Beautiful is a beautiful body that everyone's lips praise
Beautiful is a beautiful body, which all lips praise is a sonnet by Andreas Gryphius . The first version was printed in 1637 under the heading “To a high state Jungfraw” in Gryphius' first collection of sonnets in Lissa , Poland , one of the 31 sonnets from Lissa .
- Print in the edition of 1657
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Origin and tradition
Gryphius wrote the Lissa sonnets from 1634 in Gdansk while attending the academic high school there and then on the estate of his patron Georg Schönborner (1579–1637) near Freystadt in Lower Silesia . Later he kept fine-tuning them. In Gryphius' lifetime, "beautiful is a beautiful body, which all lips praise" were published in four further editions, greatly changed in 1643, little changed compared to 1643 in 1650, 1657 and 1663. Since 1643 the heading has been "To Eugenien". The Lissa version was first reprinted by Victor Manheimer in 1904, then by Marian Szyrocki in 1963, the last edition of 1663, among others by Thomas Borgstedt in 2012. The following texts come from Szyrocki's and Borgstedt's editions.
text
At a high place Jungfraw. (1637)
A well-shaped body is easy to raise /
Even worse / if it comes from noble blood /
And a skillful soul trapped in itself /
Which unanimously strives to strive for
whiteness / for whiteness / so the guideline teaches us equal lives /
The piety shows / so may such an ornament /
By no human tongue are rightly stated:
Is sincerity still given to him /
And humility that is hardly found in high people;
And friendliness that almost disappears with rich and poor;
So may the beautiful world call such beauty
The most beautiful wonder / who desires this to schawn /
Will his wish be made to abundance /
If only he can / O most beautiful / correctly recognize you.
To Eugenia. (1663)
Beautiful is a beautiful body / that all lips praise!
Which comes from not bad tribe and noble blood.
But more beautiful / when the body draws a noble soul
Those who agree can only teach virtue.
More / if wisdom still / to which we often travel
She teaches in the Wigen / more when she leads discipline
And to be holy / who only feel humility /
More / if your chaste spirit does not hesitate for flame and iron.
This I guess proudly defends / that's what this world
Who holds the seat of all beauty for the highest beauty /
And that one can call beauty miracles.
Who wants to see this / will find what he is looking for
And can hardly be found / if he / O Blum de Zucht /
O beautiful / if he / will know something better!
interpretation
The interpretation is based on the 1663 version.
The Eugenia poems
Gryphius addressed numerous poems to fictional people, mostly satirical mocking poems, in the sonnet edition of 1643 for example "An Lucinden", "An Poetum", "An Iolinden". Completely different, namely the character of consistently positive love poems, have the "Eugenia poems". The two earliest sonnets from Lissa are the Sonnets “Beautiful is a beautiful body, which all lips praise” and “ What else do you wonder, you rose of the virgins ”, both of which were first written in 1643 with the fictitious address “An Eugenien”. In the 1643 sonnet edition and in the “Ander Buch” from 1650 two more sonnets of the same title were added, “ As a wanderer, then the cloudy night ” and “ If my soul is in you, my light, how can I live? ". According to Dieter Arendt, including the epigrams , Gryphius had "about ten" Eugenia poems printed. When his son Christian published a posthumous complete edition in 1698, it contained seven further Eugenien sonnets from the estate.
Victor Manheimer first suggested that the “Eugenie” of the poems could have been Schönborner's daughter Elisabeth: “One would like to think of the young Countess Schönborn, who decorated him [...] with the laurel wreath.” Schönborner had Gryphius on November 30, 1937 crowned poeta laureatus , and fourteen-year-old Elisabeth had put the laurel wreath on him. Schönborner died on December 23, 1637. Gryphius accompanied his two sons to the University of Leiden in May 1638 , then went on a long study and educational trip and did not return to his Silesian homeland until 1647. Here he learned that Elisabeth had married a Silesian nobleman on May 25, 1647. Gryphus himself married Rosina Deutschländer, the daughter of a wealthy woman from Fraustadt , in January 1649 .
