Zwei Gedichte

My first recollection of coming across James Wright's translation of Herman Hesse’s Poems was in New Haven, in the late 1970s or early 1980s.  A friend, who I had worked with as a manager in a bookstore at the Yale Center for British Art, showed me a poem from the book; I immediately found that, thematically, the poems concerned “finding the way home.”

There is an uncanny sense of longing in the work of Herman Hesse: longing for home, yearning for love, and returning from a journey. Joseph Campbell would portray this theme as one of the hero’s journeys, a classical mythological trope.  Hesse fittingly displays this time and again in his novels and, most characteristically, with both brevity and depth in his poems.

Pablo Neruda wrote about the “infinite ache” for his beloved in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair; Herman Hesse writes about “My mother’s lost child / Wander[ing] across the land.” I know that child, since my mother died when I was eight, and I am aware I have stridden over many fields throughout my life, looking out “across the land.” Hardly profligate and unlike a prodigal son, I returned to these poems of coming home by surprise, although I did also recognize the synchronicity that was electrified in my life, to return to these poems of Hesse with a new radiance within myself, through my own writing, reading, and experiencing over the decades, and because of that, intuit that I might infuse that light into the poems themselves so that not only myself but others could access the tone, color, and ethos Hesse exhibits in what are significant contributions to the theme of finding one’s way back home.