CHAPTER 30
John T. Hamilton
Receptivity and Return
The metaphor of reception suggests that tradition is a gift, a cultural bestowal that has been handed down or handed over (tradita) from antiquity to modernity. As an endowment transmitted across the centuries, the textual and artistic materials that constitute the tradition bind one epoch to another and thereby aim to overcome the historical distance that nonetheless persists. Every tradition, like every bridge, is a link premised on separation, uniting by division. Whereas some might emphasize continuity, others might insist on discontinuity. Accordingly, from the standpoint of the receiving culture, the ancient legacies may either be positively venerated or forthrightly dismissed: either as models of imitation or as irrelevant modes of expression; either as a source of valid aesthetic criteria or as oppressive institutions that threaten to stunt true creativity. In both cases, however, the tradition, precisely as a gift, obliges the recipient to give something back in return. As soon as we recognize ourselves as being heirs to the wealth of the past, we find ourselves in a position that demands an authentic reply, be it in the form of acquiescence or in the form of rebellion. By engaging with the works of classical antiquity, we are invariably inscribed into a system of indebtedness and exchange; and it is our response within this grand system that defines the measure of our gratitude, and conversely, our possible ingratitude.
Pindar, the archaic Theban poet of the late sixth, early fifth century BC, clearly understood the nature and power of the gift. The four books of epinikia, the songs that Pindar composed to celebrate victors in the Panhellenic games—the only collection of complete poems that have survived the long passage of time—are replete with conceptions of poetry as driven by acts of donation, even if these compositions were written under commission (see Brown (Chapter 23) in this volume). For example, in the Fourth Nemean Ode, the poet acknowledges that his “excellence” (areta) was graciously received from “lord Destiny” (Potmos anax)—a divine power that he charitably passes on to his subject of praise. As mediator of this gift, elaborating on the conventional understanding of poetic skill as divinely inspired, the epinician singer broadcasts the brightness of his athlete’s strengths and accomplishments. Yet, in a parallel gesture, he must work to preserve this success from the envious intentions of the victor’s neighbors, who would prefer to bury the fame beneath a veil of obscurity:
Φθονερὰ δ᾽ἄλλος ἀνὴρ βλέπων
γνώμαν κενὰν σκότωι κυλίνδει
χαμαὶ πετοῖσαν. ἐμοὶ δ᾽ὁποίαν ἀρετάν
ἔδωκε Πότμος ἄναξ,
εὖ οἶδ᾽ ὅτι χρόνος ἕρπων πεπρωμέναν τελέσει.
(Nem. 4.39–43)
Another man, with envy in his eye,
rolls an empty thought in the dark
that falls to the ground. But whatever kind of excellence
lord Destiny has given me,
well I know that coming time will accomplish its fated end.1
The gods who grant success to the athletic competitors also give the singer the talent to proclaim the triumph, which can then be transmitted from one generation to the next. And the poetic victory, no less than the athletic accomplishments, would always seem to be menaced by envy, which receives these gifts begrudgingly and gleefully longs to see a fatal fall.
The reception of Pindar among German poets, thinkers, and scholars is likewise divided between those who would celebrate this fortunate gift and those who would disparage it. Generally speaking, Pindar’s devoted proponents would strive to save the poetry from many damaging accusations—from the charges of difficulty, incomprehensibility, obscurity, and embarrassing sycophancy. These valiant advocates almost always begin by citing the judgment of Quintilian, who definitively placed Pindar at the very head of the Greek lyric poets:
Of the nine lyric poets Pindar is by far the chief [princeps] in virtue of the magnificence of his spirit, his ideas, his figures and the most beautiful abundance of subjects and language [beatissima rerum verborumque copia] and eloquence which flows like a river; for which reason Horace rightly believed him to be imitable by none.
(Inst. Orat. 10.1.61) 2
With such an authoritative, legitimizing voice as Quintilian’s, latter-day Pindarists were convinced that they were championing a worthy cause. The ancient epinician poetry was clearly not a gift to be rebuffed. Pindar gives, and gives excessively. To reject this offering would be nothing less than a vile act of thanklessness, akin to the boorishness that Pindar consistently ascribed to the envious.
In turn, Quintilian legitimizes his own claim by alluding to the second poem of Horace’s fourth book of odes, the so-called Pindar Ode. More than any other text in the tradition, this poetic characterization has formed the basis of Pindar’s reputation and guided his long and complex reception across Western literary history. It is not unimportant that Horace prefaces his account with a serious note of caution:
Pindarum quisquis studet aemulari,
Iulle, ceratis ope Daedalea
nititur pennis vitreo daturus
nomina ponto.
monte decurrens velut amnis, imbres
quem super notas aluere ripas,
fervet immensusque ruit profundo
Pindarus ore,
laurea donandus Apollinari,
seu audacis nova dithyrambos
verba devolvit numerisque fertur
lege solutis
(Horace, Odes 4.2.1–12)
Pindar – whoever tries to emulate him,
Iullus, with the Deadalean strength of wax wings
he soars and is to give his name to the
glassy sea.
