I

“Ballade des äußeren Lebens”

Und Kinder wachsen auf mit tiefen Augen,
Die von nichts wissen, wachsen auf und sterben,
Und alle Menschen gehen ihre Wege.

Und süße Früchte werden aus den herben
Und fallen nachts wie tote Vögel nieder
Und liegen wenig Tage und verderben.

Und immer weht der Wind, und immer wieder
Vernehmen wir und reden viele Worte
Und spüren Lust und Müdigkeit der Gleider.

Und Straßen laufen durch das Gras, und Orte
Sind da und dort, voll Fackeln, Bäumen, Teichen,
Und drohende, und totenhafte verdorrte...

Wozu sind diese aufgebaut? und gleichen
Einander nie? und sind unzählig viele?
Was wechselt Lachen, Weinen und Erbleichen?

Was frommt das alles uns und diese Spiele,
Die wir doch groß und ewig einsam sind
Und wandernd nimmer suchen irgend Ziele?

Was frommts, dergleichen viel gesehen haben?
Und dennoch sagt der viel, der “Abend” sagt,
Ein Wort, daraus Tiefsinn und Trauer rinnt

Wie schwerer Honig aus den hohlen Waben.

—By Hugo von Hofmannsthal

II

A.
I wondered how long it would take for someone to turn today's tragedy in Blacksburg into a blame-the-Democrats exercise. “Not long,” was the answer.

After teaching—an exercise that involved me ranting at them for their sloppiness in presentation and preparation regarding a group project, as well as a few moments of German hip-hop and a discussion of extended adjectival modifiers (which I've incorporated far too fully into my written and occasionally into my spoken English ... where they do not belong)—I engaged in an extended discussion on emergence and the nuances of the term “metaphysical” (I suspect that my colleague is a property dualist), discussed the Va. Tech shooting with a departmental secretary, and made my way in the warm spring sunshine past my ex's office and down the hill to the Union, where the three young women in hair-nets and thin, tight short-fingered plastic gloves that gave them webbed hands made me a Paul Bunyan Burger.

As I ate my burger—now equipped with mayo and BBQ sauce—in another room and connected to the campus wireless network to my left an imported Math T.A. helped an undie with calculus word problems and to my right a thickly built young man used his cell phone to check up on the status of a team of Wisconsin students, engineers from the sound of it, who were in Blacksburg for a meeting, conference, or similar engagement.

No news was forthcoming, and it's hard to tell people that no news is good news.

Foreign math T.A.s are the illegal immigrants of the academic world, not because they are illegal, but because like migrant workers and others they do jobs that blue-blooded 'Merkins aren't fond of, though in this case it's teaching algebra, calculus and introductory statistics instead of collecting garbage and picking produce.

I drank a glass of chocolate milk, studied my lines for the play, and eventually made my way to the theater for rehearsal.

B.
“TERZA RIMMA. A verse form composed of iambic tercets rhyming aba, bcb, etc., the second line of the first tercet supplying the rhyme for the second tercet, the second line of the second tercet supplying the rhyme for the third, and so on, thus giving an effect of linkage to the entire composition. In t.r., the conclusion of a formal unit is generally signified by the occurrence of a single line which completes the rhyme structure by rhyming with the middle line of the preceding tercet: xyx y.” (The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, 1986 edition, page 278)

I guess I cite that passage only because I haven't had a chance to use my PHoPT in quite a while, even though it was a required text my first semester in college.

As a young man of only 16, and under the name Loris, Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) published a number of poems that took the Viennese literary scene by storm, and many refused to believe that a mere boy had produced these texts. His age is not a matter for concern regarding this verse from 1895 (published 1896 in “Blätter für die Kunst”).

