Austrian composer Franz Peter Schubert lived for only 31 years, but left behind a vast body of work, including the song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), a setting of 24 poems by German poet Wilhelm Müller. The poet also died young, of a heart attack at 32. As for Franz Schubert, there is no conclusive cause of death. He possibly suffered from syphilis, and some of his symptoms resembled mercury poisoning. But it could have been typhoid, salmonella or even leukemia. Days before his death, gripped by illness and deteriorating fast, he was still correcting the proofs of the second set of Winterreise.

Why am I, a rather non-musical person, thinking of this long-dead composer? Perhaps because I cannot get the song lyrics of Winter Journey out of my head. I may never have encountered this song cycle if not for Absolution, the latest installment in Jeff VanderMeer’s brilliant Southern Reach series. Look at that book cover. That’s right, it’s an alligator entwined with distorted yellow sunflowers. That should give you an idea of the vibe of the book. Like being bitten in a dream. Like being subsumed. Like being unmoored from reality, much like its narrator, Old Jim, who plays the piano and is haunted by the lyrics of Winter Journey. And also a wrong version of Winter Journey. He plays them again and again, not realizing that he is, in some way, being controlled by them.

But I don’t want to talk more about the book here, or the series itself. That deserves its own blog post. The Southern Reach is a very unique, genre-defying science fiction series, both creepy and fascinating. The first book, Annihilation, was turned into a movie that was its own kind of Weird.

No, what I really want to talk about is Winter Journey. The lyrics are some of the most melancholic I have read. And, as the author Jeff VanderMeer says, there is a melancholy satisfaction in existing within someone else’s sadness, someone who is safely removed from you by centuries.

The poet Wilhelm Müller was a teacher of classics and a librarian. Where did the pathos in his work come from? The heart attack was sudden, after all, unexpected. Perhaps he was just extremely skilled at eliciting emotion from his listeners/readers. His son grew up to be the famous philologist and Indologist Friedrich Max Müller – a connection I didn’t make until I looked him up. The Goethe Institutes in India are called Max Müller Bhavans. I visited the one in Delhi multiple times as a student. I never thought, then, to do any research into his father or his father’s work.

Now then. The poems. There are 24 in all, each one a bittersweet ode to winter, to loss, to longing, to love. I’ve read two translations: one by the Hampsong Foundation that is likely closer to the original, and one by the poet Jeremy Sams. Both have their own charm. Oh, I’ve read a third version in the book as well – the one that infected me first. They have seeped into me, blurred so the version in my mind is a meld of all three. The words of the poet, the intent of the translator, the heart of the listener make a compact. There is no passivity when reading poetry in translation – or any poetry, for that matter. Here, then, is the poem Will-o’-the-wisp with bits from each translation – and a touch of my own:

Deep within some dark ravine
A ghostly flickering led me here
Where I am, or how I’ll leave
Is very far from clear.

I am used to going astray
Every path has its end
Every joy, every sorrow
Is but a phantom’s toy.

I follow dry riverbeds
In peace I make my way
Every stream will reach the sea
Every sorrow too its grave.

And here is The Signpost, the twentieth in the song cycle:

Why do I pass the highways
That other travelers tread
Scaling snowbound rocky heights
Through hidden roads instead?

What sin have I committed
To keep me from my kind
What senseless craving
Drives me into the wild?

Every road has a signpost
Pointing toward a town
Yet I wander on and on
Destination unknown.

But one signpost I can see
The words steadfast and stern
One road that I must travel
From which there’s no return.

That road, of course, is death. Imagine Schubert, at the end of his life, working on this song. What must he have been going through then? You can listen to the song here. You can sense the hidden paths the writer (the composer?) is seeking, and the inevitability of the final one. There is a loneliness in both the lyrics and the music that stays long after the song ends.

If you are interested in listening to the entire song cycle, there is an excellent performance by the tenor Ian Bostridge you can watch here. Ian Bostridge also wrote the book Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession. Despite my general non-musicality, I plan to read it. There is a universality in the lyrics and music of Winter Journey that transcends barriers of language, of knowledge.

It’s fitting that I have come to this composition in November, traditionally the gloomiest month of the year in northern climes. There’s a long winter ahead.

But today, the sun is out. Today, I will walk on the beaten path with the sunlight on my face. Today, I will not dwell on hidden paths, both those that I took and those that I missed.