From the mount descending like a river, which
the rain has fed over the well-known banks,
he rages and boundless rushes with mouth
profound, Pindarus,
who must be given the Apollonian laurel,
whether through bold dithyrambs new
words he tumbles, borne by numbers
free from the law
The poem clearly follows the conventions of a literary refusal or recusatio, where the poet defines his own style in contrast to one being rejected.3 In this specific case, Pindar’s poetry is portrayed as far too powerful, far too excessive to warrant emulation. Hence, the opening verses articulate a blatant warning addressed to Iullus Antonius, the son of Marc Antony and Fulvia, to think twice before accepting the task of composing a Pindaric hymn to welcome Augustus back to Rome.4 Pindar’s greatness—what Quintilian comes to identify as the poet’s magnificentia and copia—represents a force so formidable that imitators are bound to fail, plummeting to their poetic death like Icarus fell to the sea. Tellingly, Icarus’s name is suppressed in these lines, having already vanished. Here, to give back according to the impossible demands of the Pindaric tradition means giving up one’s posterity to the unmarked grave of the sea—daturus nomina ponto (3–4).
Whereas the emulator of Pindar suffers a vertical fall into the calm and silent water, Pindar himself is a waterfall, thunderously loud and respecting no constraints (lege solutis, 12). The distinction between Horace’s first and second strophes is organized on the difference between Pindarum in the accusative as the impossible object of imitation and Pindarus in the nominative as the voluble subject of original poetry, rushing down from the mountainous heights and flooding the plain of ordinary limits. To characterize the Pindaric imitator as an Icarus is to consign imitation itself to the status of a follower: as the son of the artist Daedalus, Icarus cannot be an origin, because the paternal source will always have preceded him. Nonetheless, the daredevil son longs to surpass his provenance, wanting to break away from all restrictions yet suffering dearly for his audacity. In contrast, Pindar, as the nominative subject of the second strophe, does not face the threat of losing his nominal strength. While the Icarian disciple is to give (daturus) his name to the sea, Pindar as pure source is to be given (donandus, 9) the laurel of poetic accomplishment.
Yet Horace is not without recourse, insofar as his refusal creates a feasible path for latter-day poets to innovate without major risk. Specifically, he goes on to recommend that one should rest content with slighter, less sublime matters, that one should shy away from grandiose projects, abandon the lethal dream of emulating too great a model, and instead remain within the narrow confines of private, parochial affairs:
multa Dircaeum levat aura cycnum
tendit, Antoni, quotiens in altos
nubium tractus ego apis Matinae
more modoque
grata carpentis thyma per laborem
plurimum circa nemus uvidique
Tiburis ripas operosa parvus
carmina fingo.
(Odes 4.2.25–32)
Great is the breeze that lifts the Dircean swan
as often, Antonius, as he reaches for a high
tract in the clouds. I, in the Matine bee’s
manner and mode,
culling pleasing thyme by hard work
around the many groves and the banks
of the moist Tiber, I, a little man, form
songs full of labor.
Provided we read this recusatio as entirely earnest, Horace suggests that lyric poetry should be the result of diligent craftsmanship, which produces songs that neither impulsively “rage” (fervet) nor loudly “rush” (ruit) but rather display careful industriousness (operosa). Whereas Pindar’s verses exceed familiar conventions like a river floods over the “known banks” (notas ripas), the Horatian style attends to the “banks” (ripas) of familiar territory, hovering close to earth, rather than reach for the skies. What, then, would justify modern attempts at Pindaric grandiloquence? In addition to establishing the legitimacy of imitating Pindar, accepting the authority of Horace and Quintilian also poses the risk of branding his work as absolutely impossible. Vis-à-vis the tradition, therefore, the one who rejects to follow Pindar’s model need not be vilified as a merely envious ingrate but rather as someone fully aware that one could never possibly repay this gift in kind.
Pindar in the German Reformation
In terms of scholarship, Pindar’s difficulty, which is generally linked to his excessiveness—to the way his poetry transcends or transgresses the notas ripas of comprehensibility—constitutes an alluring challenge. On the title page of his full Latin translation of the epinicia, initially published in 1528 by Andreas Cratander in Basel, Johannes Lonicer first corroborates Quintilian by identifying the poet as “easily the chief of the most ancient lyricists” (poetae vetustissi lyricorum facile principis) and then promises to justify this ranking by including interpretations that should render Pindar, “hitherto understood by few” (a paucis hactenus intellectus), “more clearly and more vividly” (planior et illustrior).5 The poetry’s recalcitrance constitutes a wonderful gift for the valiant interpreter who is thereby able to demonstrate his acumen and intellectual brilliance.
In addition to teaching ancient Greek and Hebrew at the University of Marburg, Lonicer was also a staunch advocate of the Reformation, having translated Luther’s Schriften into Latin. It is worth underscoring this historical coincidence. Beginning with Cratander’s Greek edition of the epinicia in 1526—the text that Lonicer likely used for his Latin translation—Pindar’s extant work received consistent promulgation by scholars devoted to the evangelical cause. It was Huldrych Zwingli, the founder of the First Reformed Church at the Großmünster in Zurich, who brought the Greek edition to completion for Cratander’s press in Basel—a volume first prepared by Jakob Wiesendanger, known by his humanist name Ceporinus, which finally appeared with introductory and concluding essays by Zwingli. This tradition of clarification persisted through the first half of the sixteenth century, culminating in 1563 with the appearance of fresh Latin translations by Philipp Melanchthon, published posthumously by the theologian’s son-in-law, Kaspar Peucer, who included his own introductory letter.
