This late 15th-century statue of Saint John the Baptist from Southern Germany came to the museum of the Cathedral of Kalocsa in 1997. It was brought from the endangered church of the castle of Tompa, near to the Serbian border. The church was built in 1905 by Baron Béla Redl – unrelated to Colonel Redl – as a reduced-scale copy of the Matthias Cathedral in Buda, and was equipped with precious objects of art brought from all over Europe. The 1908 edition of Szalon Újságmentions its richness with awe. The walls are covered with marble from Carrara, the altarpieces are Italian Renaissance paintings, and the Byzantine column of red porphyry from Egypt supporting the pulpit was paid for with one year’s full income on the wheat in all the estates of the Baron. These three late Gothic wooden statues were also purchased in Italy.
I still saw them on their place in the church. We were there at the beginning of the 90s, during a survey of historical monuments. The abandoned castle and church standing in the middle of the farmlands were already in bad conditions. The guard came out from the nearby town of Tompa which at the time of the church’s building was only a farmstead. Baron Redl built there the school of his estates where he himself was the teacher in the first school year. The school-farm developed into a village – and lately into a town of five thousand inhabitants – only after the new state border in 1920 was drawn four kilometers below it, cutting the region off its natural center, the city of Szabadka (now Subotica) some fifteen kilometers to the South.
The heir of Baron Redl, Baron Endre Podmaniczky was a great charmer, a sociable man and an excellent card-player, the guard counted to us. In 1920 the French military commission assigned to establish the new border was quartered in his castle. The Baron invited the French officers to play cards. His stake was cash, while that of the French were his estates to be annexed to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929 Yugoslavia). They played all night along, and the Baron gradually pushed the border more and more southwards. Finally, by the daybreak the castle and the church too came back to Hungary. “Gentlemen, it’s getting late. Let us retire to rest”, proposed then the Baron.
I got a mail from Arcadia. I know it sounds like getting a parcel from Atlantis or a commercial sample from the Silk Road. But I really got a mail from Arcadia. Poly has sent an Easter greeting from the mount of Maenalus where the god Pan and the nymphs used to live surrounded by the pastoral poets of the eclogues until on the very first Easter – if we are to believe to Plutarch and Eusebius – it was announced on the island of Paxos: “the great Pan is dead!”
The mail reminded me of this picture that I have kept for a long time. Poplars bordering the road to mount Maenalus, a photo by Nikolaos Frestis. I saved it back then because it has recalled a poem of Kostas Karyotakis. Karyotakis was literally an Arcadian poet, he was born just some miles away in Tripoli, in 1896. These three stanzas of his “Στροφές” – “Strophes” comprising ten impressionistic sketches were set to music by Photis Ionatos.
Photis Ionatos: Strophes, on Kostas Karyotakis’ Στροφές. From the CD Ithaque (1988).
Τι χάνω εγώ τις μέρες μου
τη μία κοντά στην άλλη,
κι όπως μου ασπρίζουν τα μαλλιά
ξινίζει το κρασί,
αφού μονάχα όταν περνώ
το βλέμμα από κρουστάλλι,
με νέα ρετσίνα ολόγεμο,
βλέπω τη ζωή χρυσή;
Η νύχτα μας εχώρισεν
από όσους αγαπάμε
πριν μας χωρίσει η ξενιτιά.
(Να 'ναι όλοι εκεί στο μόλο;)
Σφύρα, καράβι αργήσαμε.
κι αν φτάσουμε όπου πάμε,
στάσου για λίγο, μα ύστερα
σφύρα να φεύγουμε όλο.
Λεύκες, γιγάντοι καρφωτοί
στα πλάγια εδώ του δρόμου,
δέντρα μου, εστέρξατε ο βοριάς
τα φύλλα σας να πάρει.
Σκιές εμείνατε σκιών
που ρέουν στο μέτωπό μου,
καθώς πηγαίνω χάμου εγώ
κι απάνω το φεγγάρι.
How my days are getting lost
one after the other
as my hair is growing white
and the wine gets bitter:
only when I glimpse
through the glass
full of new retsina
I can see the golden life.
Night has already separated us
from everyone we loved
even before exile separates us.
Will they all be there on the shore?
Whistle, ship, we are late
and when we arrive to our goal
wait a little, and for a last time
whistle so we all go ashore.