Victor Manheimer, Marian Szyrocki and Dieter Arendt tried to find traces of this story in the poems. In particular, Arendt suspected that Gryphius had deliberately withheld the seven estate sonnets because they were not concealed; together with the “still unprocessed and undisguised Lissa Eugenia sonnets”, they reflected experiences relatively openly. The departure for Leiden and the distant pain speak from the legacy verses
SO far / my light / from you / so far from you torn /
I share the dreary time in pain and grief /
And wish every moment that the heavens put an end to me
Allow yourself to greet you soon full of pleasure and unharmed.
In the later revisions, Gryphius fitted the Eugenia poems more and more decisively into the traditional and contemporary model of erotic poetry, Petrarkism .
The equation of Eugenie with Elisabeth Schönborner is widely accepted in research, a close parallelization with Gryphius' biography is viewed with skepticism. Fritz Cohen approvingly quotes René Wellek's remark that baroque images and catachheses are often not expressions of what has been experienced, but rather "decorative over-elaborations of a highly conscious, skeptical craftsman, the pilings-up of calculated surprises" - skeptical artist, accumulations of well-planned surprises ”. According to Wolfram Mauser , the biographical element for the poems is largely irrelevant. “Whoever 'Eugenie' and 'Lucinde' were, they appear in the poem as bearers of values - beauty and virtue - that were accorded great importance. Beauty becomes the correlate of ethical preference and vice versa. ”However, Arendt's cautious summary holds true:“ The sonnets, however they appear in the school tradition, are, as one can hardly deny, evidence of an inner life; Of course, the personal style merges with the epoch style and one will not be able to speak of an experiential and expressive poetry, but at a time when the personal poems reflecting one's own inner self were less valid than the sonnets in the poetic convention, it is astonishing enough that they even came about. "
shape
Like most of Gryphius' sonnets, both versions are written in Alexandrians . The rhyme scheme is “abba abba” for the quartets and “ccd eed” for the trios . The verses with the “a” and “d” rhymes are thirteen syllables, the rhymes are feminine , the verses with the “b”, “c” and “e” rhymes are twelve syllable, therefore here according to the editions of Szyrocki and Borgstedt indented, the rhymes masculine .
Praise of beauty
Although belonging to the “core of love poetry” by Andreas Gryphius, “beautiful is a beautiful body that all lips praise” is not a typical love poem. The word “love” does not appear in either version. With the following “What else are you wondering, you rose of the virgins”, it forms its own small group of beauty praise within the Lissa sonnets . The 1643 title already indicates this. It is firstly the fictional name of a lady and secondly the translation of the title of the Lissa version in the sense of “noble born, noble”. Thirdly, however, according to Günther Weydt, whose interpretation had a formative effect, the Greek εὐγενής ( eugenḗs ) has the additional meaning “of a high-minded, noble-minded character”. The sonnet thus becomes a poem about “Eugenes-sein”, which is now played through through all layers of meanings and references.
The aspects of "being Eugenes" range from a "beautiful body" (verse 1), descent from "not bad stock and noble blood" (verse 2), to the ethical norm of "virtue" (verse 3–4) to the cardinal virtues "whiteness", sapientia (verse 5), and "discipline", temperantia (verse 6), and finally the Christian virtues of "humility", humilitas (verse 7) and courage, willingness to suffer, faithfulness, fortitudo , Constantia , who does not shrink back from martyrdom (verse 8): "More / if her chaste spirit does not hesitate for flame and iron". “All these named meanings and references to this one basic word do not simply follow one another in a paratactically ordered, planar sequence [...], but outbid and deepen according to the principle of increasing from determination to determination, without a point of rest, driving up to that limit , which separates quartets and trios from one another. ”At this border , the intensification forced by comparatives -“ nicer ”,“ Vilmehr ”,“ more wen ”,“ Mehr / wen ”- breaks off sharply, blurring into the inconspicuous parallelism “ I guess that [...] that is what this world ”,“ and then, in the last two verses of the first trio, in a formula that draws the sum, the ultimate possible surpassing through an increase in the superlative : 'all beauty seat', 'highest beauty', yes, that Beauty miracle '”. "Beautiful - beautiful - most beautiful" sums up Andreas Solbach.
The second trio surprisingly catches the somewhat abstract praise formula of the first trio and translates it into the punch line , argutia of the sonnet. Up to verses 12 and 13, the subject of "eugenity" is dealt with -
Who wants to see this / will find what he is looking for
and can hardly be found / if he / O flower of breeding /
to be applied to a lady in the last verse, which is obvious from the title, the fictional Eugenie:
O beautiful / if he / will know something better!