The difficulty of Pindar’s poetry, the challenge that it posed for interpretation and understanding, certainly rhymes well with a long Augustinian tradition that welcomed the obscurity of sacred Scripture insofar as it perturbed habits of casual and careless reading. Obscurity incites the struggle to comprehend while reminding pious readers of the limits to penetrating the divine will. As Augustine explains, God may well have inserted the many enigmas and ambiguities into Scripture “to conquer pride by work [labore] and to combat disdain in our minds, to which those things that are easily discovered frequently seem to become worthless.”6 In an analogous way, the poetic difficulties of the epinicia might foster the kind of piety, morality, and serious contemplation that the Reformers generally hoped to promote. Thus, the Horatian warning can turn into a warm recommendation. To open his preface to Ceporinus’s 1526 edition, Zwingli modulates one of the tradition’s main themes: Pindarum quisquis studet, ut ab Horatiano carmine ordiar, commendare, ceratis Daedali pennis nititur, optime Lector (“Whoever is eager—so that I may begin weaving from the Horatian song—to recommend Pindar, soars with the waxen wings of Daedalus, dear Reader”).7 While retaining the Adonean rhythm that concludes the Sapphic stanza, Zwingli replaces Horace’s threat to the would-be Pindarizer with an appeal to the modern student: whereas the Latin poet conjures the sacrifice of one’s “name to the sea” (nomina ponto), the Swiss theologian celebrates the laudable courage of the earnest reader (optime Lector). Horace’s own response to the Pindaric flood—to cull the pleasing poetic thyme by means of hard work (per laborem) correlates to Augustine’s proposal “to conquer pride by work (labore).”
The reception of Pindar throughout the early German Reformation is exemplary for its capacity to cull the choicest verses. The method was established by Erasmus, whose first edition of Adagia from 1508 contains fifty-five “proverbs” or Sprichwörter gleaned from the epinicia and other extant verses. This process of decontextualization continued with Johannes Lonicer’s edition, which provided a detailed index of Sprüche that were usefully abstracted from the epinicia and presented as moral sententiae—a copious and invaluable resource for the student of rhetoric. The mining of the epinicia for gnomic utterances that could serve as valuable sententiae—the search for compact parcels of moral lessons that would not contradict Christian views—greatly contributed to Pindar’s privileged place among the humanists of the Reformation like Zwingli and Melanchthon. It was a distinctly pedagogical approach to the epinicia that flourished throughout the period. In 1556, following on the work of Lonicer, Michael Neander, Rector of the Ilfeld Gymnasium, published the Aristologia Pindarica Graecolatina, which facilitated transmission by highlighting the gnomic material and by condensing the epinicia’s digressive myths into prose paraphrases—a practice that would continue straight through into the nineteenth century.8 Concise and poignant, the gnomic statements that often punctuate the victory songs were particularly apt for plucking. In the Middle Ages, before any complete edition of the epinicia was available, the Pindaric tradition consisted mainly in manuscript anthologies of these precious gnomes.9 Pindar gains entrance to the Reformation period precisely as a sententious authority, and not as the effusive, impassioned genius that would subsequently fascinate poets and theorists of the eighteenth century. For the proverbial wisdom expressed in the gnomes is not only easily digestible and applicable, but can also be readily reconciled with Christian morality. Hence, at the conclusion of his introductory essay, Zwingli was able to confirm the poet’s sanctity and chastity: sancta et casta sunt omnia.10 In this regard, Pindar’s work is comparable to the divinely inspired Psalms of David—both corpora attest to a shared spirituality and truth.
Pindar’s continued rise to prominence among humanists across the German-speaking lands was fueled by an entirely revised Greek edition in 1616, prepared by Erasmus Schmid, Professor of Greek and Mathematics, who also provided new Latin translations, metrical analyses, and extensive commentary for each poem.11 As his title proclaims, Schmid’s keen philological eye led to over 600 emendations, which now made it possible for Pindar “to be read and understood.” At the head of the volume, Emericius Thurzo, the Rector of the University of Wittenberg, composed an encomium on the merits of the editor’s industriousness by rewriting Horace’s famous ode:
Pindarum quisquis fuit aemulatus
OLIM, is aptatis ope Daedalea
Nixus est pennis, vitreo daturus
Nomina ponto.
Pindarum qui NUNC studet aemulari,
Ille constructis ope SCHMIDIANA
Usus antennis, celebri daturus
Nomina Famae est.
Monte decurrens velut amnis, imbres
Quem super notas aluere ripas,
Eluit sordes, Lyriciqui; mendas
SCHMIDIUS aufert,
Laurea donandus Apollinari,
PINDARUM cuius licet aemulari
Ductibus; cuius studio & LYCOPHRON
Luce fruetur.12
Whoever was an emulator of Pindar
ONCE, relied on feathers fastened by
Daedalean strength, and was to give his name
To the glassy sea.
