German Lessons
Learning a new language in old age is said to be good for the brain and the memory, so in my mid-’70s I took up German. I didn’t want to learn tourist or business German, I wanted to read poetry. I find it easier to remember poetry than prose, and could still recall odd snatches of Goethe that had come my way when doing an O-Level way back in the fifties. Maybe I could add some Rilke or some Hölderlin to my memory bank? I’d long wanted to read them. About thirty years ago, I found myself at dinner sitting next to a cultural attaché from the Goethe-Institut and talking to him about this very vague wish. I was just making polite conversation, but a day or two later in the post a handsome bilingual volume of Michael Hamburger’s translations of Hölderlin arrived. It’s the Routledge and Kegan Paul edition, Poems and Fragments, dated 1966, bound in dark blue and maroon leather, with copper foil lettering. I was touched and impressed by this thoughtfulness, and occasionally, in my then very busy life, I would open the volume, which I kept by my bed, and read a few lines. There was one fragment that enchanted me, four lines that I would read again and again and learned almost by heart:
Die Linien des Lebens sind verschieden,
Wie Wege sind, und wie der Berge Grenzen.
Was hier wir sind, kann dort ein Gott ergänzen
Mit Harmonien und ewigen Lohn und Frieden.The lines of life are various; they diverge and cease Like footpaths and the mountains’ utmost What here we are, elsewhere a God amends With harmonies, eternal recompense and peace.
