Love and sorrow between the hair and the hair： an interpretation of ＂Margaret with your golden hair＂

In Renaissance painters, a flowing long blond hair always made the characters shine with divine brilliance. Whether it’s Venus, the goddess of love rising from the sea in Sandro Botticelli’s works, or Flora, the goddess of flowers surrounded by flowers, there is a warmth of love between the gossamers. However, long blond hair is not the patent of the goddess, and there are also many men who are in the wind and fog. For example, in Diu Lei’s self-portrait in 1500, the thick and curly long dark golden hair almost falls symmetrically from the painter’s head, which makes people feel unreal.

Details of "Flower God" in Botticelli’s Spring (1482)

The deepest line about "hair" in German poetry in the 20th century is undoubtedly Death fugue (TodesfugeThe last two sentences in) are right. In this poem, words take the place of notes, accumulating strength continuously, and finally pouring down:

Margaret with your golden hair,

Your book girl with ashes-like hair.

Paul Celan didn’t use the "blond" which usually describes the blue-eyed blonde of German beauty, but chose the "golden" which makes "Margaret" more divine. This word is in sharp contrast with the word "aschen" that describes the Jewish beauty "Shulamier", which is obviously reminiscent of the crematorium in the context of Holocaust literature. So we read the initial shallow opposition between these two sentences: on the one hand, a fierce abuser, and on the other hand, a weak Jewish victim, separated by a precipice.

Albrecht Diu Lei’s Self-Portrait in a Fur Coat (1500)

However, the expression "Margaret with golden hair" still hides a more profound symbolic meaning, which requires tracing back to two famous female images in the history of German literature.

Lorelei with "golden hair"

The first image is Loreley, a witch in German folklore. Clemens Brentano, a romantic writer, wrote in his novel Godfrey (GodwiAfter telling this story in the form of narrative poem, the cliff stone with a height of 132 meters at the big bend in the middle reaches of the Rhine River was covered with a mysterious veil. Since then, this beautiful but cruel witch has also appeared in eichendorff’s narrative poem "Question and Answer in the Woods" (Waldgespr?ch), but what really makes this story a household name is Heinrich Heine’s lyric poem Lorelei in 1824 (Lorelei), especially coupled with romantic composer Friedrich Silcher’s melancholy and sentimental composition, makes Heine’s poetry almost equal to this legend (for the misunderstanding of Heine’s poetry caused by Schecher’s composition, please refer to the author’s musical interpretation of Lorelei. See The Art of German Music Poetry, East China Normal University Press, 2021). Like "Margaret with golden hair", Heine’s witches also have a heady "golden hair", and the third and fourth paragraphs of the poem write:

The most beautiful girl,

Sitting upright on high places,

The gold ornaments sparkled with youth,

She combed her golden hair.

The gold comb is light and the hair is trimmed.

And sing a song,

The tune of this ballad,

There are attractive secrets.

(translated by Jiang Linjing)

Although dressed in a simple coat, a careful reading reveals that Heine’s poem describing witches is very strange: he repeated the word "golden" three times in three consecutive lines, describing Lorelei’s jewelry, hair and comb respectively. What is displayed in front of the readers is a girl who is not particularly touching except for the golden light shining all over her body, which makes it difficult for people to love. So the boatman who yearned for Lorelei described in the fourth paragraph could only sigh:

A boatman in a canoe

Suddenly I was sad,

He didn’t look at the reef,

He only looks high.

(translated by Jiang Linjing)

However, this doomed tragedy is by no means the return of the romantic party to the medieval tradition of "elegant love". The sadness caused by unattainable love only floats on the surface of words, and romantic irony is surging in the muscles below. Is this witch shining with golden light really worth dying for? The witch sitting on the high cliff is like a mirror image of the banshee of Sai Ren in ancient Greece, who charms the boatmen coming and going with songs. Her long hair is the secret weapon of "femme fatale", which grinds the wounds of love to the core.

John William Waterhouse’s The Banshee of Sai Ren (1900)

In fact, girls with long hair often indicate the impending death in medieval paintings. In a painting entitled "Three Years of Life and Death" by Hans Baldung, a painter who is good at depicting "death and the maiden" (Die drei Lebensalter und der Tod) in the oil painting, both the baby and the old woman show fear in the face of death, and only the fair-skinned blonde girl is intoxicated with her beauty in the mirror, completely unaware of the death at hand. Holding high the torch of youth, who can pay attention to the hourglass of death? In the spectacular tapestry of Revelation (Tenture de l’Apocalypse), the Babylonian whore is also portrayed as a long-haired beauty who combs her hair with one hand and looks at herself in the mirror with the other.