He who is NOW eager to emulate Pindar,
Using a mast built by SCHMIDIAN strength,
He is to give his name to
Celebrated Fame.
From the mount descending ike a river, which
The rain has fed over the well-known banks,
SCHMID has washed away the dirt for the lyricist,
And led him from faults,
Deserving the laurel of Apollo,
He, under whose leadership one may emulate PINDAR,
Through his work, even LYCOPHRON
Will enjoy the light.
The twin branches of philological labor—textual criticism and commentary—here work together to prepare a sounder basis for emulation. Scholarship has now become the rushing flood that washes away the confused dreck and scribal errors that hitherto afflicted the poet’s reception. Schmid, however, is not only the cleansing river but also a well-masted vessel that bears disciples safely along the waters. Indeed, in Thurzo’s characterization, with Schmid at the helm, it is now fully licit for modern writers to turn to Pindar as a fruitful model—licet aemulari. Such philological expertise may even make an ancient writer as notoriously obscure as Lycophron perfectly legible.
Overconfidence, however, always risks hubris. For more pious readers, Augustine’s description of scriptural difficulty should uphold the cautionary tone of Horace’s lines. Accordingly, Philipp Melanchthon, writing a half-century before the appearance of Schmid’s edition, reminds would-be interpreters of interpretive limits:
Pindarum quisquis volet explicare,
Ille ceratis ope Daedalea
Nititur pennis, viteo daturus
Nomina ponto.
Whover wants to explicate Pindar,
That man soars with the Daedalean strength
Of wax wings, and is to give his name to the
Glistening water.13
Here, the case of the Icarian explicator presents a doubled risk. On the one hand, there is the threat that sense will remain forever inaccessible, condemning the reader to a vertiginous pool of bafflement. On the other hand, however, there is the more implicit risk of achieving perfect sense, plunging the interpreter into fatal silence after every problem has been resolved, after every difficulty has been elucidated. Absolute lucidity, which invites complacency and careless security, is no less dangerous than absolute obscurity. As Melanchthon’s close friend, Martin Luther, proclaimed: Nihil est pestilentius securitate—“Nothing is more pestilential than security.”14 Salvation requires the care (cura)—the assiduous attentiveness—that comes with constant resistance and repeated frustration.
All the same, the clarity of Schmid’s comprehensive and comprehensible edition emboldened court-appointed poets of the seventeenth century to adopt the triadic form and the capacious content of the Pindaric ode for encomiastic commissions from their patrons. The modern model for these enterprises was Pierre de Ronsard, who proudly styled himself—in a thoroughly Horatian manner—as the great importer of ancient genres: “le premier de France/J’ai pindarizé.”15 The claim openly defies the ancient warning:
Par une chute subite
Encor je n’ai fait nommer
Du nom de Ronsard le mer
Bien que Pindare j’imite.16
By a sudden fall
Still I will not name
The sea with the name Ronsard
Even though it is Pindar I imitate.
Such daring represents a poetic alternative to the pedagogically motivated promulgation of Pindar’s more sober sententiae. The first German writer to accept the call was Georg Rudolf Weckherlin, Court Poet to Count Johann Friedrich of Württemberg. Weckherlin’s 1618 collection of Gedichte features four Pindaric Odes, organized in the tripartite scheme of strophe, antistrophe, and epode (Satz, Gegensatz, and Zusatz), which would gain increasing currency across the German-speaking territories, attracting major poets of the German Baroque, including Andreas Gryphius, who eventually published fourteen Pindaric Odes between the years 1643 and 1657. The popularity of the new format was already confirmed by Martin Opitz who, in his Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey of 1624—a mere six years after Weckherlin’s publication—recommended imitating Pindar in the manner established by Ronsard and the poets of the French Pléiade. The conceit throughout is an appeal to sublime poetic inspiration, to the furor poeticus, which positions the modern poet within a continuous stream reaching back to the archaic source. Gryphius, for example, does not hesitate to present himself as a sacred vates or “poet-priest,” underscoring and intensifying the religious significance of his verses, while assuming the capacity of channeling the inundating flood of enthusiastic song to those eager to receive it.
Neoclassicism and Enthusiasm
In the early decades of the following century, despite his pronounced admiration for French Classicism, Johann Christoph Gottsched despaired over the prevalence of the Pindaric mode, which he had come to regard as a license to compose carelessly: “Now I certainly know that one used to consider the Pindaric odes as belonging to a very clever and sublime genre; but some know no better way to attain this, as when they write completely dark, broken, and mutilated German.”17 Gottsched accuses those lesser talents who believe they are writing under the cover of enthusiasm—a delusion that, in his view, achieves nothing more than an troubling assault on the German language. Although Pindar may be blamed for composing poetry that violated conventions of grammar, it is because the sublime nobility of his thoughts overstretched the fragility of the language. Indeed, Gottsched underscores Pindar’s importance for developing the encomiastic style, and supplied his own German translations of Olympian 4 and 12 in order to provide a profitable model. Unfortunately, many Pindarizers up to now could not benefit from Gottsched’s instruction. Instead, these second-rate versifiers were content to imitate the damaging verbal and grammatical effects, aping Pindar’s “errors” yet without any good reason. Whereas Pindar failed nobly and brilliantly in his attempt to contain sublime ideas in his poetry, latter-day Pindaric poets all too often feigned sublimity by proffering broken language. Other critics would go one step further and consider the source itself. In his Großes Universal-Lexikon (1740), Johann Heinrich Zedler does not hesitate to ascribe responsibility to the ancient model: “Pindar is a parasite [Schmarotzer] who was very affected in his verses and whose thoughts hung together poorly. At times he may well not have known what he wanted to say.”18 Fully dependent on the generosity of wealthy personages, Pindar, no less than his modern-day imitators, could be charged with the kind of poetic enthusiasm that may gratify the vanity of the patrons yet hardly impress the sober intelligence of rational critics.19 For the latter, the vatic could all too easily slip into the vapid.
