Poems Read online

  Books by Hermann Hesse

  Peter Camenzind

  Beneath the Wheel

  Gertrude

  Rosshalde

  Knulp

  Demian

  Strange News from Another Star

  Klingsor’s Last Summer

  Wandering

  Siddhartha

  Steppenwolf

  Narcissus and Goldmund

  The Journey to the East

  The Glass Bead Game

  If the War Goes On …

  Poems

  Autobiographical Writings

  Stories of Five Decades

  My Belief

  Reflections

  Crisis

  Tales of Student Life

  Hours in the Garden

  Pictor’s Metamorphoses

  Soul of the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse

  Poems by

  Hermann Hesse

  Selected and

  Translated by

  James Wright

  FARRAR, STRAUS

  AND GIROUX

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 1970 by James Wright

  copyright © 1953 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 1970

  This paperback edition, 2008

  The quotation from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (translated by Basil Creighton; copyright © 1929, 1957 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.) is reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007934249

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52641-2

  ISBN-10: 0-374-52641-9

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Michael di Capua — J.W.

  Contents

  Copyright Notice

  1) Translator’s Note

  2) I Know, You Walk

  3) Across the Fields …

  4) Elizabeth

  5) Ravenna (1)

  6) Ravenna (2)

  7) Lonesome Night

  8) A Swarm of Gnats

  9) The Poet

  10) Mountains at Night

  11) At Night on the High Seas

  12) To a Chinese Girl Singing

  13) Departure from the Jungle

  14) Evil Time

  15) On a Journey

  16) Night

  17) Destiny

  18) Ode to Hölderlin

  19) Childhood

  20) Lying in Grass

  21) How Heavy the Days …

  22) In a Collection of Egyptian Sculptures

  23) Without You

  24) The First Flowers

  25) Spring Day

  26) Holiday Music in the Evening

  27) Thinking of a Friend at Night

  28) Autumn Day

  29) To Children

  30) Flowers, Too

  31) Uneasiness in the Night

  32) All Deaths

  Translator’s Note

  Few American readers seem aware that Hesse was a poet. In the seven-volume German edition of his works, there are some 480 pages of poems, Die Gedichte. Some are very fine, and it goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire good novel. Readers of Hesse’s novels are already aware that they contain many passages of literal verse. His Novellen, that peculiarly German form which Goethe first mastered and which contains some of the most profoundly beautiful and illuminating bodies of feeling in the literature—Keller, Eichendorff, and Storm come to mind, not to mention the very master of them all, Thomas Mann—are lyrical in themselves; and one of them, In the Pressel Summerhouse (Im Presseischen Gartenhaus), is itself a story about poets. It deals with the young Mörike’s visit to the aging Hölderlin. It is a story by an artist about an artist who is visiting another artist, in this case a master, and it bears some resemblance to Mörike’s own prose masterpiece, Mozart on the Way to Prague (Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag).

  I don’t intend here to offer more than an implicit judgment of Hesse’s work. I like his poems very much, or I would not have tried to translate some of them. But I should say something about the poet’s theme. Both his curious erudition and his own writings make clear his abiding concern with art as a way of searching for knowledge. Whether or not the strange and haunted old man ever learned anything worth knowing is a matter still open to question. It has been argued by scholars and artists alike. All I wish to do is to offer a selection of Hesse’s poems which deal with the single theme of homesickness.

  I suppose the word, like love, is simple enough at first glance. If somebody else is in love, love looks charmingly silly. If somebody else is homesick, we chuckle. The poor fellow hasn’t grown up. But his struggle, his growth itself, is a serious theme, and Hesse has touched this theme with a traditionally endearing delicacy.

