About the birth of Jesus

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There is a sonnet about the birth of Jesus first printed in 1643 by Andreas Gryphius . The American Germanist Blake Lee Spahr has judged that it is perhaps Gryphius' greatest religious sonnet, both in its form and in its complex imagery, Jörg Baur , it belongs "in the first row of poems in our language".

Origin and tradition

1637 was published in Polish Lissa Gryphius' first sonnet band 31 Lissa sonnets , the latest developed during his school days at the Academic Gymnasium Danzig . Gryphius left Danzig in 1636, spent about one and a half years as a private tutor on the estate of the lawyer and writer Georg Schönborner near Freystadt, and after his death in 1637 accompanied two of his sons to the University of Leiden . At Schönborner and in Leiden he rearranged 29 of the 31 Lissa sonnets, revised them heavily, added 21 new ones, including “About the Birth of Jesus”, and left the collection of 50 sonnets in 1643 in Leiden under the title “ANDREAE GRYPHII SONNETE. The first book. ”Print. During his lifetime, further, little-changed editions appeared in 1650, 1657 and 1663. The 1643 edition was reprinted in 1963 in a complete edition of the German-language works for which Marian Szyrocki and Hugh Powell were responsible. This is where the following text comes from.

text

About the birth of Jesus.

NIGHT more the bright night! night lights than the day /
night brighter than the sun / in which the light is born /
the god / the light / in light living / ihmb receive:
O night / who may defy all nights and days.

O joyful night / in which oh and lament /
And five-starred and what the world conspired to
do, and fear and fear and horror was lost.
The sky is breaking! but no longer felt a clap of thunder.

The time and nights Schuff is arriving tonight!
And had the right of time and meat to itself!
And our flesh and time is bequeathed to eternity.

The sad night, the black night of the sins
The grave's darkness / must disappear through the night.
Night lights than day; night more the light night!

interpretation

shape

The poem is in the 1624 by Martin Opitz in his book by the German Poeterey recommended for sonnets meter of Alexandrian written with the recommended also by Opitz rhyme scheme "abba abba" for the quartets and "ccd eed" for the trios . The verses with the “a” and “d” rhymes are twelve syllable, therefore indented according to the Szyrocki edition, the rhymes are masculine , the verses with the “b”, “c” and “e” rhymes are thirteen syllable who have favourited rhymes feminine . Gryphius designed this apparently rigid shape in a varied way by changing incisions and accents. If, for example, verse 1 and verse 3 in the first stanza are sharply structured by the caesura after the sixth syllable, then the incisions made visible by the baroque virgel lie in verses 3 and 4 after the second syllable, and the caesura is covered: " A moving and at the same time a formed and strict language. "

Metaphor and paradox

Any reader from Gryphius' as well as today will notice that the poem omits all narrative and episodic elements of the event, the biblical - Bethlehem, the diapers, the manger ( Lk 2,1-7  EU ), the Annunciation to the Shepherds ( Lk 2.8–20  EU ) - just like the later decorations of ox, donkey and “lovely boy with curly hair”. Gryphius also knew how to design the narrative side as a sonnet, for example - handed down in the estate -

About the birth of Christ in 1657.
Child three times sweet child / in what distressed needs
Breaks your birth day! The angel's power
Cheer your manger and sing in the quiet night /
The shepherds praise you with brightly tuned flutes.

With the elimination of everything human-legendary, the sonnet printed in 1643 is completely dominated by the contrast between light and night and its salvation-historical interpretation as the light of Christ and the darkness of the sinful, unredeemed world. This metaphor is used in many biblical passages , for example in John : “And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not grasped it.” ( Joh 1,5  EU ) “For the judgment is like this: The light came in the world and people loved darkness more than light; for their deeds were evil. Anyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light so that his deeds are not exposed ”( Jn 3:19  EU ). With this symbolic use, however, the paradox arises that the night was also the time of day in which Jesus was born. "This gives the opportunity to set" night "(= unredeemed world) against" night "(= arrival of the Redeemer) in the poem, and this possibility is now played through in a formally virtuoso manner." "Fourteen verses long, in ever newer, Ever bolder variation of the basic axiom 'night lighter than day', a struggle between night and nights, sun-night and darkness, day-night and darkness of the grave, lamentation and sin staged - staged as versified Show and demonstration piece that plays on the level of thought. ”In the Baroque era, wordplay and profundity are not mutually exclusive .

The four stanzas

The “night” that the poem calls out in praise is physically and temporally the night of Jesus' birth, but in terms of salvation history it is the darkness of the sinful, unredeemed world. The addition of the adjective "light", "light night", exaggerated by the comparatives "lighter", "brighter" and "more than", brings the ambiguity to the shortest possible version. The play on words "light night" means the "miracle of all miracles", that the dark night of need and fear is "disempowered in the light night of the birth of Jesus". Jesus is the light, "The God / who light / in light living / receiving him". “Him” could still be used reflexively in the 17th century - “chosen”. “God, who is essentially light and living in light, has light, that is, a piece of himself, to be born in the world this night.” The night of Jesus' birth, says the fourth line, is more important than any other day and nights of world history.

