Final Reflections on Hölderlin's Poltergeists (A Drama for Voices by Síomón Solomon)

(Peter Lang, 2020)

 

 

I. 

 

Astute readers may have noticed that whilst I published a quintet of posts last month on the supplementary writings contained within Síomón Solomon's study Hölderlin's Poltergeists,* I didn't actually comment on the highly original adaptation of the radio play which is at its heart. 

 

This was due to the fact that although Nietzsche may figure prominently in my intellectual background, I simply do not feel qualified to do so: I am not a German literature scholar and not only have I never studied Hölderlin, but I hadn't even heard of Stephan Hermlin or his 1970 audio drama, Scardanelli, before reading Solomon's book. 

 

Further, whilst I've read a lot of novels and seen a lot of films, my knowledge and appreciation of plays is shamefully underdeveloped. I don't know why, but watching plays unfold on stage, or listening to them on the radio, has always filled me with a kind of performance anxiety. I even find reading plays troubling. 

And so, I'm perfectly happy to accept Dan Farrelly's estimation of Solomon's work as a "beautiful, free and creative translation" which "opens access to an extraordinarily creative poet who is superbly served by the playwright and his translator" [1]. 

 

Happy also to reproduce below remarks made by Solomon in his introduction, which give a fascinating insight into his thinking and working method ...    

 

 

II. 

 

According to Solomon, although his adaptation is rooted in "an exhaustive attentiveness to the minutiae" [2] of Hermlin's original German text, he has nevertheless seen fit to take a transmorphic approach in accordance with which he has made "a host of minor and major infidelities to the mother script, from compensations (moved text), borrowings (untranslated language items), tweaked directions, insertions and elisions to new dramatis personae and whole scenic re/writings" [3]. 

 

Solomon continues:

 

"As a result, the source text - already, of course, a seething intertext implicating a range of semiotic fields (Classical/Romantic poetics, early European psychiatry, Franco-German revolutionary politics, epistolary erotics, etc.) - has been both critically trimmed and lavishly enhanced. Our clamorous ark of thirty-five speakers [...] through twenty-eight scenes - roughly doubling Hermlin's quantities in each case and all doing their many varieties of violence to Hölderlin's voice - has been accordingly relaunched as a keening vessel of ventriloquized voices, in which ill-starred poets, idealist philosophers, literary editors, hamstrung employers, pious relatives, mortified lovers, political tyrants, ghoulish voyeurs and anonymous critics collide and collude." [4] 

 

In consequence: Solomon calls his work a 'remix', "aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix" [5]. 

 

And in sum: "Hermlin's play has been treated playfully, with a passionate recklessness or irreverent love" [6] that some might term abusive fidelity. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Dan Farrelly, Senior Lecturer in German (retired), University College Dublin. I am quoting from the blurb provided by Farrelly for the back cover of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

[2] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 13. 

[3] - [5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 14.

 

* The quintet of earlier posts inspired by Hölderlin's Poltergeists are: 

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All (With Reference to the Case of Stephan Hermlin)

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked: Notes On Síomón Solomon's Fantasia of Translation 

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin 

 

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli 

 

We Are Transmitters: Reflections on Síomón Solomon's Audiopoetics 

 

 

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli

Ja, die Gedichte sind echt, die sind von mir, aber der Name ist gefälscht! 

Ich habe nie Hölderlin geheißen, sondern Scardanelli!

 

 

I. 

 

Nietzsche is not the only great poet-philosopher and madman of German letters. Before him came the early Romantic figure Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), who, long plagued by mental illness, was finally committed in 1806. 

 

Deemed incurable - despite the belladonna preparations and cold water baths - Hölderlin was released into the care of a kindly carpenter called Ernst Zimmer, who gave him a room at his house in Tübingen. Here, Hölderlin would spend the last thirty-six years of his life; a period referred to by those in the know as the Turmzeit. 

 

During this so-called Tower period, Hölderlin would occasionally write rhymed quatrains signed with a variety of theatrical-sounding pseudonyms, including Scardanelli, a name which Stephan Hermlin would use as the title of his 1970 Hörspiel, which deals with the poet's breakdown triggered (arguably) by the realisation that there is little room for art in a world dominated by politics and philistinism; something that Hermlin himself would also come slowly to accept despite his life-long communist affiliations and affinity.

