Long before I got interested in music, I read everything I could get my hands on. It seems that from the age of five I devoured books indiscriminately to such an extent that Karl May, Sartre, Alexander Dimas and Kafka were good friends on my shelf. My heroes, however, were not called Ćopić or Tolstoy, Šantić or Popa. Rather, it will be that they played the role of small, household saints who helped me to escape from the meager world of my childhood to parallel, seemingly more colorful worlds.
Judges
Wysocki, Dylan, Cohen, Morrison and Tom Waits each spun poetry on turntables in their own way. Only when I realized that I write better than I play the guitar, I allowed myself to have a personal hero, who came from the very heart of world poetry. I remember, it was summer, high school holidays, outside you could hear the murmur of children playing around with a ball. Zunzara fought to the death with the curtain. I read the following lines:
Just give me one summer, you mighty ones! And one autumn, let my song ripen, so that my willing heart, full of sweet games, then dies. The soul, to which in life its divine right does not belong, does not rest even down there in Orcus; But if I succeed in that sacred thing in my heart, the song, You are welcome, then, silence in the world of shadows! I am satisfied and if my strings do not send me down, I have lived once, like the gods, no more.
The song, in another translation, was called "Suđajama", I would call it "Parkama", but more on that later. And the poet was Friedrich Helderlin.
Purple Mist and Scarce Age
My emotional reaction was comparable to listening to Hendrix for the first time Purple mists (Purple haze). That confused me. Probably, there were not many high school students who were captivated by Hendrix's riffs and who would react in a similar way to the poetry of the German poet who lived at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. I've found that good lyrics are equal to tripe - they hit you off guard like a type of weed called "purple mist". Thus began my association with translations of Helderlin's lyrics.
When I stumbled into literary and philosophical circles during my student days in Sarajevo, Helderlin - the more I learned and read - seemed even more extravagant. And that was appreciated.
Helderlin loved the ancient Greek heritage. In Tübingen he lived with Hegel and Schelling, people who would intellectually mark the epoch. He put poetry on a pedestal as a royal discipline of the mind and heart. He greeted Napoleon wholeheartedly. From 1805, he was allegedly imprisoned in a mental hospital with a clouded consciousness. He then spent several decades in a small room in the town tower of Tübingen. In spite of that, or precisely because of that, he radiated the energy I needed both in his lyrics and in his life: Creative freedom or nothing! Poetry or nothing! "But if I succeed in that sacred thing in my heart, the song, / You are welcome, then, silence in the world of shadows!" Helderlin was what we, budding and naive, thought we would become in a rather short time - absolute poets. Few of us understood that bitter question from his elegy Bread and wine: Why poets in times of scarcity? But that's not what a rock poet asks.
Heidegger and Hasche
During my last year in Sarajevo, I had long conversations with my roommate Mensa about Martin Heidegger, the famous German philosopher who could not resist the fascination with Nazism. Menso wrote his thesis on Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche. And our topic, besides, was Heidegger's interpretation of Helderlin. I also read all Mensa's books, although I did not study philosophy.
According to Heidegger's lecture in Rome in 1936, Helderlin had several key statements: poetry is "the most innocent of all professions." And man was given "the most dangerous of all goods - language" which serves to leave "testimony of what he, man, is". Helderlin is convinced that "what lasts is established by poets". According to Helderlin, man is a special being: "Full of merit, yet poetically Man dwells on this earth." And so it is "Since we've been talking / And we can hear each other".
If we also add Heidegger's statement that Helderlin is a "poet of poets" and that poets are "watchmen of the battle", then it is clear that the young men who were just trying out their first publications must have felt cosmically important, because while learning the craft of poetry, they already taught something as incomprehensible and important as "being" for priests. Yes, the simple world would say that even a dog had no reason to bite us, but we were on the trail of a cosmic mission.
Long nights in a student house on a hillside above Sarajevo were spent in conversations like this. When we felt a bowel movement, we would light one blue "Morava" each. Then Menso would take out Podravkin hash and some flatbread from somewhere. Warmed on the stove, the can was a gourmet reward for our metaphysical hunger. We lived poetically on the ground, dipping flatbread into chopped beef. We were talking and could hear each other.
