Boris Dralyuk, an old bloggic friend (dating back to 2012), has an essay in Poetry about looking backward:
Pain is at the core of nostalgia, a term that a Swiss medical student coined in 1688 to diagnose a manifest malady, a homesickness intense enough to dysregulate the heartbeats of mercenaries serving abroad. Some of us are especially prone to such acute symptoms, but all of us, at one time or another, have experienced nostalgia as a proper ache. And yet, that isn’t what makes nostalgia a hard feeling to write about. There is often a sweetness to nostalgia, a sugar coating that, left unchecked, thickens until it obscures the painful kernel. The longing for a past purified of its faults—or a past we never knew firsthand, encountered only on the page, on the screen, or in tales told to us before sleep or from a podium—becomes an indulgence. What makes nostalgia difficult to treat honestly in poems is how easily some of us fall under its spell.
I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it. This inner conflict—my attraction to the past, my effort to remind myself that the past is always a dream—has guided much of my work as a poet and translator. I suppose I could blame my personal history. Uprooted as a child from my native town of Odesa, Ukraine, thrust into an alien culture, I sought comfort in memories: of playing in the park with herds of cats and one terribly loyal stray dog as the sun set, while old men swapped inflated war stories over games of checkers and dominoes; of racing back from the water of the Black Sea to bite into incomparably flavorful tomatoes sprinkled with salt; of listening to my mother’s guests crack jokes in our warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. The memories grew ever cleaner, ever more pillowy in response to my needs.
Surely the experience of immigration reinforced my predilections, but some people are simply born looking backward. When the theologian Ronald Knox was four years old, he had trouble sleeping. He never made a fuss about it, just stayed in his room. A guest at the house asked what the boy did all night, and he replied, “I lie awake and think about the past.” That was me from the start, and that is me now. Many of my poems are born as phrases that come to me as I do what little Knox did.
I frequently conjure up, as a sobering slap, the image of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy, the smalltown lush who “missed the mediæval grace/Of iron clothing,” who “thought, and thought, and thought,/And thought about” the storybook worlds of “Thebes and Camelot.” That fourth thought, coming after the line break, sent Robert Frost and Ezra Pound into a fit of laughter when they first read it. What a terrific dig at the paralysis of the nostalgic. Of course, they knew what kept Cheevy planted on that barstool as well as Robinson did. For all his talk of making it new, Pound was forever digging in the past, forever scorning the present, and, at his canniest moments, mocking himself for it. His Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—“out of key with his time,” striving “to resuscitate the dead art”—is as much a half- tender, half-devastating reflection of himself as Cheevy was of Robinson.
He goes on to discuss nostalgia in Marina Tsvetaeva’s 1934 poem “Homesickness” (which I too love) and Donald Justice’s “Dance Lessons of the Thirties” (which I was unfamiliar with). I love the image of Frost and Pound’s fit of laughter, and especially the four-year-old Ronald Knox lying awake and thinking about the past. And that Swiss medical student was Johannes Hofer, whose little pamphlet Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (1688) you can read at Google Books or at MDZ; the word is introduced on p. 5:
It was translated by Carolyn Kiser Anspach in “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688” (Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2.6 [1934]:376-391), available at JSTOR; she has an interesting paragraph about the title:
The first reprint of this thesis appeared in 1710, as part of the “Fasciculus Dissertationum Medicarum Selectorium” of Th. Zwinger (Basel). The original title is changed to “De Pothopatridalgia vom Heimwehe.” The text is almost identical with that of the first edition, although the term “nostalgia” is replaced throughout by “pothopatridalgia.” Zwinger also has introduced an additional case history between the fourth and fifth chapters, has revised and re-arranged parts of the text, and in his twelfth chapter mentions a sweet melody of Switzerland which tends to produce homesickness in everyone who hears it. He actually gives the notes of this “pathologic air,” which is called “Kühe-Reyen.”
I have a feeling “pothopatridalgia” was never going to catch on.
Wonderful topic. It has a close relative, the (nearly?) untranslatable saudade that surely has been treated here before. Another branch is to be found in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. For me they can ride parallel paths or merge.
Interesting, I don’t think I’ve looked up the etymology of saudade before; per Wiktionary, it’s more complex than I expected:
And, speaking of Edwin Arlington Robinson, who lived just up the road a piece in Head Tide,
he delved often into the tragic, futile underbelly of nostalgia: regret.
The final lines of Bewick Finzer—
“ Familiar as an old mistake,
And futile as regret.”
For this time and place of ugly acquisitiveness
https://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-23553
Nostalgia is a translation of German Heimweh, which is more than century older (according to Paul, it first occurs in the writings of another Swiss, Ludw. Pfyffer.
“Kühe-Reyen” is the “Ranz des Vaches” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranz_des_Vaches which is famously included in Rossini’s “William Tell” overture.
The Welsh word hiraeth “longing” seems to have acquired in English a wholly specious cod-mystical Celtic Twilight sense, relating to geography rather as “nostalgia” does to chronology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiraeth
The WP article provides some characteristic bollocks about it being “unable to be directly translated to English.”
Welsh WP is a bit better:
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiraeth
Messes up the Gododdin cite, though: should be
Blwydyn hiraeth er gwyr gatraeth a’m maeth ys meu.
“A year of longing for the men of Catraeth who nurtured me is mine.”
And “13th century” is right for the manuscript, but the poem itself is certainly much older (at least in part.)
Ah. It’s from the Llyfr Aneirin, but not, in fact, from Y Gododdin.
https://cy.wikisource.org/wiki/Gwarchan_Tudfwlch
The soft mutation in gwyr gatraeth “men of Catraeth” is odd. I wonder if it’s an archaism? (I think Cornish has soft mutation after plural masculine nouns for persons.) More likely just a mistake, I suppose. Alliterates, though …
“Kühe-Reyen” is the “Ranz des Vaches” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranz_des_Vaches which is famously included in Rossini’s “William Tell” overture.
Thanks, I’ve added a link to the mention in the post.
Reminds me of Paul McCartney’s new song
Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
No one can erase
The days we left behind
That definitely sounds like McCartney.
Norw. hjemve is probably a calque of German Heimweh, but it’s definitely a longing for homeplace and family, not a bygone era.
You can long home to anywhere, also Trondheim:
The orthography is, eh, 1925 Trondheim dia- to mesolect on a substrate of pre-war Riksmaal. That should give GT something to choke on!
The good old days of the snows of yesteryear may differ when mentioned by an individual recalling oneself
than by a leader of a political party.
Heimweh and Nostalgie have drifted apart as place vs. time. The former has spawned Fernweh for the urge to go somewhere far away, preferably exotic.
Derhjemme er derhjemme, as they almost say in Bavaria.
Norw. hjemve is probably a calque of German Heimweh, but it’s definitely a longing for homeplace and family, not a bygone era.
That is also the sense of German Heimweh. Despite it originally being a calque and meaning the same, Nostalgie has come to refer only to longing for a bygone time and lost the sense of geographical longing.
Edit: Ninja’d by DM
(Ostalgie is nostalgia in East Germany for the GDR.)