Tuesday 9 October 2018

German Epigrams in Coleridge's Notebooks



Notebooks 1:432 is long, multi-item text. In Coburn's words, ‘most of the entries in this item are adaptations, or notes for adaptations, of epigrams from German authors.’ There are thirty entries in all. Coburn identifies the sources of most of these but three she couldn't trace are noted below.

1:
No mortal spirit yet had clomb so high
As Kepler, and his Country let saw him die
For very want! The Souls minds alone he fed
And so the Bodies left him without bread!
Coburn marks this as ‘Source not found’. In fact it's an epigram by German mathematician and astronomer Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719–1800):
So hoch war noch Kein sterblicher gestiegen,
Als Kepler stieg—und starb in Hungersnoth!
Er wusste nur die geister zu vergnügen,
Drum liessen ihn die Körper ohne brodt.
It was widely reprinted and quoted in the 18th-century, so there's no way of being sure where Coleridge found it.

3:
On Lucas Cranach's Grave-stone he is called Pictor celerrimus—a mistake of the Stone-cutter for celeberrimus. With some of our Poets the Public makes just the contrary blunder—& puts celeberrimus where celerrimus only is the Truth.
‘Source not found’ says Coburn. Well, it is indeed true that Cranach's monument does indeed describe him as ‘Pictor celerrimus’, ‘the fastest painter’, which most art-historians think merely reflects his reputation as a rapid craftsman. The idea that this was actually whatever-the-stone-cutter-equivalent-is-of-a-typo is something Coleridge saw in Christian Wilhelm Schneider's Samlungen zu der Geschichte Thüringens (1771) 1:121: ‘Denn obgleich “Lucas Cranach” auch “Pictor celerrimus” gewesen:—so sieht man doch gar wohl, daß er hier “celeberrimus” hat sollen genennt werden’. Coleridge's application of the notional blunder to poetic reputation seems to be his own addition.


17:
Ein jeder sieht mit Lust diess schöne Bildniss an—
Ich nicht: weil ich nur noch diess Bildniss sehen kann
This is actually the last two lines of a quatrain by Andreas Gryphius entitled ‘Über das Bildniss der Hippolyta’, ‘On a Portrait of Hippolyta’:
So schien Hippolyta, der Ausbund ihrer Zeit,
Der Tugend Ebenbild, die holde Freundlichkeit.
Ein jeder sieht mit Lust diess schöne Bildniss an;
Ich nicht: weil ich nur noch diess Bildniss sehen kann.
‘So Hippolyta: the epitome of her time/the picture of kindness, the grace of kindness/Everyone looks upon her picture with pleasure/But I don't—because it is only a picture!’ [Christian Wernikens Überschriften: nebst Opitzens, Tschernings, Andreas Gryphius und Adam Olearius Epigrammatischen Gedichten (1780), 397]

No comments:

Post a Comment