These appeals to rational judgment, which were perfectly congruent with the ideals of the burgeoning enlightenment, came to be targeted by a group of poets and thinkers who refused to sacrifice enthusiasm for sobriety. In 1749, the Bremer Beiträge, a journal founded a few years before by Karl Christian Gärtner, Wilhelm Rabener, and Johann Andreas Cramer, published the first three cantos of Der Messias, an epic poem penned by a young man devoted to the divine power that ostensibly inspired him.20 Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock composed his poem on The Messiah out of sheer admiration for John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which had recently been translated into German by Johann Jakob Bodmer in 1742. Bodmer and his Swiss colleague, Johann Jakob Breitinger, had long championed a poetics of “enthusiasm” (Begeisterung), which Gottsched found altogether menacing—to the point where, in 1741, Gottsched published a bitter satire à clef, Der Dichterkrieg (“The War of the Poets”), attacking Bodmer and Breitinger as the ridiculous duo, Merbod and Greibertin. At the beginning of his poetic career, Klopstock vehemently rejected Gottsched’s approach and instead warmly embraced his circle of enthusiastic friends:
Wie Hebe, kühn und jugendlich ungestüm,
Wie mit dem goldnen Köcher Latonens Sohn,
Unsterblich, sing’ ich meine Freunde
Feyrend in mächtigen Dithyramben.
Willst du zu Strophen werden, o Lied? oder
Ununterwürfig, Pindars Gesängen gleich,
Gleich Zevs erhabnem trunknem Sohne,
Frey aus der schaffenden Sel enttaumeln?
(Klopstock, “Auf meine Freunde,” lines 1–8)21
As Hebe, boldly and youthfully impetuously,
As with the golden quiver Latona’s son,
Immortally, I sing of my friends
Celebrating in powerful dithyrambs.
Do you want to become strophes, o Song? Or
Unsubmissively, like Pindar’s songs,
Like Zeus’ sublime drunk Son,
To tumble freely out of the creating soul?
Klopstock’s Ode “To his Friends” of 1747 unabashedly aligns the poet’s mission with the ancient priestly office of the vates, who transmits the celebratory strains that come directly from the gods. However, choosing the form of this dithyrambic transmission falls to the singer—a choice between two options: either in the free rhythms attributed to Pindar or in the measured strophes ascribed to Alcaeus.22 The belief that Pindar’s versification abandoned regular metrical patterns is essentially based on the complexity of the prosody, the underlying systematicity of which would not be discovered until August Boeckh published his comprehensive analysis in 1814.23 In Klopstock’s eighteenth century, the popular characterization of Pindar as a freely improvising songsmith derives directly from the remark in Horace’s Pindar Ode that the poetry consisted of “numbers free from law” (numeris lege solutis). This freedom of expression ultimately correlates to a conception of genius that serves as the antithesis of the rule-bound poetics (Regelpoetik) promulgated by Gottsched’s classicism. Thus, whereas Zedler could write Pindar off as a shallow, sycophantic “parasite” enslaved to patronage, Klopstock and his circle would promote the Theban bard as the very paradigm of poetic autonomy. How else to account for the obvious obscurity of Pindar’s style, his mythic digressions and his wildly errant imagination, if not as a bold sign of the poet’s disdain for all external pressures?
