Copying Hölderlin

February 4, 2017

A ten thousand kilometers away, it is not always easy to keep the golden thread of familiar love and do not let it melt. With children, the habit of doing common, everyday, to say the diary, the banal and the everyday rituals, becomes thin and nearly transparent. Luckily we have the internet and all the social relations facilitated derived therefrom, and we can write to us, tell us verbally, see us... But me, a sentimental man, I am missing the ritual.

When I was a boy of twenty I was a big fan of poetry. My favorite authors were the Germans: I felt an absoluteness of their words, a perfect accuracy in drawing a direct route to the soul. Among all, my two favorites were Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. The first, I bought an Italian edition of the Lyrics in the translation by Enzo Mandruzzato, published by Adelphi in two volumes, in 1977-1978, in the series "The Classics". The books of the Adelphi Classics series are maybe my absolute favorites: a not too large octavo, bound but not "rigid", with lots of white space around the text, printed on a beautiful light ivory color paper, light but not too much, with the spacing between the words of the texts not machine made, but handmade, irregular, extraordinary.

Hölderlin was so essential to me that when, at age 21, I painted my self-portrait, I wanted my right hand staying on a volume of Hölderlin poems.

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And here is the detail of the book:

http://i1311.photobucket.com/albums/s677/Franco_Pupulin/Dettaglio_zpse0rqgfhn.jpg

Eventually, the self-portrait remained with mom and dad, who prefer to keep it hanging on a wall of their home. In Costa Rica I have a life-size copy, printed on canvas from a Hasselblad negative and then covered with a transparent paint for oil painting, which is really hard to distinguish from the original, except that the printer has made the general tones slightly more reddish. As for the two volumes of Adelphi, they ended like a thousand others in cardboard boxes intended for the library of my daughters to their future learning. I know, because I asked several times, that the books are still not "jumped out" from the boxes. Meanwhile, Adelphi has completely sold out the edition in two volumes, and in 1989 made a reprint, also in the series "The Classics", in one volume, which is also more than sold out.

Last year, however, shortly before my traditional "trip to Italy", a miracle did occur and a volume of Hölderlin’s Lyrics, in the 1989 Adelphi edition of “The Classics", appeared in an eBay sale, and I bought it. The handsome volume is contained in a cardboard box on which is reproduced the "silhouette" of a Japan medlar, the work of the German painter Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), which apart from being an extraordinary romantic painter of the size of a Caspar David Friedrich, was also a great creator of tiny decoupages with floral motifs, animals, and scenes of daily life, very typical of the romantic era.

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The superb book, also curated by Mandruzzato, with Italian translations and German text to the front, printed on a thin ivory paper, ended up enlarging the ranks of the small Italian-Costa Rican library of our house in Curriravá.

It was great reading again the perfect Italian translations of Madruzzato and savor the German text (I just get it, but I like to read), switching between the fingers the beautiful pages published by Adelphi. And since the two original volumes are not yet “jumped out" of the boxes, I decided to do some copies of the translations, some excerpts, for my daughters. And since the translations of Madruzzato are in turn own poems, which sometimes differ significantly from the letter by Hölderlin, I have also copied the original in German.

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On a Moleskine notebook, the ones sold by twos, seamed on the back, I made my day job (or almost daily) as a copyist. The smart phone has taken the images, and for a few months, every day (or almost) WhatsApp did postman: a few verses a day as a good day from a distance, like a dad caress.

I, as always, I took the opportunity not only to re-read Hölderlin, but also to give free rein to all my fountain pens, to change the colors of the inks, to choose the verses that seemed to me the most essential.

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When, now mad, Hölderlin was locked up in a tower in the city of Tübingen, he continued to write extraordinary poems, signing the papers with the fantastic name of "Scardanelli":

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Now that the "Hölderlinian" notebook has ended, now that all the excerpts were delivered, I like to think that Margherita and Carlotta have had just a flash of poetic light each day, amid the din of things to do, and that they have had the chance to known Hölderlin and his absolute verses.

http://i1311.photobucket.com/albums/s677/Franco_Pupulin/41_zpsk0ci9rln.jpg

And I like to believe they felt like from far away, day after day, has come a thought of their dad.

P.S. For those wishing to have an excuse to see a bit of pens (and read a bit of Hölderlin if they understand German or Italian), I created a PDF document of the entire "Hölderlinian" notebook, with photographs of the pages along with pens that have written them. You can download it from here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tywmxcu68qywzil/H%C3%B6lderliniana.pdf.zip?dl=0