Hälfte des Lebens
[This page by Susan Ranson]
Hälfte des Lebens; Life at Mid-Point
A celebrated poem, on account of its tangible, plastic images of youth and joy, desolation and despair, which take the role of emotion-laden symbols, in classical form, decades before the advent of Symbolism. The word order is partly artificial, yet the fragmented effect is one not of stiltedness but of extreme and musical lassitude. This is achieved without assonance, which Hölderlin does not much use. Again he looks with a shiver into the future, urgently aware that his mental equilibrium, intellect and artistic powers are waning like the year: the poem is one of his late works, written after 1802.
Hälfte des Lebens
Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.
Weh mir, wo nehm ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein,
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.
Life at Mid-Point
With yellow pears hangs –
And full of wild roses –
Land hangs into the lake,
O lovely swans,
And drunk with kisses
You dip your heads
Into the sacred-sober water.
Alas, where shall I find,
When winter comes, flowers, and where
The sunlight,
And the shadows of Earth?
The walls stand
Speechless and cold; in the wind
Weathervanes clatter.
https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/hoelderl/gedichte/chap121.html
Further Reading
Charlie Louth, ‘Reflections: Goethe’s “Auf dem See” and Hölderlin’s “Hälfte des Lebens”’, Oxford German Studies 33 (2004), 167-75
Web Link
http://www.berfrois.com/2014/12/mid-life-friedrich-holderlin/
An alternative translation of this poem, by Daniel Bosch