To joy (grain version)

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In the early 1790s, the writer Christian Gottfried Körner began to write his own version of Friedrich Schiller's poem An die Freude , which he initially tried to publish in Schiller's magazine Thalia . The background to this were Schiller's and Körner's different views on the poem.

Creation and publication

While Körner ascribed a very fundamental, timeless meaning to the Ode To Joy , Schiller saw it as more personal and of only temporary importance, calling it simply "flawed" and "bad". He expressed this about seven years later in an exchange of letters with Körner:

Joy, on the other hand, is completely flawed according to my current feeling and whether it recommends itself through a certain fire of feeling, it is a bad poem and describes a level of education that I had to leave behind in order to produce something decent. But because it accommodated a faulty taste of the time, it has received the honor of becoming a folk poem, so to speak. Your affection for this poem may be based on the epoch of its creation; but this also gives it the only value it has, and only for us and not for the world nor for poetry.

However, Körner found the idea of ​​the poem to be quite important. He thought that it could be perfected by making minor changes and therefore wrote his own variant, which he sent to Georg Joachim Göschen , with the request that it be published in the Neue Thalia . Göschen refused this, so that in 1793 the fourth and last volume of the Neue Thalia was published without the poem.

text

Körner took over all the text components of his variant of Schiller's model, but rearranged them and selected:

  • The Körner version of the poem takes over the first and fourth stanzas, i.e. verses 1 to 8 and 37 to 44 from Schiller unchanged as stanzas 1 and 2.
  • The third stanza is composed of two fragments from different stanzas in Schiller's original: Verses 49 to 52 and 85 to 88 form the third stanza.
  • Verses 61 to 68, i.e. the sixth stanza of the original, become the fourth stanza in Körner.

Compared to Schiller's original version, the Körner version is significantly shortened. It contains only four eight-verse stanzas, with no four-verse chorus or chorus stanzas in between:

To Joy.

Joy, beautiful spark of gods,
daughter from Elysium,
We enter
your sanctuary , drunk on fire, heavenly ones .
Your spells bind again,
What fashion strictly divides,
All men become brothers,
Where your gentle wing dwells.

Joy is called the strong pen
In eternal nature.
Joy, joy drives the wheels
In the great world clock.
She lures flowers from the sprouts,
suns from the firmament,
she rolls spheres in the rooms that
Seer Rohr does not know.

From the truth of the fire
mirror, she smiles at the researcher.
To the virtue of the steep hill
it guides the sufferer's path.
Solid courage in severe suffering,
help where innocence weeps,
eternity sworn oaths,
truth against friend and foe.

You can't repay gods, it's
nice to be like them.
Sorrow and poverty should report,
rejoice with the happy.
Resentment and vengeance be forgotten,
our mortal enemy be forgiven.
No tear should press him,
no regrets gnaw him.

supporting documents

  1. ↑ http://www.kuehnle-online.de/literatur/schiller/briefe/1800/180010211.htm
  2. ↑ Sangmeister, Lichtenberg-Jahrbuch 1998, p. 383 ff
  3. ↑ Füssel, References to the correspondence with publishers Georg Joachim Göschen 1997
  4. ↑ http://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/diglib/aufkl/neuethalia/neuethalia.htm