The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866

Where the two, together turning,
Meet, the rounded heaven is burning
Rosy-bright in one celestial brand!"

I have not the original edition of the "Oriental Roses," but I believe the volume contained the greater portion of Rückert's marvellous "Ghazels." Count Platen, it is true, had preceded him by one year, but his adaptation of the Persian metre to German poetry—light and graceful and melodious as he succeeded in making it—falls far short of Rückert's infinite richness and skill. One of the latter's "Ghazels" contains twenty-six variations of the same rhyme, yet so subtly managed, so colored with the finest reflected tints of Eastern rhetoric and fancy, that the immense art implied in its construction is nowhere unpleasantly apparent. In fact, one dare not say that these poems are all art. In the Oriental measures the poet found the garment which best fitted his own mind. We are not to infer that he did not move joyously, and, after a time, easily, within the limitations which, to most authors, would have been intolerable fetters.

In 1826 appeared his translation of the Makamât of Hariri. The old silk-merchant of Bosrah never could have anticipated such an immortality. The word Makamât means "sessions," (probably the Italian conversazione best translates it,) but is applied to a series of short narratives, or rather anecdotes, told alternately in verse and rhymed prose, with all the brilliance of rhetoric, the richness of alliteration, antithesis, and imitative sound, and the endless grammatical subtilties of which the Arabic language is capable. The work of Hariri is considered the unapproachable model of this style of narrative throughout all the East. Rückert called his translation "The Metamorphoses of Abou-Seyd of Serudj,"—the name of the hero of the story. In this work he has shown the capacity of one language to reproduce the very spirit of another with which it has the least affinity. Like the original, the translation can never be surpassed: it is unique in literature.

As the acrobat who has mastered every branch of his art, from the spidery contortions of the India-rubber man to the double somersault and the flying trapeze, is to the well-developed individual of ordinary muscular habits, so is the language of Rückert in this work to the language of all other German authors. It is one perpetual gymnastic show of grammar, rhythm, and fancy. Moods, tenses, antecedents, appositions, whirl and flash around you, to the sound of some strange, barbaric music. Closer and more rapidly they link, chassez, and "cross hands," until, when you anticipate a hopeless tangle, some bold, bright word leaps unexpectedly into the throng, and resolves it to instant harmony. One's breath is taken away, and his brain made dizzy, by any half-dozen of the "Metamorphoses." In this respect the translation has become a representative work. The Arabic title, misunderstood, has given birth to a German word. Daring and difficult rhymes are now frequently termed Makamen in German literary society.

Rückert's studies were not confined to the Arabic and Persian languages; he also devoted many years to the Sanskrit. In 1828 appeared his translation of "Nal and Damayanti," and some years later, "Hamasa, or the oldest Arabian Poetry," and "Amrilkaïs, Poet and King." In addition to these translations, he published, between the years 1835 and 1840, the following original poems, or collections of poems, on Oriental themes,—"Legends of the Morning-Land" (2 vols.), "Rustem and Sohrab," and "Brahminical Stories." These poems are so bathed in the atmosphere of his studies, that it is very difficult to say which are his own independent conceptions, and which the suggestions of Eastern poets. Where he has borrowed images or phrases, (as sometimes from the Koran,) they are woven, without any discernible seam, into the texture of his own brain.

Some of Rückert's critics have asserted that his extraordinary mastery of all the resources of language operated to the detriment of his poetical faculty,—that the feeling to be expressed became subordinate to the skill displayed by expressing it in an unusual form. They claim, moreover, that he produced a mass of sparkling fragments, rather than any single great work. I am convinced, however, that the first charge is unfounded, basing my opinion upon my knowledge of the poet's simple, true, tender nature, which I learned to appreciate during my later visits to his home. After the death of his wife, the daughter who thereafter assumed her mother's place in the household wrote me frequent accounts of her father's grief and loneliness, enclosing manuscript copies of the poems in which he expressed his sorrow. These poems are exceedingly sweet and touching; yet they are all marked by the same flexile use of difficult rhythms and unprecedented rhymes. They have never yet been published, and I am therefore withheld from translating any one of them, in illustration.

Few of Goethe's minor songs are more beautiful than his serenade, O gib' vom weichen Pfühle, where the interlinked repetitions are a perpetual surprise and charm; yet Rückert has written a score of more artfully constructed and equally melodious songs. His collection of amatory poems entitled Liebesfrühling contains some of the sunniest idyls in any language. That his genius was lyrical and not epic, was not a fault; that it delighted in varied and unusual metres, was an exceptional—perhaps in his case a phenomenal—form of development; but I do not think it was any the less instinctively natural. One of his quatrains runs:—

"Much I make as make the others;
Better much another man
Makes than I; but much, moreover,
Make I which no other can."

His poetical comment on the translation of Hariri is given in prose:—"He who, like myself, unfortunate man! is philologist and poet in the same person, cannot do better than to translate as I do. My Hariri has illustrated how philology and poetry are competent to stimulate and to complete each other. If thou, reader, wilt look upon this hybrid production neither too philologically nor over-poetically, it may delight and instruct thee. That which is false in philology thou wilt attribute to poetic license, and where the poetry is deficient, thou wilt give the blame to philology."

The critics who charge Rückert with never having produced "a whole," have certainly forgotten one of his works,—"The Wisdom of the Brahmin, a Didactic Poem, in Fragments." The title somewhat describes its character. The "fragments" are couplets, in iambic hexameter, each one generally complete in itself, yet grouped in sections by some connecting thought, after the manner of the stanzas of Tennyson's "In Memoriam." There are more than six thousand couplets, in all, divided into twenty books,—the whole forming a mass of poetic wisdom, coupled with such amazing wealth of illustration, that this one volume, if sufficiently diluted, would make several thousand "Proverbial Philosophies." It is not a book to read continuously, but one which, I should imagine, no educated German could live without possessing. I never open its pages without the certainty of refreshment. Its tone is quietistic, as might readily be conjectured, but it is the calm of serene reflection, not of indifference. No work which Rückert ever wrote so strongly illustrates the incessant activity of his mind. Half of these six thousand couplets are terse and pithy enough for proverbs, and their construction would have sufficed for the lifetime of many poets.