Revolutions
The purported freedom or unbounded quality of Pindar’s verses would corroborate this emancipation from all conventions, an inspired transcendence of quotidian experience. For the generations of poets who were nourished by Klopstock’s innovative experiments, the Pindaric mode came to be regarded as a powerful means for breaking with the traditional constraints of court patronage and occasion. Precisely because the ancient victory songs were commissioned by wealthy oligarchs, Pindar showed all the more strongly how a poet might exceed the given assignment. Endowed with divine might, he obeyed nothing save his own genius. Magnificent and difficult, sublime and obscure, Pindar elevated poetry to a most holy level. Soaring far above the crowd, neglecting mere earthbound service, the vates was glorified. In the concisely dynamic formulation of Jochen Schmidt, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Pindar became the “tradition for breaking tradition”—a model for every genius bent on eschewing all models.24
Accordingly, Pindar’s poetry became exemplary for the Sturm und Drang—the rebellious “Storm and Stress” movement that stirred the hearts of young German writers in the last third of the eighteenth century. In his letter to Johann Gottfried Herder—one of the primary theorists of this complex movement—Johann Wolfgang Goethe, at the ebullient age of twenty-two, wrote of his latest infatuation: Ich wohne jetzt in Pindar—
I am now dwelling in Pindar, and if the glory of the palace were to make one happy, then I would have to be so. Whenever he shoots his arrows one after the other toward his goal in the clouds, of course I still stand there and gape; but all the while I feel what Horace could express, what Quintilian praises, and whatever is active in me comes to life, for I feel nobility and know purpose.25
On the one hand, Goethe’s immersive experience elicits unqualified admiration, a passive disposition that leaves the young man standing still and gaping, while on the other hand, through the mediation of Horace and Quintilian, something internal comes to life, a poetic mission, and the determination to achieve it.26 By dwelling in Pindar, Goethe already appears to assume a degree of agency, as if the epinicia were a residence receiving an eager guest or perhaps a house haunted by an alien presence, as if Goethe’s feelings, his imagination and his thoughts were the content for which Pindar’s language now serves as formal articulation. As the letter proceeds, Goethe gathers fragments from the victory songs—from the Second Olympian and Third Nemean Ode—recombining the Greek terms into a patchwork capable of transmitting something new, something modern. In unaccented letters, Goethe transcribes: “Ειδως φυα, ψεφηνος ανηρ, μυριαν αρεταν ατελει νοω γευται, ουποτ ατρεκει κατεβα ποδι, μαθοντες [Knowing by nature, obscure man, countless feats with ineffectual mind he tastes, never with a sure foot he enters, learners].” Through the art of selective citation, Goethe shakes the words loose from their original contexts, liberating them from their initial occasion, from their original historical, social and cultural circumstances, in order to make them communicate a fresh message replete with pathos—“These words have gone through my soul like swords” (255–256). Goethe piously allows the Greek language to glow on the page, untransliterated and untranslated, emphasizing its material presence. In accepting this gift from Greek antiquity, Goethe sacrifices his own vernacular which, as Horace described it, plummets namelessly into the sea. Yet it is precisely through this fall, by surrendering oneself to the dark waters, that a more authentic voice—a genial voice—promises to emerge.
Goethe’s early lyric poetry, dating around the time of his Pindar studies, continues the trajectory already prepared by Klopstock’s hymnic prosody as well as the kabbalistic prose of Johann Georg Hamann and the reflections of his most famous acolyte, Herder. Throughout, the ancient victory songs provide inspiration for song’s victory over threatening conditions, for example in Wandrers Sturmlied, which Goethe composed in free verse in 1772:
Wen du nicht verlässest, Genius,
Nicht der Regen, nicht der Sturm
Haucht ihm Schauer übers Herz.
Wen du nicht verlässest, Genius,
Wird der Regenwolke
Wird dem Schloßensturm
Entgegen singen
Wie die Lerche
Du dadroben.27
Whom you do not forsake, Genius,
Not the rain, not the storm
Breathes horror over his heart.
Whom you do not forsake, Genius,
Will against the rainclouds
Will against the hailstorm
Sing out
Like the lark,
You, up there.
The poetic voice is discovered within the roar of the torrent, responding boldly to the inclement weather like the high-flying lark that sings during raging storms. Both the theme and the syntactic form are borrowed from Horace’s Ode 4.3—that is, from the poem that directly follows the famous Pindar-Ode: Quem tu, Melpomene, semel/nascentem placido lumine videris (“Whom you, Melpomene, once/looked upon with peaceful eyes at his birth,” 4.3, lines 1–2). It is noteworthy that, in this poem, Horace makes frequent allusions to the epinicia, again in the manner of refusal: Not by “Isthmian toil” (labor Isthmius, 3), not by a victory with an Achaean chariot (curru Achaico, 5), but rather by means of the gentle waters flowing past the fertile Tibur (sed quae Tibur aquae fertile praefluunt, 10) will the Roman poet gain renown. Like Horace, then, instead of tracing the fatal Icarian path of simple imitation, Goethe withstands the Pindaric flood and emerges with poetic innovation. At the conclusion of Wandrers Sturmlied, the poet claims to have acquired the “inner glow” that once inspired Pindar—a sublime achievement won by residing in Pindar’s language rather than drowning in his verbal maelstrom:
Vater Bromius,
Du bist Genius,
Jahrhunderts Genius,
Bist, was innre Glut
Pindarn war,
Was der Welt
Phöb Apoll ist.
(lines 52–58)
Father Bromius,
You are Genius,
The century’s Genius,
You are what the inner glow
Was to Pindar,
What Phoebus Apollo
Is to the world.
Having acquired this internal fire, the poet now possesses the genial power that can fertilize the plain of human existence and propagate culture. In Mahomets Gesang, dating roughly from the same period, we see how Goethe appropriates the Horatian image of the “river descending from the mount” (amnis monte decurrens) to celebrate poetry’s potential, here figured as a bursting “mountain spring” (Felsenquell, line 1) that saturates the valley below and causes beautiful flowers to grow.