“'The beauty miracle' is thus presented in Eugenie as actual reality.” The punch line is artfully staged rhetorically: by apostrophizing the lady “O Blum” - “O most beautiful” - “you”; through the two subordinate clauses “if he” placed chiastically to the axis of the beginning of verse 14 ; and by placing the direct address “you” in the middle of the verse, immediately before the caesura .
Pedagogy and self-expression
In praise of the connection between physical and mental beauty, the Kalokagathie , the sonnet according to Solbach corresponds to the Petrarkist love poetry. However, distance from the body is alien to Petrarkism. There is no beauty theme of the body parts, as it is declined by Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau in his sonnet "Description of Perfect Beauty":
A hair that speaks so boldly in spite of Berenice
a mouth that carries roses and pearls in itself,
a tip that carries such a poison from a thousand hearts,
Two breasts where ruby breaks through alabaster […].
Gryphius' poem does not want to praise an individual addressee, but rather to draft an ideal image that the addressee should be similar to. At the top of a hierarchy of love is something like a martyrdom, specifically the willingness to stand up for the Lutheran creed persecuted in Habsburg Silesia . “Gryphius drafts a Christian-humanistic educational goal for a young aristocrat by making her nobility the starting point and the end goal. Eugenie is not only a cipher for Elisabeth Schönborner, but at the same time and equally for the objects of an educational program specifically geared towards the nobility, which […] aims at virtue and denominational constantia as the most important personality trait. ”Gryphius infused religious-denominational motifs and overforms into a love poem so the original theme of eros, beauty and desire.
In addition to this pedagogical intention, after Solbach comes a self-portrayal of the author. “For it formulates the ideal, it guides it, and it also decrees that beauty is only embodied in this ideal. [...] With this he shows his abilities and his dignitas as an author. ”By prescribing an educational goal for the nobility, he also gives the bourgeois protagonist the opportunity to acquire the“ nobility of spirit ”and the right attitude and thus equality in ideological terms to claim. The formula of poeta as amator , of the poet as lover, known from the Latin love affair , de-eroticizes Gryphius to poeta as dux , poets as leaders in secular and religious questions.
The Lissa version
The Germanists differ in their appreciation of this or that version of Gryphius' poems. According to Szyrocki, the sonnets gained smoothness during the revisions, but often lost “weight, naturalness”. Weydt, on the other hand, judges that Gryphius' later editorial teams were often highly confident new creations and mostly "led to more convincing performances". According to Weydt and Cohen, “beautiful is a beautiful body, which all lips praise” has to respect the boundary between the octets and the thirds, in the Lissa version by the position in the middle of the movement
Is sincerity still given to him /
And humility / which is hardly found in high people
blurred, the structure tightened. In the 1637 version, sober statements are strung together without tension, whereby the repetition of parts of the sentence - “striving for whiteness / whiteness / so vns teaches” verses 4 and 5) - although clarifying the understanding, is not poetically compelling. In the replacement of 1637 “And a skillful soul enclosed in self” by 1663 “But more beautiful / if the body draws a 'noble soul”, “a' noble soul” is more elegant than “a skillful soul”, and the foreign word “enclosed” is eliminated according to the taste of the times. Verse 8 of the 1663 version with its price of chastity and faithfulness - "More / if your chaste spirit does not hesitate for flame and iron" - is a real high point. "Certainly nothing in the Lissa edition is equal to it in impact." - "Nothing in the Lissa edition is as impressive."
In the second trio of the Lissa version, Cohen finds a punchline that differs from the 1663 version. In 1663 "the miracle of beauty" (verse 11) is presented in Eugenie as an actual reality (see above). Even in 1637, so Cohen, the sentence lay
[...] who desires this to shawn /
Will his desires be made to abundance /
at first it seems close that the ideal, “the most beautiful miracle work” (verse 12), really exists. "This moment of optimistic anticipation is however destroyed, swiftly and efficiently by another shift in mode to the provisional 'If he can only recognize you most beautifully'." - "This moment of optimistic expectation is quickly and effectively destroyed by the The conditional sentence 'If he can only / O most beautiful / rightly recognize you'. ”In the end, doubts about the accessibility of the“ most beautiful ”dominate.
literature
- Dieter Arendt: Andreas Gryphius' Eugenien-Gedichte . In: Journal for German Philology . tape 87 , no. 2 , 1986, p. 161-179 .
