Authors: Hermann Hesse
Tags: #Literary, #Fiction, #Criticism, #Literature - Classics, #General & Literary Fiction, #Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), #Classics, #Literature: Classics
Siddhartha (2 page)
RANSLATOR’S
P
REFACE
Hermann Hesse’s
Siddhartha: An Indian Poem
is a novel that inhabits two distinct locations: an imagined India of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., and a Machine Age Europe in which the heightened efficiency and automation of everyday life prompted a great many writers, not just Hesse, to retreat into various sorts of pastoral idylls. These modern idylls were generally set not in mountains and meadows but in the landscapes of interior existence. Less than a generation had passed since Sigmund Freud had mapped out the contours of the human psyche, and Hesse was one of many writers of the period (among them Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, Frank Wedekind, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Walser, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka) to devote themselves to exploring the mental—and often sexual—coming-of-age of young men in a world that took little interest in their development as individuals. Hesse began writing
Siddhartha
in 1919, only a year after the close of the First World War, which had devastated Europe with unprecedented violence. This war, fought with the modern machinery of airplanes, tanks, and bombs, took the lives of 8.5 million men across Europe (with a further 7.8
million missing in action), and of those who returned home, many were physically and psychologically scarred. There was scarcely a family anywhere in Germany not directly impacted by this war. Before it was over, Hesse fled to neutral Switzerland, where he fought bitterly against the war machine in an impassioned series of newspaper articles while undergoing psychoanalysis with a pupil of Carl Jung’s.
Siddhartha
, then, with its emphasis on soul-searching and harmony, on stillness, balance, and peace, represented an escape to a world in which a boy could grow up untouched by strife and devote his life to seeking the path of his own personal development. That this quest intersects only loosely with the Buddhist and Hindu doctrines Hesse invokes in his novel need not trouble us as readers: Siddhartha is a child of his time, a fin de siècle youth who has put on a loincloth and monk’s robe for a fancy-dress ball. The novel is not intended to show us India as it was in the age of the Buddha. (One might notice, for one thing—as Tom Robbins did when he read this new translation—that Hesse has populated his novel with improbable fauna: chimpanzees and jaguars, creatures to be found in India only in zoos.) In fact,
Siddhartha
is nothing less than a modern bildungsroman in which Indian religions—pursued here not from an ethnographic impulse, out of a desire for accuracy, but rather as dictated by the author’s inspiration—become a powerful metaphor whose very distance from the European reality of the time just goes to show how unbearable that reality was.
Hesse subtitled
Siddhartha
“eine indische Dichtung,” “an Indian poem.” The word
Dichtung
might also have been translated as “fiction,” but the overtones of the word are too postmodern.
Dichtung
also has a distinguished history in Germany, a country that calls itself the land of poets and thinkers; it appears, for example, in the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s memoir
Poetry and Truth
, where it signifies not only
written lines of verse, but make-believe in general. In truth, Hesse’s novel
is
a work of poetry, and I have tried to preserve his attention to language in my translation.
Siddhartha
is suffused with a sense of harmony and measure, and Hesse’s sentences tend to fall just so, with a great deal of gravitas and a certain decadent lushness. He often repeats phrases, which has the effect of a chant or incantation. Thus it is crucial for the sentences of the translation to have an elegant, melodious cadence, rich in assonance—this is what Hesse reads like in German. What makes the book luminous in the original is the way the quest for perfection/Nirvana is reflected in the quiet beauty of the prose.
Certain choices I have made in the translation are worth noting. The German word
Ich
—literally “I” in German—corresponds roughly to the English “self,” but it is also the word Freud picked for what in English is called the “ego,” and so I translate it as one or the other as context demands; for Hesse, the word meant both at once. The German
Lieber
—literally “dear one” or “beloved one”—is such a common form of address and appears so often in the novel that I have given it multiple incarnations as “friend,” “my friend,” “dear friend,” and even, in one instance, “my love.” I thought about translating Hesse’s
Lehre
as “dharma,” since that word is now part of our vocabulary in English, but decided to stick with the English equivalents “doctrine” and “teachings,” which serve just as well. Finally, Hesse’s novel contains a striking quantity of language commonly associated with Christian theology, and I was careful to preserve these echoes in the translation as well, with words like “bliss,” “redemption,” “preach,” “novice,” “saint,” and “sermon,” as well as Govinda’s impassioned question to his friend Siddhartha: “Why have you forsaken me?”
I am grateful to Kristin Scheible and Richard Davis, who generously shared with me their expertise on Indian religions; to the Goethe-Institute Chicago, which sponsored a
stay at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin while I worked on the translation; to Judy Sternlight and Janet Baker for their editorial ministrations; and to my husband, Don Byron, for more than I can say.
—S
USAN
B
ERNOFSKY
HE
S
ON OF THE
B
RAHMIN
In the shade of the house, in the sunlight on the riverbank where the boats were moored, in the shade of the
sal
wood and the shade of the fig tree, Siddhartha grew up, the Brahmin’s handsome son, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, the son of a Brahmin. Sunlight darkened his fair shoulders on the riverbank as he bathed, performed the holy ablutions, the holy sacrifices. Shade poured into his dark eyes in the mango grove as he played with the other boys, listened to his mother’s songs, performed the holy sacrifices, heard the teachings of his learned father and the wise men’s counsels. Siddhartha had long since begun to join in the wise men’s counsels, to practice with Govinda the art of wrestling with words, to practice with Govinda the art of contemplation, the duty of meditation. He had mastered
Om
, the Word of Words, learned to speak it soundlessly into himself while drawing a breath, to speak it out soundlessly as his breath was released, his soul collected, brow shining with his mind’s clear thought. He had learned to feel Atman’s presence at the core of his being, inextinguishable, one with the universe.