Carl Joseph Beggs’s Lorelei (1835)

Attentive readers can indeed find faint clues alluding to Lorelei in Death Fugue. When the image of "Margaret" first appeared in the sixth line of the poem ("He wrote a letter to Margaret with golden hair in Germany"), Celan chose the same word as Heine used to describe the background of the legend of "Lorelei": "Esdunkelt"-a time to step into darkness and lead to tragedy.

In the second year of writing this poem, Heine was quietly baptized and became a Protestant, but the relationship between this Jewish poet and Protestantism was actually extremely ambiguous. The boatman who was attracted by the dazzling sound of Lorelei’s phantom and looked up to the heights was an allusion to the poet’s Jewish identity. The witch with "golden hair" represents "Germany" in the poet’s eyes in a sense-as high as a goddess sitting on a cliff stone, beyond reach. Although the poet did see his own shadow in the boatman who was infatuated with Lorelei, he finally let "I" jump out of the Rhine legend in the last paragraph and look at the doomed fate of this man who suffered from love trauma and racial discrimination with lament and self-mockery:

I guess the waves finally swallowed up.

The boatman and the boat;

Lorelena’s song,

Make it all happen.

(translated by Jiang Linjing)

As a Jewish poet who also wrote in German, Celan’s feelings for Germany are more complicated than Heine’s: Germany is obviously the "master of death" and the executioner who killed his parents, but German is also the poet’s cultural language and creative language. His poems are nourished by both Jewish and German water sources, just as he wrote in an untitled poem in his later years: "I drink from two cups". Heine saw his own shadow in the boatman who looked up at the blonde witch, and Celan used the double mirror image in "Margaret with golden hair" to reflect her love and hate for Germany.

"Margaret" with Long Hair and "Eternal Woman"

The second literary image is Margarete, the heroine in the first tragedy of Goethe’s Faust, also known as Gretchen. Faust, who became a charming teenager after making a pact with the devil, fell in love with Margaret, a girl who was like a white jade. The girl was tempted, gave birth to an illegitimate child with Faust despite the opposition of her family, and drowned the baby in despair. In the last scene of the first tragedy, Faust, with the help of the devil, went to prison to rescue Gan Qingqing, but he could not convince her. Gan Qingqing in prison thinks that she should be punished for her crime, but firmly believes that God will save her penitent soul.

Henrik Frans Safr’s Faust and Sweet Tears (1863)

There is a scene in the play that depicts Margaret combing her hair in the boudoir and discovering the jewels that Faust was lured by the devil and quietly left in the wardrobe, so she dressed up carefully and lamented that the exquisite jewels made the mirror more radiant. The image of a tearful girl who combs her hair in a mirror is reminiscent of the girl in death and the maiden. This scene has indeed become a turning point in the fate of Gan Qingqing, and the girl has since fallen into the abyss of perdition and moved closer to death step by step. Faust has aroused great concern in European literary circles, and Margaret (Gan Tears Qing) has also become the representative of "German women" in world literature, and many painters have described her as a typical German beauty with "blonde hair and blue eyes".

Schnoor Carrolsfield’s Faust and Gan Tears in Prison (1833)

Let’s turn our attention to the last scene of the whole poetic drama. In front of the mysterious finale chorus "das Ewig-Weibliche", three penitent women’s solos appeared, in which we can explore the strange deformation of Margaret’s image.

The first appearance is the "sinful woman" (Magna peccatrix). This "sinful woman" can be said to be the most famous repentant female image in Christianity: once a prostitute, she wept bitterly at Jesus’ feet and used her hair to dry Jesus’ feet wet with tears. Although her name is not specified in the Gospels, the Catholic tradition generally equates her with Maria Magdalena. In the history of art, painters like to describe her as a peerless beauty with long hair shawls, with a jade bottle filled with perfume beside her, and her eyes will never stop at the glitz of the world. Georges de la Tour, a French painter, asked her head to turn to the deep place, and the long-haired beauty who was immersed in meditation ignored the jewelry discarded on the table and put her hands together on the skeleton symbolizing "people will die". Tiziano Vecellio made her look up at the sky devoutly, and her long curly hair became the only cover for her naked body.

