Freund Humanus

In the summer of 1775, the young (and already famous) poet, Johann Wolfgang Goethe found himself in a boat on Lake Zurich with a few friends, including Christian and Friedrich Stolberg, two noblemen who had accompanied him from his parents home in Frankfurt. Already famous… or better said, infamous, following the publication of his novel Sorrows of Young Werther the previous year. The theological faculty at Leipzig University had condemned its heathen views on suicide, and it was banned in some places.

On Lake Zurich he took out his notebook and, as his biographer Nicholas Boyle describes, he “scribbled a poem which caught his mood as it shifted on that glorious summer morning and which has claims to be regarded as one of his finest works.” It was an odd set of images that entered his head when he began with the words Ich saug’ an meiner Nabelschnur / Nun Nahrung aus der Welt. Sucking sustenance from the world through his umbilical cord… one hardly knows were to begin (and I think I mean that in a positive way). The poet seems to have felt similar reservations when he revised it more than a decade later. And yet, this wealth of associations clings to the poem in its revised version, the version that is usualy read:

Auf dem See

Und frische Nahrung, neues Blut
Saug’ ich aus freier Welt;
Wie ist Natur so hold und gut,
Die mich am Busen hält!
Die Welle wieget unsern Kahn
Im Rudertakt hinauf,
Und Berge, wolkig himmelan,
Begegnen unserm Lauf.

Aug’, mein Aug’, was sinkst du nieder?
Goldne Träume, kommt ihr wieder?
Weg, du Traum! so Gold du bist;
Hier auch Lieb’ und Leben ist.

Auf der Welle blinken
Tausend schwebende Sterne,
Weiche Nebel trinken
Rings die thürmende Ferne;
Morgenwind umflügelt
Die beschattete Bucht,
Und im See bespiegelt
Sich die reifende Frucht.

In March 1817, Franz Schubert put these words to music. He was 25 at the time, the same age the poet had been when he rowed on Lake Zurich. This is one of more than 60 of Goethe’s poems that inspired Schubert. Apparently, he tried hard to win the older poet’s aproval, though it seems Goethe’s ear, attuned as it was to Mozart, found Schubert’s innovative music too strange. The Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock also wrote a choral version in 1908, which I find captures the shifting moods of the poem better.

I couldn’t find any English version of this poem I found satisfactory, so I wrote my own, which I hope you enjoy:

On the Lake

And sustenance fresh, and blood that’s new,
I suck from the world around.
What grace and goodness nature grew
That on her breast I found!
Gentle waves bouy up our boat
In rhythm with the oars,
And mountains, clouded, skyward float,
And stand to face our course.

Why gaze downward, eye, my eye?
Golden dreams, you’re once more nigh?
Gold you are, you dreams, but flee!
Love and life are here with me.

On the water blinking
Floating stars abound,
Gentle mists are drinking
The towering distance all round;
Morning breeze directing
Its flight round shaded bay,
And ripening fruit reflecting
Itself upon the lake