Poplars, giants nailed here
to the border of the road
my saplings, you have let the northern
wind to take your leaves away shadows of shadows you’ve become
that fall on my forehead
as I am making my way here below
and the moon his one up there.
Lajos Vajda: Masque with moon, 1938
Et ego in Arcadia, I could quote the painting of Poussin, I also live in Arcadia, I also have my saplings, the long row of giant poplars bordering the garden like a wall. In the twilight I come up from the garden under them, and in the night I see from my desk the moon passing between them above the forest. At these times, I often recall this poem of Karyotakis.
I greeted them with this poem when we came here for the first time, fifteen years ago. Then they were thirty: now they are sixteen. Trees are having bad times lately. Forests are cut down, the water of the brook is being polluted. The empty places among the poplars growing in number from year to year also recall the other meaning of Poussin’s motto: et in Arcadia ego, even in Arcadia I exist – Death, I mean. From year to year I understand more of this poem.
In nineteen forty two, Easter fell on 4 April, just like today. In Nikolayev – a thousand kilometers below Brest along the river Bug – the German diary welcomed the Spring with a festive poem.
Schaut auf zu dem Himmel
Und öffnet die Herzen.
Die Nacht ist gezogen
In ewiger Schönheit
Leuchtet uns wieder
Das Licht das die Sonne
Alljährlich uns bringt.
Ein Fest ist geworden
In Hoffen und Glauben,
Wie Mütter gebären
Die lieblichen Kinder.
Freude o Freunde!
Der Tod ist gewesen.
Das Leben ist da.
Und weit von der Heimat,
Mit treuen Gedanken,
Dass alles doch werde
Zum glücklichen Frieden
Steh’n wir auf Wache,
Geschlecht für Geschlechter,
Am schäumenden Bug
O Vaterland Deutschland,
Das Herz soll Dich grüssen,
Mit unseren Waffen
Erst können wir wieder
Glauben an Ostern,
Aus unserer Liebe
Wirst aufersteh’n Du.
Schaut auf zu dem Himmel.
Denn heute ist Ostern.
Der Schmerz ist verloren.
Aus duftenden Knospen
Brechen die Blüten,
Die schöner dann schmücken
Zum Sieg unseren Helm.
Uffz. Heini Jahns, Nikolajew
Look up to the sky and open your hearts.
The night has withdrawn,
and in eternal beauty
shines upon us again
the Light, brought to us
by the Sun every year.
A feast was born to us
in hope and in faith
just like mothers give birth
to their beloved children.
What a joy, my friends!
Death is over
and life is here.
And far from our homeland
with faithful thoughts
so that everything turns
to a happy peace,
we stand at our post
for generations to come
at the swelling Bug.
Oh, homeland Germany,
our heart greets You
together with our arms.
Just now we can really
believe in Easter.
From our love
You will resurrect!
Look up to the sky,
for today it’s Easter.
All pain is over,
and from fragrant buds
flowers arise
to adorn our helmets
for the victory.
Squad Leader Heini Jahns, Nikolayev
“The Easter feast is not only the feast of the Spring, but rather the culmination of the preparations for the coming war operations. On Easter 1940 the German troops were ready for action at the Rhein. On Easter 1941 they were already at the eastern borders of Germany. During the following spring offensives they subdued France, Norway and the Balkan states, and they broke the might of the red army. Today, on Easter 1942 the German troops stay at Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov. Just as in the last years, the Easter of 1942 is the culmination of all preparations and gathering energy of the German Wehrmacht” – wrote the editorial of the newspaper on that day.
In ninety forty two, as a rarity, all Christian confessions celebrated Easter on the same day, just like today. The Catholic, Orthodox and Greek Catholic population of the occupied territories, whose fate after the final victory had been already decided in Berlin, on this day celebrated with processions the resurrection of Christ.
Христос воскресе из мёртвых – Christ has risen from the dead. Orthodox Easter troparium. Choir of the Cathedral of Novokuznetsk.
What book would you take with you to the desert island? If one is not extremely practical – “The Encyclopedia of Tourists and Survivors!” – then he or she immediately thinks of a Big Book. The Bible. The Odyssey. Laozi. Tolstoy. Hafez. The poems of Attila József. Something one perhaps does not read every day, but which would stay as a canon and a memento from the lost civilization.
Different people can have different Big Books. Contemporary literature, however, often proposes a new candidate. Not even a book, just a poem. A poem by Goethe, the Wanderer’s Nightsong.
In Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World (2006) it is the representative of German Classicism, Alexander von Humboldt to penetrate, by sailing upstream the Amazonas, into a world of which we do not know whether it symbolizes the pre- or post-civilization state of humanity, but it certainly lacks any traces of civilization. His four oarsmen Carlos, Gabriel, Mario and Julio – who most probably stand for the idols of Kehlmann, the four great authors of Southern American magic reality – keep treating each other with obscure, bloody and magic stories that contradict every rule of European logic. When Humboldt is also invited to say something, he tells the Wanderer’s Nightsong in a prosaic translation. The awkwardness of the translation indicates well the incompatibility of the two worlds and shows how few can be transmitted from the Winckelmannian “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”, but it also highlights that the text even in this form preserves something from its emblematic nature referring to another, more spacious and sublime world.
Mario asked Humboldt to tell a story, he too.
He does not know any stories, said Humboldt and he straightened his hat which had been turned by the monkey. And he does not even like storytelling. But he can tell the most beautiful German poem in a free Spanish translation. Above the hilltops there is silence, between the trees no wind is felt, birds are silent, too, and you will die soon, don’t worry.
Everyone looked at him.
Ready, said Humboldt.
Pardon, asked Bonpland.
Humboldt reached for the sextant.
Excuse, said Julio. It is not possible that this is everything.
Of course it is no bloody story with wars and transformations, said Humbold with irritation. It has no magic, nobody is changed into a plant, nobody can fly and they do not eat each other.
Tatyana Tolstaya’s anti-utopia Кысь (The Slynx/Kys, 1986) is a survey of humanity living in quasi-paleolithic conditions after the nuclear war, but in fact it is an allegory of the morally and culturally eroded Soviet society. In this world there are no books, and there exist only as many written texts as Fedor Kuzmich, the tyrant of the village hands over to his scribes as his own works for copying and for distributing among the commoners:
А списывает Бенедикт то, что Федор Кузьмич, слава ему, сочинил: сказки, или поучения, а то стихи. Уж такие у Федора Кузьмича, слава ему, стихи ладные выходят, чтоиной раз рука задрожит, глаза затуманятся и будто весь враз ослабеешь и поплывешь куда-то, а не то словно как ком в горле встанет и сглотнуть не можешь… Вот намедни Бенедикт перебелял:
Горные вершины
Спят во тьме ночной;
Тихие долины
Полны свежей мглой;
Не пылит дорога,
Не дрожат листы…
Подожди немного,
Отдохнешь и ты.
And Benedikt copies out what Fedor Kuzmich, glory to him, wrote: tales, teachings or poems. And the poems of Fedor Kuzmich, glory to him, are so beautiful that sometimes the hand trembles and the eyes are clouded and one feels as if all his body were weakened and were swimming somewhere or as if there were a lump in his throat and could not swallow… The other day Benedikt copied out this:
Up there all summits
are still.
In all the tree-tops
you will
feel but the dew.
The birds in the forest stopped talking.
Soon, done with walking,
you shall rest, too.
A look from the Kickelhahn. Drawing of Goethe, 1776. The archive pictures are from the Goethezeitportal.
What qualifies this poem so much for featuring as a Denkmal of European high culture in a world deprived of civilization?
The distilled simplicity of the poem, cunningly counterpointed by the asymmetries in the rhythm and rhyme structure, plays a great role in it for sure. As if it were an utmostly refined flower of European poetry. It is no coincidence that everyone tries to translate it (here you are a synoptic table of some of the Hungarian translations of the last fifty years), and nevertheless nobody could produce a translation that would be regarded as perfect.
But it is also sure that our Bildung, the way how this poem is presented to us in the course of our studies as a symbol of our culture, has its part in it as well. I remember how in the early eighties, in an intellectual environment very similar to that of Tolstaya our old-school teacher of literature taught to us this poem and we recited it in German, in the language of the destroyed middle-class culture and as a bequest of this culture, while no more than two boys in the class understood anything in this language.
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
The fact that this poem took on this importance already in the period of Goethe and it has survived like this in the European tradition is due to no small extent to Goethe himself who attributed this same importance to his own poem.
If we have just said that for the Romantic poet only the poem “writ in water” is really everlasting, then this poem fulfills all the necessary criteria. It does not have a proper title: in the first editions of Goethe it followed the Weimar Wanderer’s Nightsong, written four years earlier, under the title Ein Gleiches (“The same”). And it was writ, if not in water, but on decaying plank, the wooden wall of a hunter’s cabin in the Thuringian Forest, on the Kickelhahn above Ilmenau visited by Goethe almost thirty times during his life. And to make the metaphor complete, the handwriting of Goethe was sawed out of the wall at the end of the 19th century. Since then it has been lost.
