Lament in Walter Benjamin's Early Poetry, Theory, and Translation

Caroline Sauter The Ghost of the Poet: Lament in Walter Benjamin’s Early Poetry, Theory, and Translation In the beginning was the death of a poet.1 In August 1914, Walter Benjamin’s close friend, the nineteen-year-old lyric poet Friedrich “Fritz” Heinle, committed suicide just as World War I was breaking out.2 Shortly after Heinle’s death, Benjamin began writing poetry. His seventy-three sonnets (1915–1925) mourn the death of his friend. While Benjamin was working on the Heinle sonnets, however, he developed his early language theory in “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” (1916) and his theory of the lyric in “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” (1914–1915). He also translated Baudelaire’s “Tableaux parisiens” from Fleurs du mal and further developed his language and translation theory in the famous prologue to these translations, “The Task of the Translator” (1921). Benjamin’s early work thus consists of three forms of expression: he is at once a writer, a theorist, and a translator of lyric poetry. Benjamin’s early poetry, theory, and translations are all deeply intertwined with the death of his poet friend. Furthermore, because all of these efforts, as I will argue, represent direct or indirect responses to Heinle’s suicide, they all deal with the notion of lament: Benjamin’s sonnets, his translations of Baude- laire’s poetry, and his theoretical and philosophical writings on language ex- plore lament as a distinct and unique form of language. Specifically, they all seem to suggest a connection between the language of lament and poetic ex- 1 I would like to thank Ilit Ferber for her insightful comments and fruitful remarks on a first draft of this paper. 2 Walter Benjamin and Fritz Heinle met in 1912–1913 in Freiburg, where Benjamin was a student in philosophy at the university. During the winter semester of 1913–1914, the two friends moved to Berlin together and became the presidents of the Free Students’ Union [Freie Studen- tenschaft], a youth and student movement, and its discussion group [Sprechsaal]. The mem- bers met in an apartment rented by Benjamin, the so-called Meeting House or Heim [home]. It was here that Fritz Heinle and his girlfriend, Rika Seligson, committed suicide on 8 August 1914 by opening the gas tap. The couple probably meant their deaths to be an act of protest and resistance against the world war that had recently begun, though a daily newspaper, the Vos- sische Zeitung, identified “love grief” [Liebesgram] as their joint motive. Benjamin himself never gives any details or clues as to the precise circumstances of his friend’s death. He mentions Heinle explicitly only in his later work, in Berlin Chronicle (1932) and in his two essays on Stefan George, “Stefan George in Retrospect” (1933) and especially “On Stefan George” (1928). On Heinle and Benjamin, see Wizisla 1992. DOI 10.1515/9783110339963.205, © 2018 Caroline Sauter, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 206 Caroline Sauter pression: for instance, the Heinle sonnets are actual laments in poetic form; the Hölderlin essay, in developing a theory of the lyric that is premised upon the poet’s death, thus raises the possibility of poetic expression as lament; and the Baudelaire translations hint at a structural similarity between the language of lament and the form of translation, especially translated poetry. This endeavor of Benjamin’s goes hand in hand with a contemporaneous project of Gershom Scholem’s. While Benjamin was writing laments in sonnet form about Heinle’s death, as well as theoretical texts about language and lament and poetic translations from the French, Scholem was devoting himself to a translation of the biblical book of Lamentations, to which he wrote a short but very dense epilogue, commenting on the nature of lament and its language and its inherent kinship with poetry.3 In what follows, I will trace the intersec- tions among Benjamin’s early poetry, theory, and translation in relation to Scholem’s reflections about lament, in order to reach a conclusion about the language of lament and its connectedness to poetic expression. I want to show what poetry, theory, and translation, as three different forms of expression in Benjamin’s early work, have in common: all of them question the possibility of poetic expression by introducing lament as a means to interrupt the stability of language. Benjamin considered the essay “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘The Poet’s Courage’ and ‘Timidity’” to be his first major work, even though it was never published during his lifetime. He wrote it in the war winter of 1914–1915. So it was conceived under the direct influence of Fritz Heinle’s suicide, and it can indeed be read as a