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Hymns to the Night English and German Edition Dick Higgins Novalis 9780914232902 Books

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Hymns to the Night English and German Edition Dick Higgins Novalis 9780914232902 Books

Translator Dick Higgins has three prefaces to each edition of this translation that verges on being a transliteration of Novalis's wonderful poems. Higgins clearly struggled to do the best job he could. The issue this edition raises s not how good Higgins' translation is but how it lets you see, assuming you know some German, the concrete difficulties and strange ways Higgins sometimes translates the hymns. for example, he translates "Ewigkeit," or ternary, as "the forever." (pp. 16-17) He renders "In her Augen ruhte de Ewigket" as :In her eyes rested the forever." Higgins generally keeps very close to the word order of the German but the English sounds stilted."Eternity rested in her eyes" would sound better. And "the forever" sacrifices the echo of "Ewigkeit" a few lines later in the "fuehl Ich ewigen, unwanderlbaren Glauben." In this case, Higgins inexplicably inverts the order of ewigen un unwandlerbaren," rendering the line "I've felt an unchangeable, eternal faith." And by translating "Glauben" as "faith" rather than than "belief," he misses the chance to carry over Novalis's each of "Glauben and "Geliebte," the last word of the hymn. "Belief" and "beloved" wold have picked up the initial G's" of Glauben" and "Geliebte." or consider what Higgins does with "irische," a word that a word he says in the the preface to the third edition gave him a lot of trouble (p.7). Higgins sometimes takes poetic license, but for no apparent reason,. For example, he inserts the word "forever" where it does not exist in the German: "'Und sent ins in des Vatars Schoss"becomes "And sink us forever in our Father's lap." (pp. 52-53) Higgins does not translate the word the same way. In one case, translates it as "worldly," in another "earthly." (He says he abandoned Keats' "earthy" in his earlier translation.) Is it better to use the same English word for "irdische" since Novalis uses the same word and thereby capture the repetition? Or is there really a semantic difference between the meanings of the word "irdische" as Novalis uses it that requires two English words be used? Hard to say. For me, the value of this translation lies in the way it provokes such questions, leading me to a more careful reading of the German than I otherwise probably would have been able to do. Like any good German Romantic poet, Higgins has failed, failed again, and failed again. But he has failed brilliantly the third time.


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Hymns to the Night English and German Edition Dick Higgins Novalis 9780914232902 Books Reviews

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.
The poem is translated in English by someone who is clearly pound foolish and pennywise. So much effort is done to stay close to the original text but as a whole it has become a bit two dimensional. The poem itself reads like a profound work that has had and will have always some but not so manny admirers. That is not because it is so difficult or vague. No it's just that time kept this one secret for the grande majeure.
I won't reiterate what's already been stated, but this is a translation by an academic and not a poet.

If you want a real translation of hymns to the night check out Blurb books and search "hymns to the night", translation is by B.R. and there's a preview of hymn 1 to give you an idea of the distance between this translation and all others I've seen.

Great work, worth buying and reading but you have to find the best if you want to enjoy it in its entirety.
Hymns to the Night
Translator Dick Higgins has three prefaces to each edition of this translation that verges on being a transliteration of Novalis's wonderful poems. Higgins clearly struggled to do the best job he could. The issue this edition raises s not how good Higgins' translation is but how it lets you see, assuming you know some German, the concrete difficulties and strange ways Higgins sometimes translates the hymns. for example, he translates "Ewigkeit," or ternary, as "the forever." (pp. 16-17) He renders "In her Augen ruhte de Ewigket" as In her eyes rested the forever." Higgins generally keeps very close to the word order of the German but the English sounds stilted."Eternity rested in her eyes" would sound better. And "the forever" sacrifices the echo of "Ewigkeit" a few lines later in the "fuehl Ich ewigen, unwanderlbaren Glauben." In this case, Higgins inexplicably inverts the order of ewigen un unwandlerbaren," rendering the line "I've felt an unchangeable, eternal faith." And by translating "Glauben" as "faith" rather than than "belief," he misses the chance to carry over Novalis's each of "Glauben and "Geliebte," the last word of the hymn. "Belief" and "beloved" wold have picked up the initial G's" of Glauben" and "Geliebte." or consider what Higgins does with "irische," a word that a word he says in the the preface to the third edition gave him a lot of trouble (p.7). Higgins sometimes takes poetic license, but for no apparent reason,. For example, he inserts the word "forever" where it does not exist in the German "'Und sent ins in des Vatars Schoss"becomes "And sink us forever in our Father's lap." (pp. 52-53) Higgins does not translate the word the same way. In one case, translates it as "worldly," in another "earthly." (He says he abandoned Keats' "earthy" in his earlier translation.) Is it better to use the same English word for "irdische" since Novalis uses the same word and thereby capture the repetition? Or is there really a semantic difference between the meanings of the word "irdische" as Novalis uses it that requires two English words be used? Hard to say. For me, the value of this translation lies in the way it provokes such questions, leading me to a more careful reading of the German than I otherwise probably would have been able to do. Like any good German Romantic poet, Higgins has failed, failed again, and failed again. But he has failed brilliantly the third time.