With the exception of "Kaiser Barbarossa," and two or three other ballads, the amatory poems of Rückert have attained the widest popularity among his countrymen. Many of the love-songs have been set to music by Mendelssohn and other composers. Their melody is of that subtile, delicate quality which excites a musician's fancy, suggesting the tones to which the words should be wedded. Precisely for this reason they are most difficult to translate. The first stanza may, in most cases, be tolerably reproduced; but as it usually contains a refrain, which is repeated to a constantly varied rhyme, throughout the whole song or poem, the labor at first becomes desperate, and then impossible. An example (the original of which I possess, in the author's manuscript) will best illustrate this particular difficulty. Here the metre and the order of rhyme have been strictly preserved, except in the first and third lines.

"He came to meet me
In rain and thunder;
My heart 'gan beating
In timid wonder:
Could I guess whether
Thenceforth together
Our paths should run, so long asunder?

"He came to meet me
In rain and thunder,
With guile to cheat me,—
My heart to plunder.
Was't mine he captured?
Or his I raptured?
Half-way both met, in bliss and wonder!

"He came to meet me
In rain and thunder:
Spring-blessings greet me
Spring-blossoms under.
What though he leave me?
No partings grieve me,—
No path can lead our hearts asunder!"

The Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan, (whose translations from the German comprise both the best and the worst specimens I have yet found,) has been successful in rendering one of Rückert's ghazels. I am specially tempted to quote it, on account of the curious general resemblance (accidental, no doubt) which Poe's "Lenore" bears to it.

"I saw her once, a little while, and then no more:
'T was Eden's light on earth awhile, and then no more.
Amid the throng she passed along the meadow-floor;
Spring seemed to smile on earth awhile, and then no more,
But whence she came, which way she went, what garb she wore,
I noted not; I gazed awhile, and then no more.

"I saw her once, a little while, and then no more:
'T was Paradise on earth awhile, and then no more.
Ah! what avail my vigils pale, my magic lore?
She shone before mine eyes awhile, and then no more.
The shallop of my peace is wrecked on Beauty's shore;
Near Hope's fair isle it rode awhile, and then no more.

"I saw her once, a little while, and then no more:
Earth looked like Heaven a little while, and then no more.
Her presence thrilled and lighted to its inmost core
My desert breast a little while, and then no more.
So may, perchance, a meteor glance at midnight o'er
Some ruined pile a little while, and then no more.

"I saw her once, a little while and then no more:
The earth was Eden-land awhile, and then no more.
O, might I see but once again, as once before,
Through chance or wile, that shape awhile, and then no more!
Death soon would heal my grief: this heart, now sad and sore,
Would beat anew, a little while, and then no more!"

Here, nevertheless, something is sacrificed. The translation is by no means literal, and lacks the crispness and freshness of Oriental antithesis. Rückert, I fear, will never be as fortunate as Hariri of Bosrah.

When, in 1856, I again visited Germany, I received a friendly message from the old poet, with a kind invitation to visit him. Late in November I found him, apparently unchanged in body and spirit,—simple, enthusiastic, and, in spite of his seclusion, awake to all the movements of the world. One of his married sons was then visiting him, so that the household was larger and livelier than usual; but, as he sat, during the evening, in his favorite arm-chair, with pipe and beer, he fell into the same brilliant, wise strain of talk, undisturbed by all the cheerful young voices around him.

The conversation gradually wandered away from the Orient to the modern languages of Europe. I remarked the special capacity of the German for descriptions of forest scenery,—of the feeling and sentiment of deep, dark woods, and woodland solitudes.

"May not that be," said he, "because the race lived for centuries in forests? A language is always richest in its epithets for those things with which the people who speak it are most familiar. Look at the many terms for 'horse' and 'sword' in Arabic."

"But the old Britons lived also in forests," I suggested.

"I suspect," he answered, "while the English language was taking shape, the people knew quite as much of the sea as of the woods. You ought, therefore, to surpass us in describing coast and sea-scenery, winds and storms, and the motion of waves."

The idea had not occurred to me before, but I found it to be correct.

Though not speaking English, Rückert had a thorough critical knowledge of the language, and a great admiration of its qualities. He admitted that its chances for becoming the dominant tongue of the world were greater than those of any other. Much that he said upon this subject interested me greatly at the time, but the substance of it has escaped me.

When I left, that evening, I looked upon his cheerful, faithful wife for the last time. Five years elapsed before I visited Coburg again, and she died in the interval. In the summer of 1861 I had an hour's conversation with him, chiefly on American affairs, in which he expressed the keenest interest. He had read much, and had a very correct understanding of the nature of the struggle. He was buried in his studies, in a small house outside of the village, where he spent half of every day alone, and inaccessible to every one; but his youngest daughter ventured to summon him away from his books.

Two years later (in June, 1863) I paid my last visit to Neuses. He had then passed his seventy-fifth birthday; his frame was still unbent, but the waves of gray hair on his shoulders were thinner, and his step showed the increasing feebleness of age. The fire of his eye was softened, not dimmed, and the long and happy life that lay behind him had given his face a peaceful, serene expression, prophetic of a gentle translation into the other life that was drawing near. So I shall always remember him,—scholar and poet, strong with the best strength of a man, yet trustful and accessible to joy as a child.