 

II. 

 

Offering as it does a "musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix" [1], one wonders why Síomón Solomon didn't simply call his translation-adaptation of Hermlin's play Scardanelli: an Extended Remix, instead of opting for the (admittedly more paranormally suggestive) title of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

For whilst I appreciate his desire to announce the work's originality and emphasise its spectral chaos, I think the name Scardanelli should have remained in the title somewhere or other. For Scardanelli is a name that has a real magic to it and which has continued to resonate within creative circles for over 200 years; not just amongst poets and playwrights, but also composers, filmmakers, and even graffiti artists. 

 

I'm thinking, for example, of the large-scale Scardanelli-Zyklus project that the Swiss composer Heinz Holliger worked on from 1975 to 1993 (ECM Records); the 2003 film written and directed by Harald Bergmann entitled Scardanelli, and starring André Wilms as Hölderlin (see image below); and of the fabulous piece of street art (reproduced above) painted on shutters in Milan and posted on the designer Campbell Johnson's Instagram account: click here [2].

 

My point is this: the name Scardanelli unites a wide range of artists and artworks and I think Solomon's work is best understood in relation to this world rather than the academic world of German studies. There's no doubting Solomon is a fine scholar: but he is also an amazing artist in his own right.  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p.13 

 

[2] Mention must also be made of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker's recent collection of poems entitled Scardanelli, trans. Jonathan Larson, (The Song Cave, 2018); a collection haunted by the presence of Hölderlin throughout, an author to whose work Mayröcker is, by her own admission, addicted. Click here for more details.       

 

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin

Stephan Hermlin by Gudrun Brüne (1985) [1]

 

"Where one asks, others will know no answer, and 

where answers are given, questions will be waiting."

 

 

Stephan Hermlin was born (as Rudolf Leder) into a bourgeois Jewish family in Chemnitz, in 1915. Aged sixteen, he joined the Socialist Student Association as well as the Young Communist League (KJVD). Unfortunately, Germany was probably not the best place to be at that time for a Jewish Marxist and so, in 1936, Hermlin fled abroad; drifting round Egypt, Palestine, England and Spain, before settling in France. 

 

Quickly establishing contact with literary circles in Paris, Hermlin also became involved with an underground German-language radio station. During the occupation - and after a period of internment - Hermlin lends support to the Resistance and goes on the lam, before escaping to Switzerland in 1943 with the help of the (exiled) German Communist Party. 

 

Whilst living in Switzerland, he publishes his first work; a volume of ballads influenced by his experiences in France. Considering the nature of these experiences, one might have expected that Hermlin's Zwölf Balleden to possess a hard militant-ideological edge, but, as one commentator points out, these carefully crafted poetic pieces reveal "a high degree of artistic sensibility and familiarity with European literary traditions from the Middle Ages into Modernity" [2].

 

Hermlin's goal was not to turn poetry into a form of political propaganda but "'to harmonize once and for all that which cannot be fully grasped, that which is perennially eclipsed, that which can only be intimated through music and poetry, the dream, the quiet, the incoming tides of silence, in short everything that makes up the world of lyrics, with the world of the visible.'" [3]

 

As well as establishing his own name as a poet and writer of essays and short stories, Hermlin also enjoys success as a literary translator. I discuss my favourite piece of his from this period in an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

 

Post-War, Hermlin returns to Germany and gets a job as a broadcaster at a radio station in Frankfurt. In 1947 he decides to move to East Berlin in the Soviet-controlled zone (which will eventually become the GDR), where he becomes an active supporter of the new regime. In an obituary for Hermlin, Philip Brady writes:

 

"His move to East Germany was more than a matter of ideology. He returned in many essays and interviews to the question of Heimat (fatherland) and to his own powerfully emotional conviction that the GDR was his only conceivable home." [4] 

 

In 1972, Hermlin is presented with the Heinrich Heine Award by the East German Ministry of Culture, for his services to literature (and the state). In 1979, he publishes what is to become his most popular work, Abendlicht (1979) "in which fact and fiction, reality and dream, politics and Romantic gesture, combine in a story that shifts between autobiography [...] and the narrative of a distanced, anonymous observer" [5].