In the second stanza the night of evil is marked with the rhythmically pushing forward enumeration “oh and lament / and five-starred and what conspired to the world / and fear and bright fear and horror” - “oh and lament and darkness and what about them World swears, only thinks earthly, and fear and fear of hell and horror ”. But the threatening list is clasped by the invocation “O joyful night” and the poetic image “The sky breaks! but feel no more clap of thunder ”- the Savior comes as light from heaven, as lightning, which is not followed by thunder. “In the flash of lightning of his arrival, the world suddenly stands in the light of redemption. The sky breaks silently, without clap of thunder, and shows an earth without suffering, flooded with light. "

The first trio precisely formulates the doctrine of the essential equality of God the Father and God Son . “He times and nights created”, namely God the Father, “has arrived this night”, namely God son: in a single verse “the mystical identity is linguistically symbolized”. God has the law of temporality, has taken upon himself flesh that is subject to pain and death and for this “bequeathed our flesh and time to the everlasting”, acquired us the transfiguration in the heavenly Jerusalem . In his interpretation , Erich Trunz gives depth to the play on words “meat and time” versus “time and meat”, “accept” versus “bequeath” : “God no longer God, subject to earthly conditionality; man no longer man, raised to the freedom of eternity. This is precisely where the religious event lies. The formulation expresses it precisely through its pointed and antitheticals: the enigmatic, what goes beyond earthly law, the merging of the spheres. "

The second trio assigns misery, sin and death to the night. However, their negation immediately follows through the night of Jesus' birth. “Sins” - “disappear” is the triumphant rhyme. The last verse repeats the first with a rearrangement of the half-verses. "So at the end there is again the praising, astonished, overwhelming call with the contradictio in adiecto , which is a sign that something is being targeted that is impossible in the human realm."

The whole

Trunz writes that the poem is a solemn, praising expression of what happened in the history of salvation. Behind the pictorial words and rhetorical expressions there is a dogmatically precise content. This “high” content corresponds to a “high” form. The “ordo” of the art form symbolizes the “ordo” of the world. Mauser adds that the stylistic and formal effort serves no less to convey the truth than the argument made. What fits into a “ingenious” version was true for the baroque man. For him, the order of form corresponded to the order of things.

“If anywhere,” says Walter Jens , “then Gryphius has reached a limit with his poem about the birth of Jesus, published in 1643, in which image (sun, clap of thunder, bursting sky, darkness of the grave) and thought are related and a power of abstraction that does not shy away from any risk (fifteen times 'night' in fourteen verses!), achieves something that hardly any writer has succeeded to date. "

Baur describes the poem as a high point in the productive individual appropriation of Lutheran Christology . The eternal deity of the Son, his entrance into humanity, the “wonderful change” in the communicatio idiomatum condense into a classical statement in the first trio.

However, according to Mauser, the aspect of salvation history is not the only meaningful component. The real event, the birth of Christ, is interpreted based on the doctrine of the fourfold sense of the word . In addition to the allegorical exaggeration of the history of salvation, there is a statement directed at the life of the individual: The night of Jesus' birth is for him a "joyful night" that opens the way to salvation for him. Finally, an eschatological dimension becomes visible: "The times and nights created" has "bequeathed our flesh and times to the world". The last verse summarizes the whole spectrum of possible interpretations and shows that they are all contained in the night-light metaphor. "There are only a few poems in the 17th century in which sense and form are so closely functionally interrelated as in this one."

literature

References and comments

  1. ↑ † 2006. Obituary from the University of California, Berkeley
  2. ^ Blake Lee Spahr: Andreas Gryphius: A Modern Perspective. Camden House 1993. ISBN 1-879751-65-8 , p. 42.
  3. ↑ Baur 1993. p. 190.
  4. ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. 30.
  5. ↑ The version of 1658 V about the birth of Jesus, accessible via Wikisource . is probably the title edition of the 1657 edition that Szyrocki designated as D 'on p. XVI in 1963.
  6. ↑ Szyrocki 1959, p: 91.
  7. ↑ Trunz 1962, p. 134.
  8. ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. 95.
  9. ↑ Trunz 1962, p. 137.
  10. ↑ Jens 1985, p. 76.
  11. ↑ Kurzke 2007.
  12. ↑ Trunz 1962, p. 134.
  13. ↑ Kurzke 2007.
  14. ↑ Trunz 1962, p. 135.
  15. ↑ Trunz 1962, p. 135.
  16. ↑ Trunz 1962, p. 136.
  17. ↑ Mauser 1976, p. 81.
  18. ↑ Jens 1985, p. 77.
  19. ↑ Born 1993, p. 190.
  20. ↑ Mauser 1976, p. 80.