2023-12-16 22:41:56
“This is all the result of me writing you a lovely letter,” writes Oscar Wilde. He writes it in a far less charming letter, which meticulously lists and comments on “all of this” – like a register of disappointed friendship. Nevertheless, Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellman, who is not only considered a profound connoisseur of Joyce and Yeats, but also an authority on style through his own work, counted the later letter “unquestionably among the most important love letters”. And among the longest: 190 book pages.
It may also be the only letter of this type known by its own title: “De Profundis” (From the Deep, a quote from Psalm 130); However, the Latin name was not Wilde’s choice, although he decreed in it: “The worst vice is superficiality.” He had been writing the letter for three months, but had not planned to publish it. It was only published in 1905, five years after his death, in a heavily edited and shortened form. A publication corresponding to Wilde’s complete manuscript did not take place before 1962.
Grossly immoral acts?
What is this letter about, which has now been newly translated into German (of course based on the text of the most recent critical English edition published in 2005)? What makes it so attractive that a writer like Mirko Bonné has undertaken to translate it, which Hanser Verlag is now publishing in its classic series, undoubtedly the most acclaimed selection of newly translated works of world literature in German at the moment? Oscar Wilde wrote this letter in Reading Penitentiary (in Berkshire, near London), where he had to serve most of a two-year prison sentence to which he had been sentenced on May 25, 1895 for “gross immoral acts with other male persons”. .
Oscar Wilde: “From the Deep”. : Image: Hanser Verlag
The majority of the reasons for the judgment are misleading: Wilde was primarily blamed for his relationship with the then twenty-four-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queensberry, and it was his lover’s father who had reported Wilde. The main piece of evidence was the “charming letter” mentioned at the beginning in which Wilde, as an Irishman, the most successful British writer at the time and a leading representative of the decadence, did not skimp on pompous comparisons. Neither the defendant nor the person making the complaint (nor the aristocratic and anti-Irish English judiciary) had any interest in involving the young Douglas too deeply in the matter; So the main blame fell on Oscar Wilde.
Praise You, cry out to You
His loyalty to his lover was supposed to help Wilde survive his horrific prison time, which nevertheless damaged his health so much through forced labor and stay in the musty cells that he died as a result three and a half years after serving his sentence at the age of only forty-six. From prison he initially wrote further glowing letters to his “Bosie”, which are cleverly included in the new translation: “Even covered with mud, I will praise you, from the deepest abyss” – here appears for the first time, almost two years before the big letter, the de profundis motif – “I will cry out to you.” You will be with me in my loneliness.” But it wasn’t Douglas; Although he also assured the prisoner of his continued love (the letters that Wilde received in prison are unfortunately missing from the book), he lived in freedom, and Wilde found this discrepancy (and the lack of the more intensive correspondence he had hoped for) increasingly depressing, so that At the end of his prison term, that great reckoning with his passion and his lover took place, which is “De Profundis”. Or “From the Deep,” as the text is titled in the Hanser edition.
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