The Kickelhahn hunter’s cabin today
Goethe wrote this poem on the cabin’s wall on the night from 6 to 7 September 1780, and in 1813 he renewed it. In 1831, shortly before his death he returned here again only to see it once more. His companion, the forest ranger Johann Christian Mahr described this visit in his diary, published shortly afterwards:
Beim Eintritt in das obere Zimmer sagte er: “Ich habe in früherer Zeit in dieser Stube mit meinem Bedienten im Sommer acht Tage gewohnt und damals einen kleinen Vers hier an die Wand geschrieben. Wohl möchte ich diesen Vers nochmals sehen und wenn der Tag darunter bemerkt ist, an welchem es geschehen, so haben Sie die Güte mir solchen aufzuzeichnen.” Sogleich führte ich ihn an das südliche Fenster der Stube, an welchem links mit Bleistift geschrieben steht:
The Kickelhahn cabin
Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Es schweigen die Vöglein im Walde;
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
D. 7. September 1783. Goethe.
Goethe überlas diese wenigen Verse und Thränen flossen über seine Wangen. Ganz langsam zog er sein schneeweißes Taschentuch aus seinem dunkelbraunen Tuchrock, trocknete sich die Thränen und sprach in sanftem, wehmüthigem Ton: “Ja warte nur balde ruhest du auch!”, schwieg eine halbe Minute, sah nochmals durch das Fenster in den düstern Fichtenwald, und wendete sich darauf zu mir, mit den Worten: “Nun wollen wir wieder gehen.”
On entering the upper room he said: “I used to spend here eight days in a summer with my servant and then I wrote a little poem on the wall. I would like to see this poem once more, and if the day on which I wrote it is also noted below, then please be so kind to have a record of it for me.” I immediately led him to the southern window of the room, where this was written with pencil:
Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Es schweigen die Vöglein im Walde;
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
D. 7. September 1783. Goethe.
Goethe read over these few verses and tears flowed down his cheeks. Very slowly he took his snow-white handkerchief from his dark brown cloth coat, he wiped his tears off, and he said in a gentle, mournful tone: “Yes, just wait, soon you will rest, too!” He was silent for half minute, looked through the window at the dark pine forest, and then he turned to me by saying: “Now we can leave.”
A perfectly arranged scene. I would be surprised if it were not yet adapted for the screen. “Since this description of Mahr the poem has been linked to the image of the old man sitting on the Kickelhahn and being absorbed with melancholy and with a presentiment of death in the contemplation of nature turning to night”, writes Wulf Segelbrecht in his monograph about the reception history of the poem. *
Goethe as an old man on the Kickelhahn, with the texts of both Wanderer’s Nightsongs below.
Thüringerwaldverlag Rich. Zieschank, Rudolstadt
Goethe’s cabin and the Kickelhahn look-out tower. Verlag v. W. Zinke, Friedrichroda, 1906
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the sea of fog, c. 1818
However, the tradition of this poem as an icon of European culture reaches back not only to Goethe but even much further in time.
The Greek poet Alcman came from Anatolia to Sparta in the seventh century before Christ, during the archaic period of Greek culture. In Sparta he composed choir hymns for the parthenias, the religious associations of young girls. This fragment was left to us from one of his hymns (the English is by Lionel Casson):
The mountains sleep, the valleys and peaks
the jutting headlands, the tumbling creeks
the black earth’s teeming creatures that crawl
the beasts of the forests, the swarms of bees
the monsters deep in the purple seas
the wide-winged birds, asleep, one and all.
The fragments of Alcman were published in one volume in 1773, producing a great effect in contemporary classical philology. Goethe wrote his Wanderer’s Nightsong seven years later. His poem attests the knowledge of Alcman’s hymn. As in a medallion, it sums up the very first description of a European sunset, inheriting its sacrality and universality and transmitting them until the last sunset of European culture and further.
Goethe – Schubert: Wandrers Nachtlied – Wanderer’s Nightsong D.768 (1823). Barbara Hendricks, soprano; Radu Lupu, piano (1986). This song can be found in several versions on YouTube, but I prefer this one because of the fine play of Radu Lupu.