Translating the World by Tautz Birgit

Author:Tautz, Birgit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

Into the World: Landscape, Antiquity, Present

Visitors enliven the salon’s space, which is otherwise dominated by loud and silent reading. As Brun depicts the salon’s dynamic qualities in narrating Ida’s expressive imitation in movement, she replicates the imitative gesture. Her writing chronicles movement, rather than a static image of her daughter. In the process, she defines a style of poetic expression that Friedrich Schiller, in his review essay “Über Matthisons Gedichte” (On Matthison’s Poetry),99 describes—in many more words—as simultaneously natural and static (with respect to history and politics), yet inwardly preoccupied with the present and thus forever moving. Both the essay’s ostensible subject—Friedrich von Matthison (1761–1831) was one of the editors and publisher of Brun’s first poems—and the essay’s observations connect it to Ida’s Aesthetic Development. As the observed qualities allow poetry to resonate globally, they not only permeate Brun’s salon but also speak to a quality of literary production that transgressed an ocean and linguistic boundaries, as well as the discursive lines that separated religious life from literary life.

Schiller argues that, in poetry, form and stylistic mode are the most important aspects of expression, considering them defining elements and placing them in contrast to the poem’s subject, which appears secondary at best. He further observes that the poet faces a conundrum, as she or he must produce art that adheres to two, seemingly contradictory impulses: first, it must stimulate the imagination of the reader, allowing him or her to be creative and free; second, it must assure the poet of her or his effectiveness and control. Adherence to both the imagination of others and the self produces a tension or struggle for dominance, because imagination and the poet seek to dominate simultaneously. To resolve this tension, the poet must unify both aspects, abstracting from the reader (i.e., others) and submitting instead to humankind’s innate imagination. Recognizing the latter enables adapting her or his tools. The result will be a poem of “true nature.” Conversely, Schiller adds, the natural must never be stifled by the real, which is always already historical. Poetry, according to this reading, always projects (into the future) or remembers (the past), but does not participate, communicate, or resonate with the present situation.

But where does this leave the landscape as a subject of poetry? After all, it eludes the principles laid out by Schiller: not enticing the imagination per se, landscape remains resistant to poetic dominance. Erdmut Jost describes landscape as the perfect medium to render yearning (Sehnsucht), while noting the persistent belief that landscape is unable to represent a compelling ideal that exceeds the status quo; instead, it remains confined to static beauty.100 But there is more, and that is the embrace of the radical present without rendering it mute, static, or postponed. Schiller, in working through Matthison’s poetry, had also argued that, only by becoming human nature, could nature represent feelings and sensibilities. However, here he encountered a problem: sensibilities cannot be represented as image or content but only communicated as form. He thus proposed a

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