Heine’s “Rückschau” and “Weltlauf”

 

  

The German texts of the poems and quoted prose are appended.

  

1.  Heine’s “Rückschau” 

 

A Look Back

 

I have smelled every smellable scent

that the kitchen of earth can present.

I’ve taken all pleasures I could,

just like a hero would,

drunk coffee and gobbled down cake,

known many fine girls for love’s sake,

worn a silk vest and a very fine cloak

with money jingling in my poke.

I rode on a horse like Gellert the Great;

I had more than a house, I had an estate!

On fortune’s green field I’ve often reclined

while golden sunrays on me shined.

A laurel wreath round my brow one would find

inspiring new dreams to be born in my mind,

dreams of fine roses and unending May.

So blissful it was then to me each day,

addicted to twilight and idle as sin!

Roast pigeons just saw my mouth and flew in!

An angel appeared and from out of his gown –

a vintage Champagne for me to drink down!

These, though, were visions, just bubbles of soap,

which burst.  Now I lie on a wet grassy slope.

Rheumatism has seized all my limbs

and my soul is so sad, it with shame overbrims.

Every joy and every delight

I have paid for with harsh acrid spite.

I’m soaked in the bitterest gall,

while bedbugs do bite and crawl.

Beset by every black grief,

I find I’m a liar, I find I’m a thief.

Each affluent booby and dry old maid

must be begged if I’m to be paid.

I’ve now grown so tired of dashing around,

I’m ready to lie in my grave in the ground.

For now, my Christian friends, good-bye!

It’s quite understood, we’ll meet in the sky. 

 

 

    This poem, though high-spirited, is anything but frivolous.  It appeared in Romanzero, Heine’s last book, written from his sick-bed with the knowledge that he would not recover.. 

     I translated this primarily for the fun of the couplets, many of which are constructed with the care of a stand-up comedian.  Punchlines arrive as regularly as the surf.  While maintaining these clanging insistent rhymes, I have jazzed up the rhythmic patterns (for the most part keeping a four-beat line of variable length) to avoid a sing-song tone.  The rhymes still create an impression of a certain jauntiness, which should not distract readers from Heine’s graver implications.  One may gather a hint of this darker tone from the title of one of the chapters in Adorno’s Notes to Literature: “Heine the Wound.”

     The irony that begins with naïve hyperbole, which comes to seem mere bravado as it is undercut and eventually all but inverted by bedbugs and illness and dependence on unworthy others.  The poet’s élan vital drained, he is fatigued with life, ready to leap into the grave.  Yet at the same time, he is a spirited observer of his own position and able to toss off an ironic greeting for the close, the hollow Christian promise of pie in the sky.  His supposed conversion serves as an example of the “begging” to which the author is reduced, yet he remains afloat in the sea of circumstance through artful and defiant words.  If he cannot eliminate life’s pains and injustices, he can at any rate make fun of them.

 

 

ii.  Heine’s “Weltlauf”

 

     This poem, also from Romanzero, provides economic analysis boiled down to the bare minimum.  In a society in which worth is measured by wealth, further success inevitably goes to those who have no need of it, while those in penury stand no chance.  As another poet put it “Them that's got shall get/ Them that's not shall lose/ So the bible said and it still is news.”

     In the French introduction to Lutetia Heine asserted his simple and radical belief that “all people have the right to eat.”  He proceeded to a righteous condemnation of capitalism.  “The old social order has long been judged and condemned.  Let justice prevail!  May the old society be shattered in which innocence always loses, where cynicism flourishes, where people exploit their fellow man!  May the old way be destroyed from the very base with its whitewashed graves, filled with lies and injustice.”

 

The Way of the World

 

If someone’s got a lot you know what’s next:

the money rolling in will never cease.

The man with very little at the start

will never find his wealth increase.

 

And if you haven’t anything at all,

you may as well be buried ‘neath the clay.

The right to live belongs only to those

who have the cash to pay their way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rückschau

 

Ich habe gerochen alle Gerüche

In dieser holden Erdenküche;

Was man genießen kann in der Welt,

Das hab ich genossen wie je ein Held!

Hab Kaffee getrunken, hab Kuchen gegessen.

Hab manche schöne Puppe besessen;

Trug seidne Westen, den feinsten Frack,

Mir klingelten auch Dukaten im Sack.

Wie Gellert ritt ich auf hohem Roß;

Ich hatte ein Haus, ich hatte ein Schloß.