  During the recent proliferation of translations which have brought so many of Hesse’s works to the attention of American readers, and particularly to the attention of the young, there has been a need to identify him, to describe his limits. Otherwise, he might go the way of a fad, as so many things—and not all of them worthless, either—have a way of doing in America. To my mind, the best criticism of this indispensable kind has been provided by the brilliant American novelist Stephen Koch. He is particularly qualified to warn against the inflation of Hesse. Quite aside from Mr. Koch’s own mastery of lyrical prose, and quite aside from his learning, he is himself a young man who has written profoundly in defense of the distressed, assaulted new generation in this country. So, in his penetrating review of Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund (The New Republic, July 13, 1968), Mr. Koch describes Hesse’s limitations, and thereby, I think, reveals his true powers:

  Like everything else in his work, Hesse’s thought is irretrievably adolescent, so that in his chosen role of artist of ideas, he is invariably second-rate, although unlike the other prophets of the New Age, he is never less than second-rate. His thought is never cheap, never trashy, but neither is it ever intellectually exalting, the way the professorial, unfashionable Mann so often is. Almost without exception, Hesse’s ideas are derivative, school-boyish, traditional to the point of being academic, influenced by all the right people, and boringly correct. […] So it goes, book after book, the Great Ideas chasing the Terrific Experiences home to their all-too-obvious destinations. Flawed though it sometimes is, Hesse’s aesthetic sense is different and better than this; it does sometimes rise to extraordinary levels, does transform itself into “something else,” as the kids say. The final third of Steppenwolf is one of the great moments in modern literature, a moment original to the point of being in a class by itself, and one with an importance to future art which is not to be patronized.

  I think that Mr. Koch has caught the nature and value of Hesse’s art so beautifully in this passage that it remains only to offer yet another few lines, taken from the closing pages of Steppenwolf, which I have followed as my guide in selecting and translating some of Hesse’s poems. The lines I mean do indeed appear in the final third of Steppenwolf. I have abbreviated them; but they provide what I take to be Hesse’s best and noblest expression of his artistic theme. In this passage, the girl Hermine is trying to explain to the forty-year-old Harry Haller why his life is nothing, and yet not nothing:

  “Time and the world,
money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Yes, eternity.”

  “You mean a name, and fame with posterity?”

  “No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then it isn’t fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the schoolmasters. No, it isn’t fame. It is what I call eternity. The pious call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom of truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your great poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked wonders and suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. […] Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.”

  That is what I think Hesse’s poetry is about. He is homesick. But what is home? I do not know the answer, but I cherish Hesse because he at least knew how to ask the question.

  A translation of this kind is always a collaboration difficult to identify. But I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Michael Roloff, who did his best to correct my inaccuracies of translation; to the poet Jerome Mazzaro, a masterful translator whose advice means almost as much as his friendship; and to Mr. and Mrs. Morgan Epes of Buffalo, N.Y., and Mr. and Mrs. Orrin Bly of Old Chatham, N.Y., at whose homes most of these translations were made.

  James Wright

  February 22, 1970

  I Know, You Walk—

  I walk so often, late, along the streets,

  Lower my gaze, and hurry, full of dread,

  Suddenly, silently, you still might rise

  And I would have to gaze on all your grief

  With my own eyes,

  While you demand your happiness, that’s dead.

  I know, you walk beyond me, every night,

  With a coy footfall, in a wretched dress

  And walk for money, looking miserable!

  Your shoes gather God knows what ugly mess,

  The wind plays in your hair with lewd delight—

  You walk, and walk, and find no home at all.

  Across the Fields …

  Across the sky, the clouds move,

  Across the fields, the wind,

  Across the fields the lost child

  Of my mother wanders.

  Across the street, leaves blow,

  Across the trees, birds cry—

  Across the mountains, far away,

  My home must be.

  Elizabeth

  I should tell you a story,

  The night is already so late—

  Do you want to torment me,

  Lovely Elizabeth?

  I write poems about that,

  Just as you do;

  And the entire history of my love

  Is you and this evening.

  You mustn’t be troublesome,

  And blow these poems away.

  Soon you will listen to them,

  Listen, and not understand.

  Ravenna (1)

  I, too, have been in Ravenna.

  It is a little dead city

  That has churches and a good many ruins.

  You can read about it in books.

  You walk back through it and look around you:

  The streets are so muddy and damp, and so

  Dumbstruck for a thousand years,

  And moss and grass, everywhere.

  That is what old songs are like—

  You listen to them, and nobody laughs

  And everybody draws back into

  His own time till night falls into him.

  Ravenna (2)

  The women of Ravenna,

  With their deep gazes and affectionate gestures,

  Carry a knowledge of the days

  Of the old city, their festivals.

