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Elisabeth von Österreich-Ungarn
Sehnsucht

“Sehnsucht” or “Longing” (October, 1885) is one of several poems written by Elisabeth, empress consort of Austria, queen of Hungary (1837-1898) on the subject of Achilles following a journey to the Homeric hero’s legendary grave mound. 

 

The poem appears in the Nordseelieder Collection of Sisi’s secretly kept poetic journal; it is both stylistically imitative of Heinrich Heine and intimately personal, as is highly characteristic of her poetic works.

Übersetzung

"Longing" by Empress Elisabeth of Austria 
translated by Maria Athena (September 2023)

Since being there, at his grave standing,

Consumed I’ve been by ember ash.

The quiet hill has left me pining

For faintest glimpse of ancient past.

 

  5      I felt something there that I should find,

A floret taken o’er a bone—

Such relics were too much for time!

Just something, please, the smallest stone.

 

Not one flower to adorn the hill.

  10    The dry grass sought no stone to hide;

Dressed in nothing but the soft light still

Of golden sun, stars and moonshine.

Urtext aus dem poetischen Tagebuch
Kaiserin Elisabeth (Nordseelieder, Oktober, 1885)

Seit ich an seinem Grab gestanden,

Bin ich von Gluten aufgezehrt;

Ich schmachte nach dem stillen Hügel,

Und doch hat er mir nichts gewährt!

 

  5     Mir war's, als müsst' ich etwas finden.

Ein Blümchen nur, o, kein Gebein,

Das war' des Glücks zuviel gewesen!

Nur etwas, nur den kleinsten Stein.

 

Doch ziert den Hügel keine Blume,

  10    Das dürre Gras birgt keinen Stein;

Ihn schmücket nur der gold'nen Sonne,

Der Sterne und des Mondes Schein.

A Note From the Translator

I would like to stress to the Anglophone reader that Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, also known as Sisi, is perhaps the closest figure the German-speaking world has to a Princess Diana, both in cultural-historical memory and, to a certain extent, character. Before her untimely death in 1898, Sisi was beautiful, free-spirited, always in the public’s eye and prone to melancholy in the wake of personal tragedy; her natural inclination was to turn to travel, poetry and the ancient past in an effort to escape the ever-present demands and hardships of the Habsburg court in Vienna.   

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In the 20th century, a rosy, fashionable view the empress’s life gained popularity, due in part to the 1955 Austrian film Sissi staring Romy Schneider as Princess Elisabeth, and popular interest spun the film into a full trilogy by 1957. This portrayal centred around the fairytale love between the enchanting young Elisabeth and Kaiser Franz Joseph. Yet in reality, the imperial couple’s relationship seems to have ranged, at times, from awkward to turbulent.

 

Biographies and museum exhibitions of Sisi have expanded in scope in recent years to include previously archived, private and personal primary and secondary sources from both Sisi herself and others in her most intimate circle. The late Brigitte Hamann has detailed these additions quite thoroughly in her biography Elisabeth: Kaiserin wider Willen, 8. Auflage (Piper Verlag, 2017); Hamann clarifies their necessity in presenting a more comprehensive view of the empress, whose life she characterises in her introduction as: ‘Eine private Tragödie an der Spitze eines zerfallenden Reiches im fin de siècle’ (‘A private tragedy at the height of a failing empire at the fin-de-siècle’).

 

I did not originally intend to include Sisi’s work in this translation portfolio; as with Poliziano’s Argomento, I arrived here in a roundabout way. Rather, I was reading Sisi’s biography out of personal interest, having received it as a gift following a brief family visit to Corfu in 2018, which included a tour of the empress’s own Achilleion Palace. At the time I had been intrigued by the architectural design and artwork, particularly Franz von Matsch’s well-known fresco The Triumph of Achilles and the gargantuan garden statue of the Dying Achilles by Ernst Gustav Herter.

 

It was not until recently that my researches of Lord Byron’s connections to and experiences in Greece led me back to that very same palace, as Sisi had had a marble monument of the Romantic poet—whom she read alongside Shelley, Shakespeare and Goethe, i.e. poets whose works consciously make up the bulk of my current studies in poetic translation, at least in regards to English and German—erected there. This made me keen to peruse Sisi’s own poetic works in addition to reading her biography, and I was pleased to find the metre, form and subject of the “Sehnsucht” poem to be in line with the sorts of poems I have been attempting to translate since the start of the Diana Project, of which this translation portfolio is a part.

 

Although I cannot be sure at present that Sisi herself studied Aristotelian poetics, her poetic muse Heinrich Heine, whose influence on her life and works cannot be underestimated, most assuredly did. As such, I found it fitting to include this translation here alongside the others.

On the Translation

I have made two adjustments to the poem in its translation.

 

The first is stylistic: I chose to present each stanza in alternate rhyme ABAB, despite that the first stanza is originally written in simple four-line rhyme ABCB (only the second two stanzas originally follow the ABAB rule). However, the 9-8-9-8 syllable count of the original has been maintained.

 

The second adjustment is lexical: it serves to adapt the poem slightly for the English-speaking reader, as English convention tends to avoid repetition that does not sufficiently develop a rhetorical aspect. Namely, I attempted to retain the linguistic/poetic register while also avoiding repetition which does not appear to serve a rhetorical strategy; I did this by employing alternative expressions and/or sentence structures or word orders which aim to express a comparable tone and establish semantic equivalence. My reasoning for this is as follows:

 

The poet repeats ‘nur’ (‘just’/‘only’) and ‘doch’ (‘still’/‘on the contrary’) at various points. While the repetition of ‘nur’ in line 8 may underscore the sense of frustration the poet feels—lit: ‘Just something, just the smallest stone’ as she pleads for something to appear at the tumulus—its appearance in line 6 ‘ein Blümchen nur’ (lit: ‘just a flower’) and line 11 ‘Ihn schmücket nur…’ (lit: It is only decorated by…) does not contribute as strongly to the poet’s sense of longing and, as a result, the poem's increasingly urgent and despairing tone. In my opinion, the use of ‘doch’ in lines 4 and 9 leads to a similar effect.

 

I am not entirely convinced that this repetition of ‘nur’ and ‘doch’ is intentionally done; it may have been inadvertently relied upon by the poet in order to maintain the syllable count in the aforementioned lines. Here it should be noted that both words often act as filler words in German.

 

Contrarily, the poet presents an inverted image of what she longs for and the reality between stanzas two and three, mirroring ‘ein Blümchen’ and ‘keine Blume’ (lit: ‘a little flower’ and ‘not a flower’/‘no flower’) and 'den kleinsten Stein’ and ‘keinen Stein’ (lit: ‘the smallest stone’ and ‘not a stone’/‘no stone’) in what appears to be a more conscious decision.

 

As I continue to read the poet’s Nordseelieder Collection in which the poem translated above appears, I will watch out for similar instances of word and image repetition to better assess the extent to which they are characteristic of the poet’s writing style.

A Question of Subject Matter

While conducting my background reading, I stumbled upon an unusual situation regarding the biographical context of poem. Das poetische Tagebuch (1997) notes that “Sehnsucht” was written regarding the legendary tumulus of Achilles, whereas the grave of Heinrich Heine in Montmartre Cemetery, Paris is given as the contextual writing point in the Elisabeth biography prepared by the same editor/author. The topographical description of the poem as well as its appearance in the Nordseelieder Collection points more clearly to the Achilles reference.

 

Upon further confirmation, I plan to write to Piper Verlag and inform them of the editorial mistake.

German Language Resources for Further Exploration 

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