Poetics of Translation
The path leading toward this effusion of genius had been well laid with decades of intensified efforts to translate the epinicia adequately into German. Following upon Klopstock’s development of the hymn and his experiments in free verse, we find figures like Johann Jakob Steinbrüchel, a philologist closely associated with the Zurich critics Bodmer and Breitinger who, in 1759, translated a selection of the victory songs into poetic prose. The governing conceit here is that the translator is equally inspired to exercise great freedoms, abandoning literalism and emphasizing all the indices of enthusiasm that Klopstock had underscored. To take a single brief example, at the end of the opening strophe of the First Olympian Ode, Pindar celebrates Olympia as the site the produces legendary hymns. In Schmid’s versification we read:
ὅθεν ὁ πολύφατος
ὕμνος ἀμφιβάλλεται
σοφῶν μητίεσσι.
(Ol. 1, Schmid, ed., lines 13–15)
from there [sc. Olympia] the famous
hymn occupies
wise men’s thoughts.
The verb ἀμφιβάλλω literally denotes “wrap around,” but is often used in the figurative sense of “occupy” or “concern.” Steinbrüchel takes the metaphor even further by translating the verb as begeistern (“to inspire, to fill with enthusiasm”)—Sie [die Olympischen Kämpfe] begeistern die Weisen zu jenen prächtigen Hymnen (“They [the Olympian contest] inspire the wise men to those splendid hymns”). Rather than serve as the origin of songs that engage thought, Olympia—in Steinbrüchel’s rendering—becomes a source that provokes the continuation of singing.
Steinbrüchel’s project favorably caught the eye of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing who in his thirty-first Letter on Recent Literature, cited this example from the First Olympian together with commentary:
Pindar has actually awakened a young, clever mind in Switzerland, someone who wants to make us more familiar with the enthusiasm [Begeisterung] of the Theban singer. The matter is highly difficult; and it is infinitely easier to write a scholarly commentary on the entirety of Pindar than to translate beautifully one single ode. […] It is, however, no literal translation, for Cowley says: “If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one Madman had translated another.”28
Abraham Cowley’s warning, which could be regarded as a modern variant of Horace’s cautionary tale against emulating Pindar, would not deter German scholars and poets from venturing more exact, more literal translations—each reflecting various intentions. For Christian Tobias Damm, who produced the first complete German translation of the epinicia in 1770–1771, the primary interest remained purely pedagogical. In the opinion of this formidable philologist, who once tutored Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Ancient Greek, the Pindaric corpus served as an outstanding resource for building vocabulary, yet should be treated guardedly, lest one flirt too closely with madness. Thus, Damm dissuaded Moses Mendelsohn from expending too much time on this material: “Don’t do it! … [Pindar’s] odes are nothing but pretentious, overblown haze [hochtrabender schwülstiger Dunst], and would’t give you any pleasure”—all the same, “the chap has really superb words!”29 In contrast, the subsequent translations by Friedich Gedike, published in 1777, clearly appreciate the aesthetic virtues of the poetry: According to Gedike, Damm’s expert knowledge of Ancient Greek was indispensable for understanding Pindar, yet it takes a person profoundly sensitive to the poetic capacities of German to make him speak to a modern audience.30
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt continued this praiseworthy project. To his teacher, Christian Gottlob Heyne, who published an important new edition of Pindar’s victory songs, Humboldt writes:
At present I really have an inclination only for Pindar, and if this preference endures, I hope some time to produce a complete translation of his works. … I have undertaken to remain as faithful as possible to the meter of the original; this does not seem to me at all unimportant, since such a translation is not designed merely to give pleasure to the dilettante who can scarcely understand it, but rather has the purpose to test his vital energies on a difficult work of art.31
Like Goethe in his youth, Humboldt was fascinated with the material properties of Pindar’s Greek, which supplied a productive recalcitrance. By rendering these foreign patterns of thought and expression into German discourse, the vernacular would be expanded. It would instigate a process of true Bildung, forming and reforming the native tongue into a vital means of communication. And it was Friedrich Hölderlin who would bear this task of verbal expansion and amplification to a dangerous extreme by attempting to import the complex rhythms and the idiomatic syntax of the Ancient Greek into German—nearly to the breaking point. Around 1800, Hölderlin began to translate the epinicia, adhering as much as possible to the metrical patterns he detected in the original.32 As his poetological reflections reveal, Hölderlin was concerned with penetrating the gleaming classical surface of the Greek in order to unleash the sacred fire that had been suppressed.33
Subsequently, now on the brink of mental collapse, Hölderlin turned to the Pindar fragments, which alone survived from the many books of hymns, paeans, and dithyrambs. When the translations were rediscovered and published at the beginning of the twentieth century, the work would either be regarded as the product of a heroic struggle or as the symptoms of complete madness or both. The edition of Hölderlin’s Pindarübertragungen was published in 1911 by Norbert von Hellingrath, a student of German Literature and Classical Philology, and a devoted member of the circle around the charismatic poet, Stefan George. Thus, Pindar endowed a new generation of modernists bent on revolution. For more sober, scientific scholars like Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff—Friedrich Nietzsche’s one-time nemesis—the Pindaric tradition remains distant:
[Pindar’s] world is completely foreign to us; its customs and its poetic traditions are for us unappealing, if not offensive. He himself is not very cultivated [kein reicher Geist]. He knows nothing about the power and greatness of the fatherland, nothing about progress and where it is headed.34
In the views of this staunch philologist, Pindar may give us much to learn, yet we should be cautious of the kind of overindulgence that ruined minds like Nietzsche’s. The tragic case of Hölderlin should suffice as clear warning against giving ourselves over to the divine fire that one might feel simmering at the hearth of Pindar’s verses. If Goethe temporally resided in Pindar in preparation for his long and successful poetic journey, Hölderlin stayed behind, never to emerge. In German, the gift of song may be beneficial, but may also threaten to become a deadly poison—ein tödliches Gift.