Ich lag auf der grünen Wiese des Glücks,

Die Sonne grüßte goldigsten Blicks;

Ein Lorbeerkranz umschloß die Stirn,

Er duftete Träume mir ins Gehirn,

Träume von Rosen und ewigem Mai —

Es ward mir so selig zu Sinne dabei,

So dämmersüchtig, so sterbefaul —

Mir flogen gebratne Tauben ins Maul,

Und Englein kamen, und aus den Taschen

Sie zogen hervor Champagnerflaschen —

Das waren Visionen, Seifenblasen —

Sie platzten — Jetzt lieg ich auf feuchtem Rasen,

Die Glieder sind mir rheumatisch gelähmt,

Und meine Seele ist tief beschämt.

Ach, jede Lust, ach, jeden Genuß

Hab ich erkauft durch herben Verdruß;

Ich ward getränkt mit Bitternissen

Und grausam von den Wanzen gebissen;

Ich ward bedrängt von schwarzen Sorgen,

Ich mußte lügen, ich mußte borgen

Bei reichen Buben und alten Vetteln —

Ich glaube sogar, ich mußte betteln.

Jetzt bin ich müd vom Rennen und Laufen,

Jetzt will ich mich im Grabe verschnaufen.

Lebt wohl! Dort oben, ihr christlichen Brüder,

Ja, das versteht sich, dort sehn wir uns wieder.

 

 

Weltlauf

 

Hat man viel, so wird man bald

Noch viel mehr dazu bekommen.

Wer nur wenig hat, dem wird

Auch das Wenige genommen.

 

Wenn du aber gar nichts hast,

Ach, so lasse dich begraben —

Denn ein Recht zum Leben, Lump,

Haben nur die etwas haben.

 

 

 

 

The passage from the introduction to Lutetia in German is, in the original, “dass die Menschen alle das Recht zu essen haben.  Sie ist schon seit langer Zeit gerichtet, verurteilt, diese alte Gesellschaft.  Möge ihr Gerechtigkeit widerfahren!  Möge sie zertrūmmert warden, diese alte Welt, wo die Unschuld zu Grunde ging, wo der Cynismus gedieh, wo der Mensch durch den Menschen exploitiert wurde!  Mögen sie von Grund aus zerstört warden, diese ūbertūnchen Grabstätten, wo die Lüge und die Unbilligkeit residierten!”

Steven Hirsch's Demon Commuter

 

Steven Hirsch’s Demon Commuter from Giant Steps Press is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere for $19.95.  Further information on Hirsch and his work is available at the Giant Steps site https://giantstepspress.wordpress.com/steven-hirsch/.

 

      Steve Hirsch’s readers expect a lot: great poems of corralled consciousness barely contained in words stretched to the breaking point.  Hirsch captures the unique moment, but his imagistic precision mingles intimately with the recognition of the socio-political-historical dimension of the scenes of his life, and with a view longer yet, his lines are lit with glints of what does not change, the illumination which is for him less a conviction than a habit of vision, nothing more than the way things look.  

     In its most literal reading the title refers to Hirsch’s (and many other workers’) daily routine, the commute to earn a living, the mental “drivenness” imposed by the reality principle.  Taking a step back, Hirsch makes it clear that his own sometimes ill-fitting vocation is embedded in an inescapable system that privileges greed and aggression, giving the demonic the face of war and exploitation.  Yet in his final vision, everything is transformed, redeemed even, and “demon” can regain a numinous glow.  But even once the demon of the title has appeared in beneficent form as the sort of interior muse of which Socrates spoke, now and then he seems more closely to resemble S. Clay Wilson’s Checkered Demon in his frantic, barely controllable impulsive energy.  

     With a Mahayana impulse toward sympathy with all sentient beings, Hirsch imagines what burdens may weigh on the psyches of his fellow citizens.

 

the dark bags you carry

the persnickety boss, the wear of

gravity, knees chafed by

seat backs, groveling and

fruitless weekend prayers to a god

that simply is not there

as maddening as a crossword

missing a critical clue

 (from “Demon Commuter”)

 

Often the hurrying lines of Hirsch’s poems overflow in catalogues, words falling as in a cataract.  In “Supplication to the Muse of a Dark Age” specific signs of the season lead to the definition of a psychic hunger and then to a masterful concluding image, so natural it seems a proverb.

 

 

Full force fall in a rain of leaves, crops trimmed

& drying in large bins, shrink wrapped sanity

convenient and hermetically sealed.

Last little green tomato at risk to ripen or rot before

winter frosts the cold stovepipe and eaves.

Try to talk sense so I hear you through the rain on the gutters

the sirens, derailments, hurricanes, flak —

A mask surrendered is a

mask traded for another mask that masks the mask Jack

 

     For Hirsch current events are as much an element in the phenomena boiling all about him as the autumn.  He reacts to his local nuclear plant and the Mueller investigation and reviles “Vlad the scum-paler,” but in the end these are the fleas of the world, the social projection of the comedown inscribed in miniature on every waking day.