 

In 1995, two years before his death - and six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall - Hermlin gives an interview to Die Zeit in which he finally responds to the perceived failings of communist intellectuals such as himself and friends including Jean-Paul Sartre. 

 

Perhaps, looking back, Hermlin - like many other writers - was naive to think he could combine his sophisticated artistic sensibility with the political brutalism of Stalinism. Of course it's important to remember the historical context, but, even so ... Having said that, to dismiss his life and work as nothing more than an overly-aestheticised revolutionary fantasy is, I think, a bit harsh.

 

Defending Hermlin from what might be perceived as unfair criticism [6], Síomón Solomon - translator of Hermlin's 1970 radio play Scardanelli - suggests that perhaps his personal failings and political shortcomings might themselves be regarded as "inextricably bound up" [7] with his life as a writer.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This portrait by Gudrun Brüne can be found in Für Stephan Hermlin zum 13. April 1985, (Reclam, 1985). 

      Dates and details in the post are mostly based upon Síomón Solomon's Biographical Chronology in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. xxvii-xxix, and Philip Brady's, Obituray for Stephan Hermlin, in the Independent (11 April 1997): click here. 

 

[2] Axel Fair-Schulz, 'The Impact of Swiss Exile on an East German Critical Marxist', Vol. 43, No. 3, of the Swiss American Historical Society Review (Nov 2007), p. 31. 

 

[3] Ibid. Fair-Schulz is quoting Hermlin writing in 'Von der Musik Shelleys', in Das Goldene Tor, (Feb. 1947), pp. 108-109. 

 

[4] Philip Brady, Obituray for Stephan Hermlin, Independent (11 April 1997).

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] This criticism includes the work of the investigative journalist Karl Corino, who - whilst looking for possible Stasi connections - discovered that Hermlin had reimagined the facts of his own life in order to further his own status as a heroic figure. See Corino's book on this matter entitled Aussen Marmor, innen Gips: Die Legenden des Stephan Hermlin (Econ, 1996). 

 

[7] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, footnote 43 in the 'Translator's Introduction', p. 20. 

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked: Notes On Síomón Solomon's Fantasia of Translation

Der Übersetzer - ready at any moment 

to shed their skin and become-other

 

I. 

 

What is the role of the translator? It's an old question: but it remains a fascinating and important question. 

 

And it's a question that the poet and playwright Síomón Solomon has clearly spent a good deal of time thinking about, as evidenced by the Introduction to his translation - and extended remix - of Stephen Hermlin's radio play, Scardanelli (1970), in a newly published text celebrating the life and work of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin [1].

 

I'm hoping to discuss Solomon's bold adapatation of Hermlin's audio drama in a later post. Here, however, I wish only to examine his theory of translation [2] which, in a nutshell, posits the translator as an artist in their own right; one who (paradoxically) shows fidelity to a text not by staying as close as possible to it, but by daring to deviate. 

 

Solomon's theory of translation is, therefore, ultimately rooted in a perverse aesthetic; one that queers the text and allows for the birth of an illegitimate (sometimes monstrous) new literary offspring [3]; one that hears strange voices and intertextual murmurings [4] ...  

 

II.

 

Now, of course, there will be many critics who will loathe and despise this model of translation; who will loathe and despise Solomon for what he does with Hermlin's work and for his schizopoetic reading (and re-creation between the lines) of Hölderlin. But I'm not one of them. 

 

In fact, I'm happy to endorse this model which acts "'as a preventative against cultural atrophy and homogenisation'" [5]. And if, as Solomon acknowledges, the translator's cruelty of style results in an inevitable giving and taking of offence, well, that's too bad - can there be art without somebody being disturbed or having their nose put out of joint?  

