Abstract
This book is a great treasure for anyone interested in Johannes Kepler and his immense achievements. Kepler’s collected poetry here fills 120 openings, with (mainly) Latin text on the left and parallel German translations set on the right. Some of this verse is occasional – celebrating marriages or graduations, or marking various losses, deaths, and burials – and some of it overlaps domains astronomical and political. The other half comprises roughly 50 pages surveying Kepler’s life and poetic practices, followed by just over 200 pages of introductions and notes to the poems appearing in the first part. The format, with bolded numbers marking each poem and then repeated in the second section, makes navigation between poems and notes quick and efficient.
The second longest poem is a 184-line elegy on the death of Tycho Brahe. Despite its formulaic reference to tears being shed and to grief being expressed not only in Prague but also as far away as the court of King James VI of Scotland, it is not a poem overflowing with convincing emotion. In fact, the whole second half of the poem, addressed directly to Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, while nobly characterizing Tycho Brahe as a Phoenix, reads like an extended (and of course not exactly disinterested) apologia for the usefulness of astronomy for exploration, navigation, and agriculture – with so much more to be discovered and so much more in the way of major funding required. It is a bit as if the obituary of a leading astronomer today employed half its space urging the National Science Foundation to increase research spending.
More passion appears, unsurprisingly, in Kepler’s lamentations (“Funera Domestica,” pp. 170–201) upon the loss of his 6-year-old son and of his first wife, Barbara. The same is true of his nine-line address to the supernova of 1604 (p. 106) and in his burial poem (“ab ipso conscripto”), which Paul Hindemith had his Kepler character sing on his deathbed in the 1957 opera Die Harmonie der Welt (pp. 236–237, 502). We also taste Kepler’s outrage at the Holy Office’s 1616 censure of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (anger augmented perhaps by fear that his own works might receive similar treatment). With a glance backward to the notorious case of medieval theologian and poet Peter Abelard, who had punishment visited upon his offending physical members – and with the name of Pythagoras (as was common) standing in for that of Copernicus – Kepler offers a sardonic four-line epigram whose headnote announces that he aims to oppose those “ignorant in matters astronomical” by employing “not argument but ridicule”: Ne lasciviret, poterant castrare Poetam, Testiculis demptis vita superstes erat. Vae tibi Pythagora, Cerebro qui ferris abusus; Vitam concedunt, ante sed excerebrant. (p. 202) [Easy to keep the poet from lewdness: castrate him. With testes gone, sufficient life remained. But woe, Pythagoras, your brain offends: Though life be spared, already they’ve snatched your mind.]
The epigram with headnote appeared posthumously in 1634, as note 7 to Kepler’s Somnium.
In a volume that does so much so well one is bound to find small things at which to cavil. Perhaps the best-known verses in the collection are those Kepler composed as a preface to De revolutionibus – Kepler’s Latin being based on Joachim Camerarius’ earlier Greek verses intended for, but not published with, the original 1543 Nuremberg edition. In this dialogue between a stranger and a philosopher, the former asks disbelievingly, “liber iste . . . Tellurem omnipatens an per inane rotat?” – “Does this book . . . whirl the earth through vast empty space?” (translated in Owen Gingerich, An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, pp. 356–359; lines 9–10). However, Friedrich Seck renders these lines as inquiring whether Copernicus’ book “Wirbelt . . . wirklich die Erd’ durch das unendliche All?” – which anachronistically imports into the poem an overly Newtonian air of infinite space, a doctrine foreign to both Copernicus and Kepler. The commentary upon the same poem offers a biographical paragraph on Copernicus that mentions his meeting with the young Georg Joachim Rheticus that crucially led to the completion and publication of De revolutionibus. But of course this meeting unfolded in Frombork (Frauenburg), not, as stated by Seck, in Toruń (“in Thorn,” p. 370).
Yet this book approaches (even if it does not fully attain) perfection as a meticulously curated gallery displaying the emotional and artistic range of one of the greatest astronomers – one of the finest minds – ever to have graced the annals of our species.