Hymns to the Night (English and German Edition)

In 1800, the German writer Novalis published Hymns to the Night as a set of six poems. Their subject matter is humankind’s journey through different periods of spiritual-intellectual development. The final two poems contemplate the effects Christianity has had on the fate and the strivings of the human race. Hymns to the Night uniquely structures its poetic forms such that some parts of the poems carry just three words per line down the page, while other stanzas are made up of whole, long paragraphs.

Translator Dick Higgins has three prefaces to each edition of this translation that verges on being a transliteration of Novalis's wonderful poems. Higgins clearly struggled to do the best job he could. The issue this edition raises s not how good Higgins' translation is but how it lets you see, assuming you know some German, the concrete difficulties and strange ways Higgins sometimes translates the hymns. for example, he translates "Ewigkeit," or ternary, as "the forever." (pp. 16-17) He renders "In her Augen ruhte de Ewigket" as :In her eyes rested the forever." Higgins generally keeps very close to the word order of the German but the English sounds stilted."Eternity rested in her eyes" would sound better. And "the forever" sacrifices the echo of "Ewigkeit" a few lines later in the "fuehl Ich ewigen, unwanderlbaren Glauben." In this case, Higgins inexplicably inverts the order of ewigen un unwandlerbaren," rendering the line "I've felt an unchangeable, eternal faith." And by translating "Glauben" as "faith" rather than than "belief," he misses the chance to carry over Novalis's each of "Glauben and "Geliebte," the last word of the hymn. "Belief" and "beloved" wold have picked up the initial G's" of Glauben" and "Geliebte." or consider what Higgins does with "irische," a word that a word he says in the the preface to the third edition gave him a lot of trouble (p.7). Higgins sometimes takes poetic license, but for no apparent reason,. For example, he inserts the word "forever" where it does not exist in the German: "'Und sent ins in des Vatars Schoss"becomes "And sink us forever in our Father's lap." (pp. 52-53) Higgins does not translate the word the same way. In one case, translates it as "worldly," in another "earthly." (He says he abandoned Keats' "earthy" in his earlier translation.) Is it better to use the same English word for "irdische" since Novalis uses the same word and thereby capture the repetition? Or is there really a semantic difference between the meanings of the word "irdische" as Novalis uses it that requires two English words be used? Hard to say. For me, the value of this translation lies in the way it provokes such questions, leading me to a more careful reading of the German than I otherwise probably would have been able to do. Like any good German Romantic poet, Higgins has failed, failed again, and failed again. But he has failed brilliantly the third time.

This is Novalis' masterpiece. An absolutely sublime collection of six poetic hymns, each of which centering on a deeply routed problematic configured within Novalis' complicated commitments. The symbolism and imagery of the night is particularly luminous here-it is clear that Novalis was preoccupied with an implicit death-drive. This work is also the thinker's most decisively Christian work, which has turned off readers to it in the modern era. Considered in terms of its place in the history of the Romantic movement, this work should be regarded among the masters like Tieck, Goethe, and the like.

The poem is translated in English by someone who is clearly pound foolish and pennywise. So much effort is done to stay close to the original text but as a whole it has become a bit two dimensional. The poem itself reads like a profound work that has had and will have always some but not so manny admirers. That is not because it is so difficult or vague. No it's just that time kept this one secret for the grande majeure.

Five stars for the *Hymns*; zero stars for the (mis)translation.Novalis's *Hymns to the Night* are a true gem of late 18th-Century Romantic poetry. A brilliant and original mingling of prose-poetry and verse, the *Hymns* celebrate night, darkness, and death as bearers of tremendous revelation. They do so in supple, elegant, and sensuous language filled with yearning for a deeper reality than that which gaudy daylight reveals. Particularly notable is the erotic dimension of this Romantic yearning, or *Sehnsucht*, that Novalis daringly offers the reader.Given the above, one can only react with disgust at Dick Higgins's vulgar travesty of the *Hymns*. His specious and, not to put too fine a point on it, idiotic rationalization for butchering this work is that Novalis's language was modern for its time; therefore, to preserve that flavor, it should be rendered into the modern "poetic" idiom of, say, William Carlos Williams. Higgins has vulgarized Novalis to the point of idiocy. For example, "What is it [...] that gulps down the soft airs of sadness". "Gulps down"? Really? "What're you holding under your cloak, that grabs so unseen at my soul?" "In wild griefs I recognize your distance from our home, your resistance to the old, grand heaven".If Novalis had truly written in this way, then he would be justly forgotten--unless, of course, he were magically transported to the Bronze age of Williams and Pound.For better examples of older translations, English-speaking readers who wish to read the *Hymns* as Novalis wrote them should consult the Charles Passage and George Macdonald translations. They are hardly perfect, but, unlike Higgins's misbegotten manglings, they represent Novalis's magnificent *Hymns* with at least a modicum of their original dignity intact. Simon Elmer, however, has finally provided a not merely competent, but also a superb and faithful contemporary English translation of the *Hymns*. It is also freely available online, and I invite you to search for it, rather than waste your time with this travesty.