dedication to and a dialogue with his friend’s life, poetic work, and death. In a later text on Stefan George from 1928, Benjamin calls his early Hölderlin essay a “dedication” [Widmung] to his dead friend.4 The essay 3 All English citations from Scholem’s 1917–1918 essay “Über Klage und Klagelied” (“On La- ment and Lamentation”) are taken from the translation (Lament) in this volume. Benjamin’s and Scholem’s writings on the topic of lament and poetry are demonstrably interconnected: Scholem saw “On Lament and Lamentation” as a continuation of Benjamin’s 1916 essay “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man.” In a diary entry from 3 December 1917, he writes: “Gestern das Nachwort zu der Klageliedübersetzung geschrieben […]. Es ist sehr schwer geworden. […] Die Fortsetzung der Spracharbeit [Walter Benjamins] wäre damit nun eigentlich begonnen, von mir” (Tb2, 88: “Wrote the epilogue to my translation of Lamentations yester- day. It has become very difficult. Thus the continuation of [Benjamin’s] language essay has been begun – by me”). On the interconnection between Benjamin’s and Scholem’s language theories, see Weigel 2000, 24–28. 4 In the first manuscript draft of “On Stefan George,” Benjamin writes: “My friend died. Not in the battlefield. […] A few months followed, of which I do not know anything anymore. In those months, however, which I had entirely dedicated to my first major work, namely an The Ghost of the Poet 207 is structured around a moment of loss: at the core of its central argument is the death of the poet. Following his methodological and terminological introduction, which defines the object of his study – “the poetized” [das Gedichtete] (SW1, 18) – and his method of presentation – “aesthetic commentary” (SW1, 18)5 – Benjamin emphatically begins an analysis of two poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, namely “The Poet’s Courage” (“Dichtermut,” 1800) and “Timidity” (“Blödigkeit,” 1803), by invoking the death of the poet. He writes: “In the first version of [“The Poet’s Courage”], Hölderlin’s subject is a destiny – the death of the poet. Hölderlin praises in song the sources of the courage to die this death” (SW1, 22).6 This is, very concisely, Benjamin’s interpretation of Hölder- lin’s “The Poet’s Courage.” He then proceeds to demonstrate an evolutionary process from “The Poet’s Courage” to “Timidity.” His discussion of “Timidity,” the “final version” of “The Poet’s Courage,” aims to show “how from the structured center [the poet’s death] a structuring movement necessarily forces its way from verse to verse” (SW1, 24). And this is why Benjamin returns to his presupposition about the poet’s death toward the end of his analysis, where he states that “death […] was transposed to the center of the poem” and “in this center lies the origin of song” (SW1, 34). The “duality of death and poet,” according to Benjamin, is transformed into “the unity of a dead poetic world” (SW1, 34) – and this unity is what Benjamin calls the poetized [das Gedichtete]. Thus, the death of the poet is the origin of the poetized, which itself is destined to die. The poetized therefore is nothing but the evolutionary process of its own self-annihilation. As soon as the poetized starts speaking in and through the poem, it must speak in the language of lament – it must lament about itself, lament about its own destiny, which is its own death, its self-destruction, its suicide. Both Benjamin’s argument and his method thus rest on the premise of the death of the poet, which is a figure for essential self-difference and self-denial up to the point of suicide (as exemplified in his notion of the poetized). He calls this death “the center from which the world of poetic dying was meant to arise” (SW1, 22), and, later, the “mythological law” of a “structured world” essay on two Hölderlinian poems, which was dedicated to him, my friend, the poems he had left behind took the place of those few areas at which poetry was still able to affect me deci- sively” (GS2.3, 921; trans. mine). Significantly, the Hölderlin reference has been crossed out by Benjamin. It appears only in the manuscripts, but not in the article printed in Literarische Rundschau, 13 July 1928 (see GS2.2, 623). 5 For a thorough explication of the introduction to Benjamin’s Hölderlin essay, see Wellbery 1988, 39–46. 6 English translations of Benjamin’s writings are taken from SW, if included there; all other Benjamin translations, including poetry, are my own. 208 Caroline Sauter (SW1, 23). Without the death of the poet, which presupposes the poem itself, the poem cannot exist. The telos – if there is any such thing – of the poem’s existence, however, is to “sing a cosmos whose own decline is signified by the death of the poet” (SW1, 22).

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