  The women of Ravenna

  Weep like children who won’t tell you: deep, light.

  And when they laugh, a glittering song

  Rises in the sludge of the text.

  The women of Ravenna pray

  Like children: gentle, fully contented.

  They can speak love’s words without even knowing

  Themselves they are lying.

  The women of Ravenna kiss

  Rarely and deep, they kiss back.

  And all they know about life is that

  We all have to die.

  Lonesome Night

  You brothers, who are mine,

  Poor people, near and far,

  Longing for every star,

  Dream of relief from pain,

  You, stumbling dumb

  At night, as pale stars break,

  Lift your thin hands for some

  Hope, and suffer, and wake,

  Poor muddling commonplace,

  You sailors who must live

  Unstarred by hopelessness,

  We share a single face.

  Give me my welcome back.

  A Swarm of Gnats

  Many thousand glittering motes

  Crowd forward greedily together

  In trembling circles.

  Extravagantly carousing away

  For a whole hour rapidly vanishing,

  They rave, delirious, a shrill whir,

  Shivering with joy against death.

  Whole kingdoms, sunk into ruin,

  Whose thrones, heavy with gold, instantly scattered

  Into night and legend, without leaving a trace,

  Have never known of so fierce a dancing.

  The Poet

  Only on me, the lonely one,

  The unending stars of the night shine,

  The stone fountain whispers its magic song,

  To me alone, to me the lonely one

  The colorful shadows of the wandering clouds

  Move like dreams over the open countryside.

  Neither house nor farmland,

  Neither forest nor hunting privilege is given to me,

  What is mine belongs to no one,

  The plunging brook behind the veil of the woods,

  The frightening sea,

  The bird whir of children at play,

  The weeping and singing, lonely in the evening, of a man secretly in love.

  The temples of the gods are mine also, and mine

  The aristocratic groves of the past.

  And no less, the luminous

  Vault of heaven in the future is my home:

  Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward,

  To gaze on the future of blessed men,

  Love, overcoming the law, love from people to people.

  I find them all again, nobly transformed:

  Farmer, king, tradesman, busy sailors,

  Shepherd and gardener, all of them

  Gratefully celebrate the festival of the future world.

  Only the poet is missing,

  The lonely one who looks on,

  The bearer of human longing, the pale image

  Of whom the future, the fulfillment of the world

  Has no further need. Many garlands

  Wilt on his grave,

  But no one remembers him.

  Mountains at Night

  The lake has died down,

  The reed, black in its sleep,

  Whispers in a dream.

  Expanding immensely into the countryside,

  The mountains loom, outspread.

  They are not resting.

  They breathe deeply, and hold them
selves,

  Pressed tightly, to one another.

  Deeply breathing,

  Laden with mute forces,

  Caught in a wasting passion.

  At Night on the High Seas

  (from an Asian journey: Malayan Archipelago)

  At night, when the sea cradles me

  And the pale star gleam

  Lies down on its broad waves,

  Then I free myself wholly

  From all activity and all the love

  And stand silent and breathe purely,

  Alone, alone cradled by the sea

  That lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights.

  Then I have to think of my friends

  And my gaze sinks into their gazes

  And I ask each one, silent, alone:

  “Are you still mine?

  Is my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death?

  Do you feel from my love, my grief,

  Just a breath, just an echo?”

  And the sea peacefully gazes back, silent,

  And smiles: no.

  And no greeting and no answer comes from anywhere.

  To a Chinese Girl Singing

  We traveled down the still river in the evening,

  The acacia stood in the color of rose, casting its light,

  The clouds cast down the rose light. But I scarcely saw them,

  All I saw were the plum blossoms in your hair.

  You sat smiling in the bow of the garlanded boat,

  Held the lute in your skillful hand,

  Sang the song, that holy country of your own,

  While your eyes promised fire, and you were so young.

  Without saying anything, I stood at the mast, and what I wanted,

  For myself, was to give in to those gleaming eyes, over and over,

  To listen to the song forever in blessed pain,

  To the song that could make me happy, tangled in your delicate hands.

  Departure from the Jungle

  With my suitcase, I sit on the beach;

  Below me, on the steamer, Indians,