FURTHER READING
For a broad overview of Pindaric reception in the European tradition, including the historical development of the Pindaric Ode, see Fitzgerald 1987 and Revard 2009. On the theoretical and poetological ramifications of this tradition, see Shankman 1988, Hamilton 2004, and Maslov 2015. Excellent examples of the breadth and variety of modern Pindarism may be found in Agòcs, Carey, and Rawles 2012. In terms of Pindaric scholarship, Young 1964 provides an insightful account of interpretive trends throughout the modern period.
Notes
1 Pindar: Nemean Odes, Isthmian Odes, Fragments, William H. Race, ed. and trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 38–39.
2 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
3 On Horace’s Odes 4.2 and the significance of the recusatio, see Wimmel 1965 and Syndikus 1972 /3, vol. 2: 296–297.
4 On the historical context of Horace’s poem, see Putnam 1986: 51.
5 Pindari poetae vetustissimi, Lyricorum facile principis, Olympia, Pythia, Nemea, Isthmia, per Ioan. Lonicerum latinitate donata (Basel: Andreas Cratander, 1528/1535).
6 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, D. W. Robertson, trans. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 2.6, 7.
7 Huldrych Zwingli, Praefatio et Epistola to Jakob Ceporinus’s edition (Basel: Cratander, 1526), in Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, Emil Egli and Georg Finsler, ed. (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1927), 867.
8 See Gelzer 1981: 99; and Revard 2001: 9–49.
9 See Irogoin 1952: 136 and 261.
10 Zwingli, Praefatio et Epistola, 873.
11 Erasmus Schmid, ed. Pindari Lyricorum principis, plus quam sexcentis in locis emaculati, ut jam legi et intelligi possit, illustrati versione nova fideli (Wittenberg: Zacharias Schuler, 1616).
12 Schmid, ed. Pindari Lyricorum principis, cited in Schmitz 1993: 95.
13 Melanchthon’s parody was published in Michael Neander, Aristologia Pindarica Graecolatina (Basel: Ludwig Lucius, 1556).
14 Martin Luther, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe), 34 vols. (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883), 25: 331.
15 Pierre de Ronsard, Odes 2.2, “A Caliope.” 36–37, cited in Silver 1981: 269. Ronsard is making a clear allusion to Horace, Epistles 1.19.21–22.
16 Ronsard, Odes [1550], in Œuvres complètes, vol 1, Paul Laumonier, ed. (Paris: Didier, 1959), 118.
17 Johann Christoph Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst [1730; 4th ed. 1751] (Facsimile reprint: Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962), 431.
18 Johann Heinrich Zedler, Großes vollständiges Universal-Lexikon aller Wissenschafften und Künste [1740], s.v. “Ode,” 447. On the differing critical opinions concerning Pindar, see Vöhler 2005: 1–10.
19 On the distinction between enthusiasm and critique in relation to the Pindaric tradition, see Lempicki 1930/31.
20 For an historical overview of the Bremer Beiträge, see Schröder 1956.
21 Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Oden, vol. 1, Franz Muncker und Jaro Pawel, ed. (Stuttgart: Göschen 1889), 8.
22 Cf. Vöhler 1997: 52.
23 August Boeckh, De metris Pindari, libri III. quibus praecepta artis metricae & musices graecorum docentur; cum notis criticis in Pindari carmina (Leipzig: Weigel, 1814).
24 Schmidt 1985, vol. 1: 179–192.
25 Goethe to Herder, July 10, 1772, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 28: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, Karl Eibl, ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), 255.
26 For an extended reading of this letter, see Hamilton 2004: 237–248.
27 Goethe, Wandrers Sturmlied, lines 1–9, in Goethe, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, 14 vols., Erich Trunz, ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1998), vol. 1: 33.
28 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, No. 31, in Lessing, Werke und Briefe, vol. 4: Werke: 1758–1759, Günter Grimm, ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker), 524–525.
29 Damm to Moses Mendelssohn, cited in Vöhler 2005: 96.
30 Friedrich Gedike, “Ankündigung und Probe einer Übersezung des Pindar in Prose,” in Deutsches Museum (1777): 373–383; here 374.
31 Humboldt to Christian Heyne, July 8, 1793; cited in Sweet 1978: 132.
32 For a detailed analysis of Hölderlin’s Grosse Pindarübertragung, see Seifert 1998.
33 Cf. Hölderlin’s key statements in his letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff, December 4, 1801, in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 3 vols., Michael Knaupp, ed. (Munich: Hanser, 1992), vol. 2, 913–914. For a full analysis, see Szondi 1983.
34 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1922: 463.