Helderlin in German
When I arrived in Germany in 1992, I no longer had anyone to talk to about the German poet saint Helderlin. The fact that I didn't speak a word of German probably contributed to this. Okay, not really a word. Somewhere in the thick books, which were destined for the pyre in Bosnia, I found verses in German in the XNUMXs:
April und Mai und Junius sind ferne, / Ich bin nichts mehr, ich lebe nicht mehr gerne!
April and May and June are far away / I'm nothing anymore, I don't live happily anymore!
I asked German students of Slavic Studies in a beer garden in Regensburg if they knew whose verses these were. You could see amazement in their eyes - someone who had memorized German suddenly uttered two verses in their native language with such pathos that they began to blink rapidly. When I said it was Helderlin, they just waved their hands. That was their ancient grammar school reading.
It was only much later - I was already translating literary texts from German - that I tackled Friedrich Helderlin's favorite poems. In the excellent translations of Branimir Živojinović or Mija Pavlović, I found things that disturbed me. The translations that made me love Helderlin were for a long time more musical than the original. But in 25 German years, the relationship was reversed at one point. My favorite song "Suđaje" could no longer be called that even in Serbian. The poet dedicated it to the "Parkes", and the Parkes were ancient Roman goddesses who foretold human destiny. Judges are fairies who do the same in the Slavic nations. Helderlin did not look for Germanic deities, he did not even reach for them mojrama, the ancient Greek judges, had already chosen parkas. Therefore, its title in German does not sound "folk" as in our translation, but as an association of an educated connoisseur of ancient heritage. Then I realized that I loved the Serbian Helderlin, and that I would have to read the German one.
Bonaparte and Doctor Guillotine
Helderlin's enthusiasm for Napoleon, who smashed a lot of crowned heads across Europe to finally put a crown on his own Corsican skull, was something I could understand. The French Revolution was both terrible and glorious at the same time, like any violent upheaval driven by noble ideas.
Helderlin first saw only the magnificent in Napoleon. In the song Bonaparte he says that poets are sacred vessels in which the wine of life, the spirit of heroes, is stored. But that is not true of Napoleon. "He cannot live and remain in the song / he lives and remains in the world". The world is Napoleon's vessel.
On Helderlin's twenty-second birthday, March 20, 1792, the French revolutionary parliament introduced the guillotine - a mechanical blade for beheading - as the only legal method of execution at the suggestion of physician Joseph Guillotin. Admittedly, the previous practice in Europe was barbaric - with a metal wheel, the convict's arms and legs and part of the torso would be crushed, and then his broken limbs were entangled in the wheel. The unfortunate would die for a long time on a publicly erected wheel. From that point of view, the guillotine represented civilizational progress. It should be mentioned that the first guillotine was constructed by the piano builder Tobias Schmidt - this shows us how close beauty and horror are in the human world. The charms of progress were experienced by thousands of people during the revolution, including revolutionary leaders. The last convict was beheaded in France in 1977.
A carpenter recognizes a genius
At that time, the poet Helderlin was preoccupied with other things - his love for Suzet Gontard, the wife of a banker in Frankfurt, his Diotima from his later poems.
A failed lover, an unsuspecting revolutionary, an unrecognized genius, he was born in the town of Laufen on the Neckar River, and ended his life a hundred kilometers upstream to the south, in Tübingen.
His most valuable readers were neither Goethe nor Schiller who (reservedly) supported him. His most important reader was the carpenter from Tübingen, Ernst Zimmer, who read his lyrical novel in time Hyperion to take Helderlin under his guardianship in 1807, after an unsuccessful forced psychiatric treatment that lasted 231 days. Helderlin will stay in that family for 36 years, cared for until the end of his life.
Some say that he deliberately feigned madness to drive away the curious who came to Tübingen to see the "mad poet". Others say that Friedrich Helderlin was not an actor but an incredibly gifted schizophrenic. However, the 20th century, the one from which I also come, recognized in him one of the world's greatest poetic icons. Helderlin lived once, like the gods, no more.
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