 

Solomon nails his colours to the mast in the following superb passage:

 

"What we wish to affirm is that [...] the infidelity of [every translation] is not merely an occupational hazard but its transcendental sickness. On this basis, we propose recalibrating the translator's 'success' according to the boldness of [their] betrayals. [...] What is by definition commemorated and celebrated by the translator's Janus-faced remakings is the insufficiency of the source to itself, whose rewriting represents a wager on the literary future. In the necessary corruption of practice, to translate means to return to the origin/al to reimagine it, to complicate and regenerate it, and to recompose its music - even and especially in the teeth of 'misreading' it - through the rash passion for metamorphosis." [6]     

 

Later, Solomon reduces things down to just one (memorable) line that invites readers to imagine translators as a breed of reptilian shape-shifters living and working in a domain in which : "There is no tongue [...] that is not forked" [7].

    

  

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020).

      Solomon explains what he means by the term remix to describe his adaptation of Hermlin's play on pp. 13-14 of his Introduction; "we are calling this work a 'remix', aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix [...] influenced by Kenneth Goldsmith's modish conception of translation as renovatory displacement". 

      Readers interested in knowing more about Solomon's reading of Goldsmith can find his three-part post on this topic on Torpedo the Ark: click here. And those who may wish to check out Goldsmith's work for themselves should see Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).  

 

[2] It should be noted that at no time does Solomon refer to his writings on translation as his theory of such and I'm fairly certain he'd wince at the idea, probably insisting that it's more a delirious shared fantasy of translation (of what it might become if pushed to its external limit). Whilst I understand his postmodern concerns and desire to move beyond theory (towards play, performance, and poetry), I'm using the word here for the sake of convenience. However, I have substituted the term fantasia in the title of this post in the hope that this is one that he will very much approve of.    

 

[3] Solomon recalls and transposes Deleuze's self-styled relationship to the history of philosophy as a form of buggery via which he sought to engender monsters; see pp. 9-10 of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. 

      I have to say, it's a little odd to find Deleuze posing as a sodomite and delighting in fantasies of anal rape (or bum banditry, as Solomon refers to it). Perhaps it betrays the influence of his friend Michel Foucault on his thinking; or maybe he was thinking of D. H. Lawrence, who argued that the power of inspiration always comes from outside and enters us from behind and below.

 

[4] There's a very good reason that Solomon uses the following from Roland Barthes as an epigraph to his work: "Do I hear voices within the voice? But isn't it the truth of the voice that it be hallucinated? Isn't the entire space of the voice an infinite spaciousness?" 

      If, as I do, you accept Kristeva's idea of intertextualité (and/or Bakhtin's dialogism), then the question of translation is made all the more complex; arguably, every text is already a translation at some level and the author a multiple personality who speaks with many tongues masquerading as a unified subject. 

      Clearly Solomon also (more or less) accepts this line of thinking; see footnote 20 in his Introduction where he quotes from Susan Bernofsky's Foreign Words (2005). Bernofsky has also explored the significance of Barthes's work on intertextuality and the death of the author for contemporary theories of translation.   

 

[5] Mark Polizzotti, quoted by Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, footnote 1, p. 2. 

 

[6] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 7. 

 

[7] Ibid., p. 12. 

 

 

For a related post to this one - on Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944', trans. Síomón Solomon, click here.   

 

 

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All (With Reference to the Case of Stephan Hermlin)

Stephan Hermlin (1915-1997)

 

 

I.

 

One of the defining features of Hitler's Germany is that no one was ever left alone; the private citizen was effectively abolished and every man, woman and child was forced to participate and declare themselves as either for or against the Third Reich.

 

(One of the privileges of living in a lacklustre (pre-pandemic) liberal democracy, by contrast, is that the individual is free to abstain or remain apathetic.)  

 

Given this state of affairs, many Germans enthusiastically raised their arm and shouted Sieg Heil, whilst others put their hands up and surrendered to the Nazis as if resigning themselves to Fate. A courageous few actively took up arms against the regime. 

 

But saying nothing and doing nothing was not an option; everyone was politicised and mobilised for  the coming catastrophe; no one could simply ask to be excused. 

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this whilst reading Síomón Solomon's new translation of Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944' [1].  