- Ralf Georg Bogner: Life. In: Nicola Kaminski, Robert Schütze (ed.): Gryphius manual. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-022943-1 , pp. 1–18.
- Thomas Borgstedt: Topic of the sonnet. Generic theory and history. Max Niemeyer Verlag , Tübingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-484-36638-1 .
- Thomas Borgstedt (Ed.): Andreas Gryphius. Poems. Reclam-Verlag , Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-018561-2 .
- Fritz Cohen: Two early sonnets of Andreas Gryphius: a study of their original and revised forms . In: German Life & Letters . tape 25 , no. 2 , 1972, ISSN 0016-8777 , p. 115-126 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1468-0483.1972.tb00788.x .
- Victor Manheimer: The poetry of Andreas Gryphius. Studies and materials. Weidman Verlag, Berlin 1904. limited preview in Google book search
- Wolfram Mauser: Poetry, Religion and Society in the 17th Century. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-7705-1191-3 .
- Andreas Solbach: Gryphius and love. The poeta as amator and dux in the Eugenia sonnets. In: Marie-Thérèse Mourey (ed.): La Poésie d'Andreas Gryphius. Center d'études germaniques interculturelles de Lorraine, Nancy 2012, pp. 35–46.
- Marian Szyrocki: The young Gryphius. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1959.
- Marian Szyrocki (Ed.): Andreas Gryphius. Sonnets. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1963.
- Günther Weydt: Baroque sonnet art. On the problem of reworking at Andreas Gryphius. In: Yearbook of the German Schiller Society. 9, 1965, pp. 1-32.
References and comments
- ↑ The picture comes from a 1658 title edition of the 1657 edition.
- ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. 16.
- ↑ Borgstedt 2012, p. 20.
- ↑ Borgstedt 2016, p. 109.
- ↑ Szyrocki 1963, pp. 47-50.
- ↑ Szyrocki 1963, pp. 44-45.
- ↑ Dieter Arendt (1922–2015) was Professor of German Literature at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen . Internet source.
- ↑ a b Arendt 1968, p. 168.
- ↑ Szyrocki 1963, pp. 126-130.
- ^ Victor Manheimer: Die Lyrik des Andreas Gryphius, studies and materials . Weidmann, Berlin 1904, p. 183 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
- ↑ Szyrocki 1958, p. 123; Bogner 2016, p. 10.
- ↑ Szyrocki 1958, pp. 123-125.
- ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. 127.
- ↑ Solbach 2012, p. 37.
- ↑ Borgstedt 2009, p. 340 note 166.
- ↑ From Purdue University . Message from the university to Holocaust survivors .
- ^ Cohen 1972, p. 116. The quote comes from René Wellek: The concept of baroque in literary scolarship . In: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism . tape 5 , no. 2 , 1946, p. 77-109, here p. 96 , doi : 10.2307 / 425797 .
- ↑ Mauser 1976, p. 213.
- ↑ Arendt 1968, pp. 171-172.
- ↑ Solbach 2012, p. 37.
- ↑ Borgstedt 2016, p. 96.
- ↑ † 2000; Münster Germanist and Baroque researcher.
- ↑ Solbach 2012, p. 37 Note 4.
- ↑ Weydt 1965, p. 10.
- ↑ Weydt 1965, p. 11.
- ↑ Andreas Solbach has been Professor of Modern German Literature at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz since 1999 . Internet source .
- ↑ Solbach 2012, p. 39.
- ↑ Weydt 1965, pp. 10-12.
- ↑ Quoted in Arendt 1968, p. 165.
- ↑ Solbach 2012, p. 39.
- ↑ Solbach 2012, p. 42.
- ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. IX.
- ↑ Weydt 1965, p. 32.
- ↑ Manheimer 1904 writes p. 68, if in the 13th century the frequent use of a foreign word almost betrayed the formation of a knight, “conversely, in the 17th a preference for foreign chunks was more a sign of illiteracy, was considered to be boastful with an education that one did not have. "
- ↑ Cohen 1972, p. 119.
- ↑ Cohen 1972, p. 119.