Joy leaped into his father’s heart at the thought of his son,
this studious boy with his thirst for knowledge; he envisioned him growing up to be a great wise man and priest, a prince among Brahmins.
Delight leaped into his mother’s breast when she beheld him, watched him as he walked and sat and stood, Siddhartha, the strong handsome boy walking on slender legs, greeting her with flawless grace.
Love stirred in the hearts of the young Brahmin girls when Siddhartha walked through the streets of their town with his radiant brow, his regal eye, his narrow hips.
But none of them loved him more dearly than Govinda, his friend, the Brahmin’s son. He loved Siddhartha’s eyes and his sweet voice, loved the way he walked and the flawless grace of his movements; he loved all that Siddhartha did and all he said and most of all he loved his mind, his noble, passionate thoughts, his ardent will, his noble calling. Govinda knew: This would be no ordinary Brahmin, no indolent pen pusher overseeing the sacrifices, no greedy hawker of incantations, no vain, shallow orator, no wicked, deceitful priest, and no foolish, good sheep among the herd of the multitude. Nor did he, Govinda, have any intention of becoming such a creature, one of the tens of thousands of ordinary Brahmins. His wish was to follow Siddhartha, the beloved, splendid one. And if Siddhartha should ever become a god, if he were ever to take his place among the Radiant Ones, Govinda wished to follow him, as his friend, his companion, his servant, his spear bearer, his shadow.
Thus was Siddhartha beloved by all. He brought them all joy, filled them with delight.
To himself, though, Siddhartha brought no joy, gave no delight. Strolling along the rosy pathways of the fig garden, seated in the blue-tinged shade of the Grove of Contemplation, washing his limbs in the daily expiatory baths, performing sacrifices in the deep-shadowed mango wood, with his
gestures of flawless grace, he was beloved by all, a joy to all, yet was his own heart bereft of joy Dreams assailed him, and troubled thoughts—eddying up from the waves of the river, sparkling down from the stars at night, melting out of the sun’s rays; dreams came to him, and a disquiet of the soul wafting in the smoke from the sacrifices, murmuring among the verses of the Rig-Veda, welling up in the teachings of the old Brahmins.
Siddhartha had begun to harbor discontent. He had begun to feel that his father’s love and the love of his mother, even the love of his friend Govinda, would not always and forever suffice to gladden him, content him, sate him, fulfill him. He had begun to suspect that his venerable father and his other teachers, all wise Brahmins, had already given him the richest and best part of their wisdom, had already poured their plenty into his waiting vessel, yet the vessel was not full: His mind was not content, his soul not at peace, his heart restless. The ablutions were good, but they were only water; they could not wash away sin, could not quench his mind’s thirst or dispel his heart’s fear. The sacrifices and the invocations of the gods were most excellent—but was this all? Did the sacrifices bring happiness? And what of the gods? Was it really Prajapati who had created the world? Was it not rather Atman, He, the Singular, the One and Only? Weren’t the gods mere shapes, creations like you and me, subject to time, transitory? And was it then good, was it proper, was it meaningful, a noble act, to sacrifice to the gods? To whom else should one sacrifice, to whom else show devotion, if not to Him, the Singular, Atman? And where was Atman to be found, where did He reside, where did His eternal heart lie beating? Where else but within oneself, in the innermost indestructible core each man carries inside him. But where, where was this Self, this innermost, utmost thing? It was not flesh and bone, it was not thought and not consciousness, at least according to the wise
men’s teachings. Where was it then, where? To penetrate to this point, to reach the Self, oneself, Atman—could there be any other path worth seeking? Yet this was a path no one was showing him; it was a path no one knew, not his father, not the teachers and wise men, not the holy songs intoned at the sacrifices! They knew everything, these Brahmins and their holy books, everything, and they had applied themselves to everything, more than everything: to the creation of the world, the origins of speech, of food, of inhalation and exhalation; to the orders of the senses, the deeds of the gods—they knew infinitely many things—but was there value in knowing all these things without knowing the One, the Only thing, that which was important above all else, that was, indeed, the sole matter of importance?
To be sure, many verses in the holy books, above all the Upanishads of the Sama-Veda, spoke of this innermost, utmost thing: splendid verses. “Your soul is the entire world” was written there, and it was written as well that in sleep, the deepest sleep, man entered the innermost core of his being and dwelt in Atman. There was glorious wisdom in these verses; all the knowledge of the wisest men was collected here in magic words, pure as the honey collected by bees. It was not to be disregarded, this massive sum of knowledge that had been collected here by countless generations of wise Brahmins.
But where were the Brahmins, where the priests, where the wise men or penitents who had succeeded not merely in knowing this knowledge but in living it? Where was the master who had been able to transport his own being-at-home-in-Atman from sleep to the waking realm, to life, to all his comings and goings, his every word and deed?
Siddhartha knew a great many venerable Brahmins, above all his father, a pure, learned, utterly venerable man. Worthy of admiration was his father, still and regal his bearing, his life
pure, his words full of wisdom; fine and noble thoughts resided in his brow. But even he, who was possessed of such knowledge, did he dwell in bliss, did he know peace? Was not he too only a seeker, a man tormented by thirst? Was he not compelled to drink again and again from the holy springs, a thirsty man drinking in the sacrifices, the books, the dialogues of the Brahmins? Why must he, who was without blame, wash away sin day after day, labor daily to cleanse himself, each day anew? Was not Atman within him? Did not the ancient source of all springs flow within his own heart? This was what must be found, the fountainhead within one’s own being; you had to make it your own! All else was searching, detour, confusion.
Such was the nature of Siddhartha’s thoughts; this was his thirst, this his sorrow.