Hofmannsthal does not entirely follow the terza rima model as described above, for in the final full stanza he ends the first verse with “haben,” which does not rhyme with “sind” from the previous one, and instead of rhyming his final verse with “sagt,” as the xyx y schema would indicate he pairs “Waben” with “haben.” He furthermore does not begin with an aba form in the first stanza. In terms of subject matter and rhetoric there is a certain similarity to Baroque poems on the vanitas theme (inspiration: Ecclesiastes 1: “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. / Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. / What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? / One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.”), such as Gryphius's “Es ist alles eitel,” but filtered through Hofmannsthal's own special form of neo-romanticism. I mention the Baroque because the long-lined sonnets of the age were perfect for a rhetoric of opposites, in which a thesis and antithesis were paired in the first and second halves of a verse (e.g. “Was dieser heute baut, reißt jener morgen ein”—“What this one builds today, that one tears down 'morrow”). A similar pairing of opposites occurs here and a similar pessimism about permanence pervades the young Austrian's poem.

But those last lines ...

[...]
Und dennoch sagt der viel, der “Abend” sagt,
Ein Wort, daraus Tiefsinn und Trauer rinnt

Wie schwerer Honig aus den hohlen Waben.

“Wie schwerer Honig aus den hohlen Waben.”

Hamburger makes his honey rich (and dark), which is fine since what is “heavy” honey anyway? But just feel that combination: heavy, deep, thick, stretching honey paired with depth/profundity (Tiefsinn) and sadness/mourning (Trauer).

Hamburger's translation is good. Yet I can't wrap my mouth around his words like I can with Hofmannsthal's.

Rhetorically Hofmannsthal's 4x3 + 3x3 + 1 (basically 12 + 10) division nearly employs sonnet rhetoric if not a 14-line sonnet form, and after that fourth stanza he moves from his oppositional imagery and statements to questions, from the transience of life to wondering what good it is.

And to conclude I return to the PHoPT—in a quick matter of form vs. context, syntax vs. semantics it is tempting to read “aba, bcb, etc.” as an a-b-a, b-c-b, e-t-c rhyme scheme.

I'm a f**ker. I know.

C.
I call it a tale of two Catholics, two Ts, one a philologist and the other a alleged philanderer.

Former Wisconsin governor and HHS Secretary and current GOP presidential candidate Tommy Thompson had what some consider his “macaca moment.” To quote Salon (quoting others): “‘I'm in the private sector, and for the first time in my life I'm earning money,’ Thompson reportedly said. ‘You know, that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that.’ [...] ‘What I was referring to, ladies and gentlemen, is the accomplishments of the Jewish religion. You've been outstanding business people and I compliment you for that.’” That's right, because the Jewish religion (you now, Judaism) is all about business and making money.

In more positive news Christopher Tolkien has published another of his father's “unfinished” works, The Children of Húrin. Andrew O'Hehir rather likes it; I'll give it a chance. I do take exception, however, at the characterization of The Silmarillion: “Although ‘The Silmarillion’ was a bestseller upon publication in 1977, for instance, only the hardiest of Tolkien fans have waded through its dry, haughty summaries of great deeds of the distant past.” I'm not a particularly hardy Tolkien fan, not a huge fan at all (a casual fan, perhaps, not someone who has learned one, let alone multiple, elvish dialects), and I ejoyed it a great deal, and have reread sections. No less a respected mind than HuSi's own ammoniacal in fact lists it as a work—minus that “Of Beren and Lúthien” (XIX) nonsense, mind you—that he rereads.

III

“Ballad of the Outer Life”

And children grow with deeply wondering eyes
That know of nothing, grow a while and die,
And every one of us goes his own way.

And bitter fruit will sweeten by and by
And like dead birds come hurtling down at night
And for a few days fester where they lie.

And always the wind blows, and we recite
And hear again the phrases thin with wear
And in our limbs feel languour or delight.

And roads run through the grass, and here and there
Are places full of lights and pools and trees,
And some are threatening, some are cold and bare ...

To what end were they built? With differences
No less innumerable than their names?
Why laughter now, now weeping or disease?

What does it profit us, and all these games,
Who, great and lonely ever shall be so
And though we always wander seek no aims?

To see such things do travelers leave their homes?
Yet he says much who utters “evening,”
A word from which grave thought and sadness flow

Like rich dark honey from the hollow combs.

—Translated by Michael Hamburger