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PARTISAN REVIEW
ities; or, more precariously, when questions of caliber are at issue.
When there is no thought of either, the business becomes otiose.
Otiose, too, I find Mr. Hamburger's protective attitude toward his
author (which may be partly responsible for the foregoing). Possible
charges and reservations are introduced, one after another and rather
at random, to be dismissed as impertinent in the end. Again, some of
these are pure figments of Mr. Hamburger's mind: Hoelderlin's poetry
is "neither witty nor urbane," surely-but to defend the poet on that
count is like stressing the right of Fuseli to be different from Hogarth.
Other queries and critical points brought up for discussion do indeed
contain a kernel of sense, while the answers made by Hoelderlin's
nervous apologist do not. Take the charge of obscurity. This charge
is, in part, well founded (some of the late hymns and fragments
are
impenetrably obscure in spots, with no detriment to their beauty), and
in part quite baseless. Since Mr. Hamburger had no occasion, in
hi~
essay, to discriminate the true charge- if charge it is-from the false,
he might have dropped the suoject altogether. Instead he quotes a
famous passage from Coleridge, which bears little relation to Hoelder.
lin's seeming darkness and none to his true. The procedure is wasteful;
its result, obfuscation.
The versions in this book vary considerably in quality as they do
III
character. The translator's ear is good; being a poet himself, he
has much verbal felicity; and there can be no question about his thor–
ough knowledge of German or of his author's idiom. But he defeats
himself somewhat, it seems to me, by the inconsistency of his method;
nor is his sense of key and register any too sure. A good many render–
ings follow the German fairly closely in both spirit and meter-or
rhythm-(some of the classical odes, certain of the hymns); others in
meter only (most of the odes) ; one at least in neither meter nor spirit
(the stanza
To Speidel);
while others yet (the two great sets of elegiac
distichs,
Menon's Lament for Diotima
and
Bread and Win e,
among the
most moving verse the poet has written) are rather close to Hoelderlin
in spirit but hybridize his meter, at times to the point of doggerel. Those
of the first group are clearly the best though they lag behind the originals
as all translations must, and perhaps farther than the genius of our
own language, as a minimum tribute to its idiosyncrasy, would seem to
demand.
Francis Golffing
