to another great poet and storyteller for an appropriate image to sum up how to handle many selves each having its domain, its passions and its interests. I turn to Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings:

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.

If we change the context here from the Darkness to the Light, the solution to the problem comes. There is one Ring that rules, and being aware of it—and its relation to the others—produces integration in the whole while leaving each other ring to rule in its own realm.

The translation of Goethe’s verse is mine.

Reading Dante in Detroit

A few years ago Monique gave me Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran—and just tracing that experience would suffice for a post. For one thing members of my extended family (Ghulf Genes, you might say) include children born of an Iranian woman, hence blood lines connect us back to Persia too. Indeed, whenever a country comes into focus in one or another context, I can trace tendrils of relationship—and strong ones, too, either of blood or spirit. But here my only purpose is to justify the title of this posting, to indicate the same kind of tension between cultures that Nafisi had in mind when she sat down to trace her own experiences as a woman and a teacher.

Yes. I’m reading the Divine Comedy, all of it this time, and slowly, with real attention. This too runs in the family’s spiritual genes. My mother would have done that sort of thing in her advanced years and Monique’s mate, John, is prone to feats like that as well—a kind of heroic determination to achieve the impossible, which is to grasp the entire culture, ancient and near, even if only by a few grand gestures. When I began reading Purgatory, I smiled as I read Dorothy Sayers’ introduction, in the first paragraph of which she says: “Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at.” Or, Sayers may have added, “something to quote.” She should have put that into her general introduction to nudge people on, beyond the Inferno, which is, as its name implies, a very dismal place. And arriving at the base of Mount Purgatory, one is astonished (I was) at the sudden change.

Culture is, ultimately, a system of shared values. Great literature holds these values. Its neglect is therefore either part of cultural change or cultural decay. If the value system continues to be renewed by great new works of art and philosophy, the sliding of the awkwardly dated back into the past is no matter of regret. But if the new has lost its nicotine, as it were, like fake cigarettes intended to wean us of smoking, the loss is genuine.

The cultural process is sharply discernible in the Comedy. In the first two books Dante’s guide is Virgil, the Latin poet famed for his Georgics and Aeneid, the last an epic account of Rome’s founding. The stories and myths in which Dante himself anchors his values are drawn from Graeco-Roman sources and the Bible, his philosophy is based on “moderns,” like Thomas Aquinas, and ancients, like Aristotle. The time distance between Virgil’s death and Dante’s birth is 1284 years. In 2009, we are 688 years from Dante’s death in 1321. Hence, for us, Dante stands closer in time than the towering figure of Virgil stood to him. The speed of change, however, has been so great in modern times that Dante appears to us at least 1300 years back, subjectively, rather than a mere 700.

It’s much more difficult today to get even a feel for the vast extent of human culture. Dante published his Comedy, if you can call it publishing, by having parts of it copied by hand as they were written, entirely in response to the demands of his friends. Printing still lay in the future. Today we can get dozens of translations of the Tao Te Ching, for example, and the best literature of any country we desire to read. And we have languages to master if we really wish to be serious students. I could here write a post titled Reading Goethe in German, for example, or Reading Madács in Hungarian. I’ve done both. Goethe’s name everyone knows, but Madács is known only to Hungarians. He wrote the all-time classic play called The Tragedy of Man. When you expend your energy in projects like that, you haven’t got time left to make money, do you? Anyway, that’s my excuse for failing in the American Way.

A Quote in Time Saves Time

Das eigentlich wahrhaf Gute, was wir tun, geschieht größtenteils clam, vi et
precario. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The genuinely good that we do happens largely clam, vi et precario, thus in secret, by effort and prayer—although, strictly speaking, the Latin means secretly, by force and by request. Prayer in Latin is precatio. I feel the temptation to wax eloquent on that difference between an R and a T, but time presses today.

Relationships of Choice

Goethe once used Elective Affinities as the title of a novel (Die Wahlverwandschaften). The German literally means “relationships of choice,” but Goethe’s indirect reference was to an old way of describing why certain chemicals combined, and in English that phrase had been “elective affinities.”

I got to thinking about relationships in the context of culture, that maddening and fascinating, ubiquitous yet ephemeral phenomenon. And my thought ran thus: You have no choice in the culture where you’re born; and later, when choices do appear, they are greatly hemmed in by your total experience, so much so that leaving one culture for another is often a climactic experience—as exemplified especially by religious conversions. Goethe’s title came to me as I was walking along—inevitably because my mind produces associations in several languages. In Goethe my obedient brain found the two concepts I was thinking about, association and choice, neatly combined in into a single word.

This set me off on the sort of thing that can easily fill an hour’s ambling exercise. Language. The German tongue sticks to its roots—whereas English has been seduced by Rome—but indirectly by way of France: the Norman Invasion. Wahl and Verwandschaft are both good-old Germanic words; both elective and affinities have Latin roots. In Old English both relationship and affinity were expressed by the word gesibnes (in German, to this day, Sippe means blood-relationship and may come from the same root). But where does Verwandschaft come from? It comes from the root within it, Wand, or wall; those related occupy the same walled enclosure. For folks like me an Old English dictionary is a Godsend. The one I use is here. It tells me that the wall is used in the same way in Old English. The word was weall. Thucidides strongly suggests that walls and wealth helped produce each other—but weall has no link to weal, so far as I can discover, but the Old English for commonwealth was a Genæwela holding echoes of the current German word for community, Gemeinde. I wish I had a dictionary for Althochdeutsch as well…

Goethe’s aim in using the phrase was to ponder sexual and love relations in a context both chemical and transcending that level—and we talk of “chemistry” between two people, a phrase that, to the best of my knowledge, arose quite recently. Goethe’s contemporary, Swedenborg, saw this pattern in the heavenly reaches beyond. He said that souls up there gathered into communities by affinity—as did the damned in hell; both did so of inner choice. And we recognize the same thing in nature when we say that birds of a feather flock together. As above, so below. Swedenborg was 61 when Goethe was born (in 1749); Goethe was 23 when Swedenborg died (in 1772).

Marching along—it was gorgeous day today, cool, sunny, a light wind—I was thinking: Culture is another instance of being “walled in together,” as it were, but the choice is left to our genes. But within a culture, later, when our choice expands, we select our association by elective affinities. And if Swedenborg really did converse with angels, we are likely to do a great deal more of that after we shuffle off this mortal coil. Did I just say coil? Well, let’s not go there beyond saying that it also comes from the French...