 

At 5:58 again

no matter what the song

clockradio curdles spirit

sours mind, kills dreaming

slays the composer writing aubades

in lazy morning afterglow.

On the dawn-chilled depot platform

(“Transgressions”)    

 

Yet the dreaming may be overcome, seen past, transcended with high thoughts and the illuminated dreams of art.  A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Hirsch has studied what he calls the “blank book of Zen” and realizes that irritation and desire do not vanish, but rather assume a place in a whole and perfect picture.

 

Deer ticks leap from tree bark

to truck their miniature dose of Lyme

into the truck stop of loose socks hanging

over a row of hiking boots.

Hold cosmic mudra below my navel

for another quiet hour until the gong

and then Kin Hin walking like mountain

(“Zazen Weekend at the Grail”)

 

We all travel together as demon commuters, all passengers on “The Train to the End of the World.”  No need for sighs. 

 

No muscle can lift

the unsurpassable.

                                                            (“Zazen”)

 Yet there is beauty and solace and vision in Hirsch’s small machines made of words, one all the more necessary for frantic commuters, anxious householders, and those terrified by the evening news.

 

[This poetry is a rescue

from the death of all dreams.]

(“Urban Verses”)

Thematic Instability in Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse

     The center of Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse is elusive. Though the book is a part of Balzac’s Scenes of Provincial Life a good part of the narrative occurs in Paris.  The family dynamics between Joseph, Phillipe, and their mother seem to be heart of the book until Flore appears and then Maxence with their designs on the Rouget money.

     The unusual instability of the novel’s title reflects this thematic ambiguity.  First published as Les Deux Frères in 1840, it became Un Ménage de Garçon in 1842 and then La Rabouilleuse in 1843.  The final choice is perhaps the most puzzling as Flore, la rabouilleuse herself, has a limited role and is clearly more a motive than an active agent in the plot.  In translation it has appeared as The Black Sheep in Donald Adamson’s version, as A Bachelor’s Establishment in Clara Bell’s, and as The Two Brothers in Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s. 

     Clearly these shifts in the title imply an uncertainty about the central theme of the story.  While the original title focuses on the comparison of Joseph and Phillipe, the second seems to turn primarily to Joseph as protagonist, though it remains uncertain whether the “bachelor” is Phillipe before his marriage, or Joseph whose ménage includes his mother. 

     Balzac’s comments in a brief avant-propos only complicate the question of the book’s primary subject further.  Balzac claims in a dedication to Charles Nodier that his principal theme is to point out the harm done by the weakening of patriarchy.  Few readers might have guessed.  He explains that his story carries “a great lesson for the family and for Motherhood” by calling attention to “the effects of diminished paternal authority.”  In fact, he finds a general decay of morality in modern society which he finds “based solely on the power of money.”  For Balzac as an orthodox believer, the remedy is obvious: the country must “return to the Catholic Church for purification of the masses by religious feeling” and all will be well. [1]

     All these highly conventional opinions seem to have little, though, to do with the narrative in spite of the author’s assertions.  Only in a harsh verdict on Agathe’s husbandless household and her acting the hapless woman by preferring her ne’er-do-well son to the dutiful one might “diminished paternal authority” be relevant to the plot.  Dr. Rouget, a strong husband of the previous generation, clearly errs in his mistreatment of his daughter.  Jean-Joseph, Phillipe, and Maxence are all “strong” male characters with far from exemplary behavior, while the laudable Joseph is quiet and unassertive.  Likewise, apart from the priest’s deathbed counseling of Agathe bringing her to the realization that she had been wronging her more virtuous son, the novel contains little to support the notion that regeneration must come from the Church.  Balzac, perhaps motivated by moralistic critics of his work, claims with little basis that the most respectable values underly his novel.     

     The theme of greed displacing ethics is, however, in a general way, appropriate, as the characters motivated by money or by money’s glow reflected in social prestige are depicted as amoral while those with more humane motivations behave better.  In the plot’s mainline clear patterns of retributive justice govern the paths of Joseph, the character most positively portrayed who finds success and even ennoblement in spite of his indifference to such rewards and the avaricious Maxence, Phillipe, and Flore  all of whom come to ruin.  The final miseries of Flore read almost like a medieval exemplum.  Yet, though she has no worldly ambition, Agathe is profoundly misguided in her treatment of her sons., while the community in general is neither pious nor wicked, [2] though often self-interested and gossipy. 

     This novel is only a small portion of Balzac’s grand project, La Comédie humaine, comprising ninety-one completed works and the planning for another forty-six over a period of two decades.   Balzac’s introductory note to the novel points out the thematic complexity allowed by his comprehensive plan.  His soldiers, he says, in this story indicate the “depravity” that “results from the exigencies of war in certain minds which dare to act in private life as they would on the field of battle,” but the reader can see that this is no general verdict due to the “fine characters,” motivated by “great and noble devotion” depicted in his Scenes of Military Life. 

