To the Parzen (Hölderlin)
To the Parzen is the title of an ode by Friedrich Hölderlin that was written during his time in Frankfurt am Main . Edited by Christian Ludwig Neuffer , it appeared along with 13 other short poems in the paperback for women from Education to the year 1799 .
Hölderlin conjures up the three goddesses of fate, Klotho , Lachesis and Atropos, and asks them to give him the time necessary to complete his poetry.
The three- verse work has Alkaic meter and belongs to the short codes that Hölderlin wrote from January 1796 to the summer of 1798 in Frankfurt. They are concise and epigrammatic works that document his mastery in this form.
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The three stanzas are:
Allow only one summer, you mighty ones!
And an autumn to ripe singing
That willing my heart, from the sweet
Games saturated, then I die.
The soul who is divinely right in life
It was not, it does not rest down in the orcus either;
But once the holy thing is to me
I love the poem, succeeded
Welcome then, O silence of the shadow world!
I am satisfied, even if my string playing
Not led me down; once
I live like gods, and nothing more is needed.
Background and details
Odendichtung can be found in all of Hölderlin's creative phases and, as far as the use of ancient stanzas is concerned, is considered the high point of this genre in German-speaking countries. After the publication of numerous works from 1799, contemporaries became increasingly aware of him.
After an initial phase between 1786 and 1789 in Maulbronn and Tübingen , during which there was no publication, Hölderlin dealt with this genre again during his time in Frankfurt and wrote mainly epigrammatic shorts with only two or three stanzas. In this way he set himself apart from the immediately preceding phase of the rhymed hymns and disciplined himself to concise diction and a perfectly fitting formulation.
Recommendations from influential poets also influenced this development. Goethe advised him “to make little poems and to choose a humanly interesting subject for each one”, while Friedrich Schiller , who had also written a poem to the Parzen , suggested in a letter of November 24, 1796 that “sobriety in the enthusiasm “not to lose and to avoid verbosity.
The title and content of the Frankfurter Ode Die Shorten reveal that the brevity of the odes is quite programmatic . Holderlin later expanded some of the short codes. So he expanded the two- stanza poem An die Deutschen into a twelve-stanza work.
Emergence
Hölderlin sent the printing templates for 18 short poems (from this ode to sunset ) to Neuffer in June and August 1798. Neuffer did not publish four of the works he himself called "little poems" ( Voice of the People, People Applause , The Sanctimonious Poets and Sunset ) only a year later.
The publication of the Kurzoden led to an initial recognition by a major critic. So wrote August Wilhelm Schlegel in an issue of Jenaischen general literature newspaper that one could other contents of the almanac "almost exclusively on contributions from Hölderlin limit" are "the full spirit and soul." The poems An die Parzen and An die Deutschen suggested “that the author is carrying a poem of a larger size with him”, an undertaking for which he “sincerely wishes every external favor”.
In a letter to his mother in March 1799, Holderlin mentioned Schlegel's words, which alluded to another work he was currently working on. This is likely to have been the fragment The Death of Empedocles .
Effect and interpretation
In Theodor Fontane 's first novel Before the Storm , the Ode to Parzen has a leitmotif and is linked to important themes and courses of action, to love, poetry and patriotism. As Rolf Zuberbühler explains in Fontane and Hölderlin , the ode provides Fontane's first work with the basic idea: What counts is not a long, but a fulfilled life in the service of an idea.
The poem was set to music by Hermann Reutter as part of his Drei Gesänge after poems by Friedrich Hölderlin op. 56.
For Marcel Reich-Ranicki , the work is one of the miracles in the German language. The pathos cannot be outdone, but is neither loud nor intrusive, feeling and thoughts form a perfect unit, the harmony in sound and image is realized. Like many of Hölderlin's works, the ode is a prayer with an eschatological basic mood. Like his thoughts on love, his idea of the poet is also based on “awareness of the ultimate things.” According to Reich-Ranicki, those who have succeeded in singing can come to terms with their transience and die quietly. The nonexistence - the silence of the shadow world - is welcome. Although the art in Orcus does not exist or is noticeable, the poet in this world will be satisfied one more time because he once lived like the gods. Whoever succeeds in the holy, the perfect poem, is like a god. Only art, to which the soul owes its divine existence, can make earthly existence bearable.
Arno Schmidt quotes from the ode at the end of The Scholarly Republic - presumably after the edition of Will Vespers, which was adjusted by a foreword in 1945 : "Once I live like gods, and that's all I need", when the protagonist Winer, still appalled by the human experiments carried out on the artificial island, returns to his "American" homeland.
literature
- Andreas Thomasberger: Odes, Analysis and Interpretation , in: Hölderlin-Handbuch. Life work effect . Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2002, pp. 309–319, ISBN 3-476-01704-4 , (special edition 2011: ISBN 978-3-476-02402-2 .)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Andreas Thomasberger: Oden, phases of the Odendichtung, in: Hölderlin-Handbuch. Life work effect . Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar, p. 309
- ↑ Friedrich Hölderlin, An die Parzen, in: All poems, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch, Volume 4, Frankfurt 2005, p. 197
- ↑ Commentary in: Friedrich Hölderlin, Complete Poems , Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch, Volume 4, Frankfurt 2005, p. 490
- ↑ Quoted from: Commentary in: Friedrich Hölderlin, Complete Poems , Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch, Volume 4, Frankfurt 2005, p. 490
- ↑ Quotation from: Commentary in: Friedrich Hölderlin, Samples of Poems , Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch, Volume 4, Frankfurt 2005, p. 609
- ↑ Commentary in: Friedrich Hölderlin, Complete Poems, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch, Volume 4, Frankfurt 2005, p. 610
- ↑ Ulrich Gaier, aftermath in literature, in: Hölderlin-Handbuch, Leben Werk, Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2011, p. 481
- ↑ a b Marcel Reich-Ranicki, equal to the gods , in: 1000 German poems and their interpretations, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, From Friedrich von Schiller to Joseph von Eichendorff, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1995, p. 138