READING HEINRICH HEINE

212 Reading Heinrich Heine
This conclusion is reached at the end of a meditation on the early life of
the great Jewish poet, prompted by a reminiscence of the opening of Psalm
137. Among the shadowy figures conjured by the lament for Jerusalem
is Halevi. He thus becomes visible within a certain tradition, both religious
and poetic, whose voices are heard singing psalms (‘Psalmodierend,
Männerstimmen’) (B 6/1, 130), 750 years after Halevi’s birth. The first part
of the poem goes on to tell how, touched by the primal language of the
Torah and Talmud, and especially by the poetic power of the Halacha or
Babylonian Talmud, Halevi’s poetry became a pillar of fire to the Diaspora.
The second part of the poem returns to the great elegy of Psalm 137.Heine’s
narrator identifies himself with this old song that ‘moans and hums like a
kettle’:
Lange schon, jahrtausendlange
Kochts in mir. Ein dunkles Wehe!
Und die Zeit leckt meine Wunde,
Wie der Hund die Schwären Hiobs.
Dank dir, Hund, für deinen Speichel –
Doch das kann nur kühlend lindern –
Heilen kann mich nur der Tod,
Aber, ach, ich bin unsterblich.
(B 6/1, 135–6)
Long it has been seething in me –
Forathousand years. Black sorrow!
And my wounds are licked by time
Just as Job’s dogs licked his boils.
Dog, I thank you for your spittle,
But its coolness merely soothes me –
Only death can really heal me,
But, alas, I am immortal!
(D 660)
There is an important and difficult temporal dislocation involved in this
positioning of Heine’s narrator. He speaks within the tradition of dereliction
which includes Job and the Babylonian exiles of the psalm, and yet
unmistakably defines himself in relation to his own mortal sickness and
to history as a repetition of suffering. A modern Jewish poet in Paris sees
himself as the Jew of history, perhaps as the Wandering Jew. Both timeless
and yet subject to time, the specific substance of this tradition is grasped by
the modern poet in his own time as a ‘Spleen’, which is also a revolutionary
animus cited from the end of Psalm 137: