amicable: good-natured, harmonious, cordial, agreeable, good-humored, kind, polite

No, none of those. I mean something with more bite, more room for spirited exchange.  This amicable correspondence will be between amici, prijatelji, Freunde.

amicable: between friends.

In 1826, officials in Weimar decided to clean out an overstuffed mausoleum that housed the remains of various notables, including those of Friedrich Schiller, who had died twenty-one years earlier.  When they could not identify Schiller’s bones in the chaotic crypt, a doctor named Schwabe gathered 23 skulls to examine at home.  Schwabe had known Schiller, he had his death mask, but still he was unable to identify Schiller’s skull with any certainty.  He finally chose a skull that distinguished itself by its large size and fine, regular form.  Großherzog Karl August recommended that the skull eventually be housed under glass next to Leibniz’s skull in the Royal Library.  In the meantime, Goethe borrowed the skull and in the night of September 25th wrote a poem in honor of his friend, exploring the shifting relationships between nature and spirit, between matter and mind.  Wilhelm von Humboldt saw the skull in Goethe’s possession and wrote to his wife that Goethe was having a burial vault built in the hopes that he and Schiller could eventually lie there together. In the end, the friends never shared a grave.  DNA analysis in 2008 proved that the skull in question belonged to someone other than Friedrich Schiller.

I decide to translate Goethe's poem.  The dense rhymes of terza rima and the rhythms of iambic pentameter are integral formal contributors to the content, but my attempts to reproduce them in English are a disaster.  I opt for a more straightforward form.

While Contemplating Schiller’s Skull

It was in the somber ossuary that I saw

     skulls aligned with ordered skulls;

     old times, I thought, gone grey.

They stand fixed in rows, once mutual foes,

     and stout bones that clashed to kill

     lie athwart, rest subdued.

Dismembered shoulder blades!  what they bore

     now lost, and fine and lively limbs,

     the hand, the foot, scattered, disjointed.

In vain you lay down tired,

     they left you no peace in the grave,

     drove you again into daylight.

No one can love the desiccated shell,

     whatever splendid noble germ it protected.

     Yet for me, the adept, were inscribed

sacred meanings not revealed to all,

     as I, amidst that unblinking multitude

     sensed an image wondrous beyond imagination,

and in the clammy hall’s constriction

     I was warmed, refreshed,

     as if life had sprung from death.

How mysteriously the form ravished me!

     The divinely ordered trace, preserved!

     A glimpse that carried me off to that sea

whence figures rise transmuted.

     Mysterious vessel! Orphic oracle,

     How am I worthy to hold you in my hand?

Lifting you fervently, ultimate treasure, from corruption

     and into the open air to freely muse,

     turning myself, devoutly, to the sunlight.

What more can one attain in a lifetime

     than that God-Nature reveals herself?

     How she lets what is firm pass away to spirit,

How firmly she preserves what the spirit engenders.

                              (to be continued)

Translating the poem from German to English and from the distance of two centuries, I enjoy an opening of sorts. As opposed to my largely monolingual habitation in the American West where I was born and raised, my friends Žarko Radaković and Alex Caldiero live at linguistic junctures.  Žarko, who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia and whose native language is Serbo-Croatian, lives in Cologne with his German wife Anne.  An uncompromising novelist, he is also a devoted translator of works by Peter Handke.  Alex, who emigrated from Sicily to Brooklyn at the age of nine, lives in Orem, Utah with his Russian / Turkish / American wife Setenay.  His poetry performances are legendary and his translations from Sicilian include the delightful “Bawdy Riddles and Tongue Twisters of the Sicilian Folk:” Trasi tisa / E nesci modda — It goes in hard / And comes out soft. !Pasta).  I have been the fortunate friend of these emigrant / immigrant / translator / artists for more than four decades.

8 December 2017

I show Alex my new hearing aids.  He points out that because his right ear is still his worst one, the fact that I can now hear through my bad left ear won’t change the fact that I’ll need to walk on his right side if we’re walking and talking.  He has some technical questions.  And then he gets to the heart of the matter: 

What if this destroys our friendship?

What do you mean?

What if our friendship is based on miscommunication?  What if we’re friends only because I’ve been hearing you poorly and you haven’t been hearing me correctly?

While contemplating that possibility, I tell Alex about Goethe’s poem written while contemplating his friend Schiller’s skull.

My mother, Alex responds, had a burning desire to see her father’s bones.  We were in Licodea, Sicily, and she insisted that we go to the cemetery where the family crypt is.  My grandfather’s casket is in the ground-level room of the crypt, directly under the altar.  She asked a cemetery official if she could open the casket.  You can do anything you want in your family’s crypt, he said.  I did my best to dissuade her from opening the casket.  You know how close to an emotional edge I live; imagine my mother 100 times closer to that edge.  She finally acquiesced and we didn’t open the casket.

When Schiller died, Goethe was 55 and Schiller 45.  Goethe was 76 when he contemplated Schiller’s skull.  Žarko, Alex, and I are 73, 69, and 69 respectively.  None of us is likely to write a poem with the other’s skull on our desk.

Schiller’s first letter to Goethe (first of more than a thousand letters subsequently passed between them), dated the 13thof June, 1794 and sent from Jena to the neighboring town of Weimar, addresses Goethe as High Wellborn Sir, Highly-to Be-Honored Privy Councilor.  The letter is a request for contributions to Schiller’s proposed literary journal Die Horen (The Horae).  Schiller mentions co-publishers—idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the linguist and eventual founder of the University of Berlin Wilhelm von Humboldt.  He signs the letter Your High Wellborn, most obedient servant and most sincere admirer F. Schiller.

Goethe responds on the 24th of June and then again on the 25th of July.  He offers a token of friendship and assures Schiller that he is very much looking forward to a frequent and lively exchange of ideas: "I shall with pleasure and with all my heart be one of the party."

Several letters follow and in September Goethe invites Schiller to visit him in Weimar.  Schiller responds enthusiastically on September 7th, but with a caveat: that Goethe not rely on him to meet any domestic timetables.  Cramps during the night disturb him so seriously, Schiller writes, that he finds it necessary to sleep the entire morning and cannot commit to anything at any given hour.  "You will, then, allow me to be a complete stranger in your house . . . to isolate myself so that I can escape the embarrassment of having to depend on others. . . . Excuse these preliminaries. . . . I ask for the simple freedom of being allowed to be ill while being your guest."

And with that the friendship that proved so valuable to both men was begun.  Goethe later told Schiller that he had given him “a second youth and made me a poet again, which I had as good as ceased to be.”  Schiller, thinking perhaps of his delicate health and uncertain future, wrote that, “I hope that we can walk together down as much of the road as may remain, and with all the more profit, since the last companions on a journey always have most to say to each other.”

Years later, while Goethe was editing their correspondence for publication, he asked “what could be more amusing than to see our letters begin with the pompous announcement of the Horen. . . . And yet, if there hadn’t been that impulse and will to document the times, everything in German literature would now be very different.”

If the Serb hadn’t invited the American to contribute to the literary journal Knjizevna kritika, if the Sicilian and the American hadn’t begun neighborly conversations about poetry, and if the Serb and the Sicilian hadn’t conversed one morning in the American’s house, everything in the field of Serbian-American-Sicilian literature would now be very different.