Sehnsucht
I’ve been considering the mental states of nostalgia, saudade and Sehnsucht, all of which seem to be local versions of various aspects of melancholy. Sehnsucht is the title of a poem by Goethe, set to music by Schubert, which our choir was planning to perform next weekend, which planted the seed in my mind. The poem goes like this:
- Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
- Weiß, was ich leide!
- Allein und abgetrennt
- Von aller Freude,
- Seh ich ans Firmament
- Nach jener Seite.
- Ach! der mich liebt und kennt,
- Ist in der Weite.
- Es schwindelt mir, es brennt
- Mein Eingeweide.
- Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
- Weiß, was ich leide!
In English:
- Only one who knows this longing
- Understands what I suffer!
- Alone and separated
- From all joy,
- I look to the vast horizon
- On every side.
- Oh! He who loves and knows me,
- Is far away.
- I feel dizzy, and it burns
- my insides.
- Only one who knows this longing
- Understands what I suffer!
Goethe’s idea that nobody else could know what he’s going through is central to the idea of Sehnsucht. The feeling itself is not, unlike nostalgia, associated with yearning for anything in particular, unless it’s a time before the Sehnsucht came on. It’s an idiopathic condition, in that respect.
Germans even seem to be convinced that only Germans suffer from Sehnsucht, since they’re the only ones who have a word for it. That sounds to me like a version of the old canard about Eskimos and their snow vocabulary, and about as convincing. What’s wrong with the word “yearning”? That’s an emotion that doesn’t require an object, as any teenager knows.
Melancholy itself, in the sense in which we now use it, is also similar to that free-floating form of yearning. So, also, is the Portuguese saudade, which I’ll look at later.
There is also a setting of the Goethe poem by Tchaikovsky, and a piece for piano by Robert Schumann. Here’s a performance of the Schubert setting:
I think you have to have the sense of not being amenable to fulfilment if you are going to translate it as "yearning". So "unfulfillable yearning" works. It doesn't have to have an object, as you note. Indeed, isn't that the hardest type of yearning to satisfy, that which has no object and no means of being ended?
ReplyDeleteMy understanding also is that saudade is somewhat different, because it does always have an object, being the "love that remains" when the one (or the place, I suppose) that you love is gone.
ReplyDeletewere the singers so ugly ?
ReplyDelete:-D haha, that's right, or else it was filmed by the conductor's secret admirer, though in that case I miss the close-ups.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, as you suggested, "As performed by the Toothless Centerarians Against Unnecessary Grooming Chamber Choir (TCAUGCC)."
But on a slightly more serious note, I don't see as to why Sehnsucht does not have an object? I always have the feeling that it does, perhaps even too many at times. But in this poem for instance, it's after the person "der mich liebt und kennt", is it not?
I think 'Sehnsucht' isn't that much self-assertive (in this case Goethe sounds really like a ministry official...). May be better not to write about or to mention the term to get close to this emotion.
ReplyDeleteImo Canadian LC did it:
Queen Victoria,
My father and all his tobacco loved you,
I love you too in all your forms,
the slim and lovely virgin floating among German beer,
the mean governess of the huge pink maps,
the solitary mourner of a prince.
Queen Victoria,
I am cold and rainy,
I am dirty as a glass roof in a train station,
I feel like an empty cast iron exhibition,
I want ornaments on everything,
because my love, she gone with other boys.
Queen Victoria,
do you have a punishment under the white lace,
will you be short with her, will you make her read those little Bibles,
will you spank her with a mechanical corset.
I want her pure as power, I want her skin slightly musty with petticoats
will you wash the easy bidet out of her head?
Queen Victoria,
I'm not much nourished by modern love,
will you come into my life
with your sorrow and your black carriages,
And your perfect
memories.
Queen Victoria,
the Twentieth Century belongs to you and me.
Let us be two severe giants not less lonely for our partnership,
who discolour test tubes in the halls of Science,
who turn up unwelcome at every World's Fair,
heavy with proverbs and corrections,
confusing the star-dazed tourists
with our incomparable sense of loss.