The last appearance in the mysterious chorus is "Maria Aegyptiaca". According to The Golden Legend (Legenda aurea) records, she worked as a prostitute in Alexandria for seventeen years. One day, she met some sailors who wanted to go to Jerusalem and begged them to take her with her. When she arrived in Jerusalem, she seemed to be blocked by an invisible force and could not cross the threshold of the temple. So she confessed and repented, vowed to renounce the world and finally entered the temple. After walking out of the temple, Mary of Egypt immediately took three loaves of bread into the desert for seclusion. For forty-seven years, her clothes were tattered and she covered herself with long hair. When she was hungry, she used bread that was as hard as stone, but never stopped. In traditional icon paintings and sculptures, long hair and three loaves of bread are the symbols of this "desert hermit".

Georges De La Tour’s Mary Magdalene in Candlelight (about 1625-1650)

At the end of Faust’s tragedy, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt and "Mulier Samaritana" formed a strange "Mary Group", begging for Margaret and asking God to forgive her sins.

Like Margaret, the tragic heroine of Faust, the three penitent saints all committed the so-called adultery and were rejected by their neighbors. They were all lonely marginal people, but their hearts were open, and they did not stubbornly refuse the sacred love or avoid the suffering they deserved. Just like flowing long hair, it can be as gentle as velvet or as tough as sandalwood root. The long hair that falls freely can be an open temptation or a sheltered holiness. Daniel Arasse, a French art critic, also mentioned the contradiction behind the virgin’s excessively thick hair in "We See Nothing". If the beautiful long hair symbolizes the once dirty life, and the painter wants to show their holiness after repentance, why not just let them abandon their long hair and show their true abstinence? Why highlight their hair so exaggeratedly? Because long hair contains the temptation and danger of sensuality, but it also contains the strength of softness and weakness. It is a transition, a transition from a once pure white girl to a polluted Margaret, and a transition from a tragic Margaret in the first part to a bright virgin Margaret in the second part. Margaret, who rejected the earthly "salvation" and chose eternal "redemption" in the first tragedy, finally joined this "Mary group" and begged for Faust’s soul. Make Faust’s soul follow the "eternal woman" to a higher level.

These "eternal women" are different from the men who "clench their fists" represented by Faust (in German, "Faust" means "fist") and never stop trying to climb. Their strength comes from love. In the second part of the tragedy, Faust’s own behavior is becoming more and more noble and pure. However, Goethe believes that it is not enough to have his own efforts, and he has to rely on "help" to obtain the highest happiness, and that help is "eternal love". These three penitent saints, like Gan Tears Qing, all symbolize the process from "broken" to "perfect". They are "perfect" because they accept their own "broken". It is these seemingly negative and weak eternal women who finally guide Prometheus-style strong men to rise.

Anseur Keefer’s Margaret with Your Golden Hair (1980)

Let’s go back to the end of Death Fugue. "Margaret with your golden hair" and "the girl with your ashes-like hair" are obviously the peaks of many parody fugues in this century’s poem (for the interpretation of "musicality" in Death Fugue, please refer to my humble article, see The Art of German Musical Poetry, East China Normal University Press, 2021). The opposition of "German-Jewish women" in Celan’s poems is not completely hostile in essence. Lorelei, the witch, the sweet tears in Faust, and the "eternal woman", these traditional images originated from German folk, German classic literature and Christianity are gathered together by Celan in an unconventional way, which constitutes a unique metaphorical cluster of "Margaret with golden hair". When we finally put this deep cluster together with the "ash-like hair girl of Shulami", we will find that this opposition is extremely sad, but there is no hatred. Brutal killing and romantic melancholy, dangerous temptation and eternal love overlap in "Margaret with golden hair" She embodies the ultimate contradiction of Germany, just as Friedrich Nietzsche called Richard Wagner’s Tristan and isolde (Tristan und Isolde) shows "the same horror and sweetness", just like the title of the poem "Death fugue": Germany produced a cruel massacre and also gave birth to accurate fugue counterpoint.

Beauty is pain, lust is torture, and compassion comes from trauma. Poetry touched Celan’s wound, but it was difficult to heal him. His poems stagnated between the inextricable connection between Germany and Judaism and the irreconcilable pain, and his body finally sank to the bottom of the icy Seine River. But who knows, when he falls in the water, when the moment of his final sleep comes, when the lines of his flesh are full of fear of death, whether his heart has been filled with eternal love, whether his soul has been as white and frank as Faust, and has been led by those "eternal women" who have appeared in his life and poems, and has risen to the starry sky?

This article first appeared in Book City (June, 2022), and was published by The Paper under the authorization of Book City.