 

In this piece - described by Solomon as a memoir essay, though one wonders to what extent it's a fictionalised account that blurs reality and dream [2] - Hermlin recalls his time on the run in southwest-central France in early 1944, when resistance to the German occupation was at its height and hardly a day went by "without explosions, attacks, massacres" [3]. 

 

Warned by comrades that his situation was compromised and that the authorities were closing in on him, he agrees to be taken to a new (and safer) location - a solitary farmhouse in the middle of he knew not where:

 

"A farmer, still young, received us in a friendly manner [...] He was helping the Resistance with his wife and two adolescent children. But I would need to be aware, he explained to me in a whisper, that there was someone dangerous to me living on the farm, namely his old mother, who was a fanatical supporter of Pétain and would turn me over to the Germans in an instant should she discover my presence. If I kept quiet, I would be tolerably safe from her. [...] The farmer escorted me into the barn. I clambered up into the hayloft, which was to be my eyrie for some time." [4] 

   

Although the long days hiding in the hayloft could be monotonous, at least there was plenty of time for reflection and reading his volume of Hölderlin, about whom he decides to write an essay. But then, one day, an incident occurs that could have easily ended in a terrible and tragic manner ...

 

"It was around lunchtime when, at an unaccustomed hour, the door squeaked, and unknown footsteps and a reluctant muttering were heard. I guessed that the ominous old woman had entered the barn, and, when the ladder began to creak, I realised she was heading for the hayloft. [...] I pulled the hay silently over me, breathing as lightly as possible. In the same moment, I felt a strange cold fury. I knew that, in the instant of discovery, I would not hesitate to kill that nameless old woman, lightning quick and without a sound. At that moment, she was standing about three metres away from me; I had pulled myself back deep into the hay but could see her with one eye. A dangling piece of straw obscured my view, but for a few blurred seconds I beheld my potential victim, a haggard crone in a black dress, whom I had never seen before, would never see again. At that moment, she gave up her search and climbed, grunting, back down the ladder. I lay with my body over Hölderlin's verses, having not had to become a murderer." [5] 

  

Whether this actually happened or it's a homocidal fantasy, I don't know. But the point remains the same: fascism makes killers of us all - or, at the very least, it obliges us to recognise that we all have the potential to commit terrible deeds when forced to do so. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 83-88. The original German text can be found in the Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 23, (1982/83), pp. 172-77.

   

[2] It's no secret that Hermlin reimagined the facts of his own life. He was certainly creative with the truth, shall we say, when it came to his experiences during the War; portraying himself as an anti-fascist hero who fought with the Resistance in France and the Republicans in Spain. His tendency to dissolve the genre distinction between life and literature is best exemplified in Abendlicht (1979). 

      Solomon addresses this issue and provides some useful references to other critics who have been troubled (or amused) by Hermlin's tendency to project subjective experience into false historical context and tell true lies in part (ii) of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. Unsurprisingly, since Solomon is himself a poet, he concludes sympathetically: 

"The hyperreal horror of the German menace and the continuous terror by which its paranoiac war machine infected the spirits of those it harassed and hunted down can hardly be underestimated, moreover, for the chaos it formented in curdling the contours of actuality, fantasy and memory. At the same time, poets are beings predisposed by definition to exercises of poetic licence. In the political interstices of Hermlin's own Vergangenheitsbewältigung, his reconciliation with his past, if he retrospectively massaged his own myth, he was surely in some measure just being himself." [21]

 

One work that Solomon doesn't refer us to, but which is certainly relevant to this discussion, is David Bathrick's 'Rereading Stephan Hermlin: Residues of Difference in the Post-Wall Public Sphere', in What Remains? East German Culture and the Postwar Public, ed. Marc Silberman, (American Institute for Contemporary German Studies / The John Hopkins University, 1997), pp. 90-100. To read as a pdf online, visit: https://www.aicgs.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/silberman.pdf

    

[3] Síomón Solomon, 'Hölderlin 1944', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 85.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 86.

 

[5] Ibid., pp. 87-88.

 

 

For a related post to this one - on Síomón Solomon's fantasia of traslation in Hölderlin's Poltergeists - click here.