Poems and Verse Plays of Hugo von Hofmannsthal ed. by Michael Hamburger (review)

1%3 BOOK REVIEWS 105 POEMS AND VERSE PLAYS OF HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL, bilingual edition , edited and introduced by Michael Hamburger with a preface by T. S Eliot, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1961, 562 pp. Price 42 s. Hugo von Hofmannsthal is hardly known in this country while European men of letters have long recognized his literary stature and placed him in the vicinity of Yeats, Claudel, and Eliot. Music lovers, of course, recognize him as the distin· guished librettist of Richard Strauss's operas and the more sophisticated travelers on the festival circuit may perhaps remember productions of his Everyman in front of the cathedral in Salzburg. But who is aware of the fact that Hofmanns· thaI's poetry ranks with Goethe and Rilke, tha~ his essayistic prose is superior to Eliot in sensitivity and equal to Mann in intelligence, or that few writers have done more for the revival of poetic drama in our time? Of the possible reasons for the Austrian's disproportionate position in world literature I mention only two: his amazing precociry which enabled him to create masterpieces in late adolescence and, in tum, prevented a fair appraisal of his later output by most critics and, secondly, his long collaboration with Richard Strauss whose fame, quite naturally, tended to overshadow the contribution of a poet who was "only" a librettist. (It may be noted in this connection that the drama Elektra was already written and performed when Strauss approached Hofmannsthal, and that Rosenkavalier is a good comedy in its written form, without the music.) It is gratifying that some of Hofmannsthal's poems and a few of his early verse playlets are now available to American readers. The new anthology is the seco,nd volume of a three-volume edition: the first one, containing selected prose and a penetrating introduction by the late Austrian novelist Hermann Broch, appeared a few years ago, and the projected third volume will give us the 3 most famous full-length plays of Hofmannsthal's mature years. The present book is quite handsome, exquisitely printed with the original German facing the English translation , with appropriate notes and a very intelligent and sophisticated introduction by Michael Hamburger. The poems include the famous Ballad of t-he Outer Life and the Prologue to Anatol that the schoolboy Hofmannsthal under the pseudonym "Loris" contribUted to his older friend Schnitzler's dialogues. Of the playlets ir is Death and the Fool, justly famous, which will enchant the reader. It still seems a miracle that a mere youth of nineteen could have created such a masterpiece full of ageless wisdom and unsurpassed linguistic beauty. Other dramatic selections may strike the uninitiated reader as somewhat dated, I am afraid. They, too, were written before 1899 and breathe the somewhat perfumed air of neo-romantic aestheticism and fin-de-siede decadence in the shadow of Nietzsche, Wilde, D'Annunzio, Maeterlinck. In terms of the history of modern drama it is only Death and the Faa.! that has withstood the test of time. Not until the charming comedy of manners, The Man W,ho Was Difficult, and the political allegory, The Tower, based on Calderon, become available in translation to readers of the forthcoming third volume, will the full measure of the dramatist Hofmannsthal be appreciated. In the meantime we can enjoy the youthful creator of unsurpassed poems and elegant dialogues. While the first lyric outpourings of a young poet might be compared with wild flowers on a mountain path: some are large and some are small, some gorgeous and some plain-young Hofmannsthal's work may be likened to a bouquet of exquisite and rare flowers freshly cut by the gardener of an old Italian park. Perfection, beauty, artfulness, melody, ripeness are the characteristics of these Blight and fragile productions of a precocious boy, for which few parallels can be 106 MODERN DRAMA May found in the history of world literature. There is no trace of youthful· exuberance, intellectual immaturity or lack in artistic tact. It is as if lhe young poet sets down here with the assuredness of a sleepwalker what' he had not yet experienced corisciously. Most Hofmannsthal scholars call his first period of...