     The conflicted focus implied by the multiple titles may, then, be an answer as well as a question.  As La Rabouilleuse is a single mosaic stone in a large composition in which every portion need not mimic the whole, the themes of one isolated portion need not agree with those of another.  Even the irreligious among Balzac’s nineteenth or twenty-first century readers may echo Dryden’s cogent praise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales “Here is God's plenty.”  A certain exhilarating liberty emerges, allowing Balzac to compose without preconception. 

     Balzac’s approach to theme, nuanced far beyond his conscious, expressed values, is evident in the ambivalence of his political implications.  Though Balzac was himself a conservative royaloist, Marx and Engels had the highest regard for his work.  Marx had enough respect for the Comédie humaine to envision writing a major, full-length study of it, though he never completed this project.  Engels praised Balzac for writing that belied the conscious reactionary theme, often betraying (to a receptive reader at least) what looks quite like revolutionary implications. 

 

Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

   Engels to Margaret Harkness April 1888

 

     The same authorial freedom that allowed Marx and Engels to see their notions of French society reflected in Balzac’s epic canvas also enables the reader without a partisan view to see large and complex patterns in this narrative world which, like those we observe in life, offer in general no easy answers and include many shades between the extremes, even now and then to revealing the unexpected. 

     The liberty that enables ambiguity need not result in randomness.  Balzac employs observations of unprogrammed lived experience mixed with literary conventions, and he has no difficulty in developing incidents that suggest generalizations that might be called themes.  Rather like some painters who chose to work en plein air claiming to reproduce their sense impressions on canvas, but in fact propelling art in new directions, Balzac’s pose as a scientifical observer of society allowed him to construct fictions in a new vein.

     La Rabouilleuse, a novel that has met more blame than praised from critics, [2] has at any rate a gripping story, punctuated with dramatic incident and scenes of pathos.  The reader who hunts after a theme reducible to a single line may be missing both that simple narrative excitement and the grander sense, based on Balzac’s life’s work, that his novels provide access to a complete and coherent scene of human life, one as subjective as individual as any writer’s.  The specific correspondence to historical moments in France during the author’s life seems almost immaterial, in spite of the references to documented events.  In the end La Rabouilleuse and the entire Comédie humaine are, not because of topical or documentary detail, but by virtue of the specifically Balzacian imagination they record, as resistant to reductive formulae and sometimes as enigmatic as life itself. 

 

 

1. The passages quoted in Clara Bell’s rendering are in the original French: “grands enseignements et pour la famille et pour la maternité; “des effets produits par la diminution de la puissance paternelle;” “puisse une société basée uniquement sur le pouvoir de l'argent;” and “puisse-t-elle recourir promptement au catholicisme pour purifier les masses par le sentiment religieux.”  “Assez de beaux caractères, assez de grands et nobles dévouements brilleront dans les Scènes de la Vie militaire, pour qu’il m’ait été permis d’indiquer ici combien de dépravation causent les nécessités de la guerre chez certains esprits, qui dans la vie privée osent agir comme sur les champs de bataille.”

2.  In  his introduction to the entire Comédie humaine, Balzac notes that in his view “Man is neither good nor bad” (“L’homme n’est ni bon ni méchant”).

3.  A number of negative judgements are mentioned at the outset of Allan H. Pasco, “Process Structure in Balzac's ‘La Rabouilleuse,’" Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1/2 (Fall and Winter 2005-2006).

 

 

 

 

Note of an Accidental Bibliophile

     Feeling I have enough to do to attend to the authors’ words, I don’t seek out rare editions of books, but now and then I happen across an interesting old title in a Salvation Army or library book sale, and I am quite willing then to enjoy a volume’s particular qualities.  My English copy of La Rabouilleuse, titled A Bachelor’s Establishment, was published by J. M. Dent in 1896, translated by the indefatigable Clara Bell and introduced by George Saintsbury, part of his twenty-volume edition of the Comédie Humaine.  (The Times reviewer, grandly named E. Irenaeus Stevenson, welcomed the set on June 25, 1898 in a piece “Balzac in English” which began by noting that Balzac “is not even yet read and measured nicely by all those men and women quick in perception [and] broad in cultivation.”  “It may be doubted,” he goes on, “whether in English translation and with Anglo-Saxons, Balzac will ever attain a much more general circulation that his masterpieces today receive.”

     The design of my copy has charm in its art nouveau cover lettering and decoration, deckle edges and irregular signatures, thick, palpable pages, and engraved illustrations by the Scots painter and printmaker D. Murray Smith.  While not memorable art, they and their inlaid protective tissues grace the book.