As the poet of the threshold, Hölderlin sought a path of transport between the old dying world of the ancien regime and the new world of historical freedom that lay just beyond the measure of the present. As his guide, he chose the figures of the ancient Greeks as a way to negotiate the tensions, boundaries, chasms, and contradictions between those realms separated by time, fate, history, and destiny. For him, the task of poetic communication was modeled on the same phenomenology of guest-friendship as in the closing scene from Homer’s Iliad: the journey of Priam across the threshold of a battlefield separating two bitterly opposed enemies, a journey aided by Zeus’ beloved son, Hermes. As the god of crossings and crisscrossings, of convergences and intersections, Hermes disposes over those realms marked by deep ambiguity and equivocation. In a word, Hermes is the god of the chiasm—of the crisscross of lines that intersect and whose divergence serves as the very basis of any possible convergence. Such a relation can be seen in the Greek letter chi (χ) formed by the intersection of divergent lines. Hermes comes forth, then, as the god of enigma, paradox, and riddle. He is also known as the god of travelers, who plows roads and marks their crossing with his herm statues—pillars with two heads that serve as signposts and milestones. This two-headed god stands over all thresholds as the god of doors, hinges, portals, and gates. But as the god of transport, he also regulates those realms of commerce having to do with mercantile-sexual-communicative transactions. He thus also becomes linked with the practices of thievery, deception, letters, and music. In this way Hermes becomes the god who disposes over the art of hermeneutics, that subtle craft of negotiating the distance between art and artifice, fidelity and dissembling, the very art required of those embarking upon the act of translation.

For Hölderlin, the poet becomes the Hermes-figure whose work begins at the threshold and in it, ever mindful of the vast chasm separating one’s native language from the foreign that one seeks to appropriate. Hence, as he sees it, the poet must scrupulously honor the unbridgeable separation between them, even as he simultaneously prepares a path for crossing over it. Such a demand is both impossible and necessary. It requires an understanding of the singularity of each culture, each language, each word, and each expression, even as it simultaneously demands a responsibility to perform a Hermes-like journey across each singularity to its other—a journey marked by an ordeal of difference and alterity. Such a journey enacts the very demand of ethics—a hermeneutic ethics of acknowledging the right of the other, even as it also affirms the necessity of starting out from the native and one’s own. And here, I want to argue, we find the heart of Hölderlin’s relevance to our own global and multicultural efforts to make sense of the spread of nationality and native identity. For Hölderlin, the key to such an understanding lies in the poetic practice and discipline of translation. Translation, for Hölderlin, signifies an exposure to the very difficulties of Hermes-like crossings and interchanges. To enter into the foreign is to bring into question my own identity. In authentic translation, my own language becomes foreign to me. Moreover, any attempt to reduce the strangeness of the other’s language to something familiar and conventional within my own milieu misses the very power of what the translation experience entails. For Hölderlin, to enter into the activity of translation is to experience an awakening to the hidden power of one’s own language. Any good translator of Hölderlin’s work needs to be attentive to this dimension of the poet’s vision. By that measure, David Constantine’s new translation offers us a real contribution not only to Hölderlin studies, but to the art and craft of translation itself.

During the period of his greatest poetic compositions (1800-1806), Hölderlin was actively involved in translating into German some of the most difficult poetic texts from the ancient Greek tradition, including Pindar, as well as Sophocles’s bewildering tragedies, Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus. And here is where Constantine’s translation grants some of its boldest achievements. Not only does Constantine offer thoughtful and masterly translations of Hölderlin’s poetic hymns and late songs, but his attention to detail in the tragedies helps bring focus to Hölderlin’s passion for translation as a key to his poetic art. Moreover, Constantine also provides translation of Hölderlin’s two essays—“Notes on Oedipus” and “Notes on Antigone”—which convey some of the most insightful readings of Greek tragedy within modern German thought. If, for example, Hegel reads tragedy in terms of the logic of metaphysical supersession and reconciliation, Hölderlin proffers something vastly more nuanced and problematic—an understanding of tragedy as a way to think the irreconcilability of inward contradiction.

In his reading of the play Oedipus Tyrannus, for example, Hölderlin finds the exemplar of such inward contradiction in the figure of Oedipus himself. Oedipus appears on stage as the icon of modern subjectivity, a willful force of instrumental rationality bent on mastery through the art of reckoning. Hölderlin’s Oedipus comes to embody the tragedy of all enlightenment in its boundless quest to demythologize the gods and to thereby gain control and dominance over the riddling, oracular mysteries of nature and language. In deploying the language of technical calculation, Oedipus stands opposed to the poet who seeks to keep alive the tensions and paradoxes of the foreign and the native that animate the language of poetry. In carrying out such a delicate task, however, the poet risks losing both himself and his own language. Giving oneself over to the allure of the foreign carries with it the danger of forgetting one’s native identity. What one requires is memory, memory of what the poetic task demands. In his majestic hymn “Mnemosyne,” Hölderlin speaks to this question of self-forgetting in a powerful way:

We are a sign with no meaning
Without pain we are and have almost
Lost our language in foreign lands…(v.1-3) (trans. altered).

It is as if here the poet is trying to express a gnawing fear about self-oblivion that threatens his task of retrieving the ancient language of the Greeks in his modern renderings. How to negotiate the distance between Pindar’s paratactic enjambments and the demands of modern poetic verse? How to render Sophocles’ startling idioms in a vigorous and energetic way that keeps alive their archaic power without leveling them to any modern equivalency? What would be required to make Sophocles’ tragedies resound in a powerful voice that could speak to the modern condition of alienation and abandonment?These were some of the questions that directed Hölderlin’s difficult and complex relation to the ancient Greeks. Above all, Hölderlin was committed to an idealized vision of ancient Greece as the site for the spiritual origin of the West. For him “Greece” was less the space of a geographical location than it was the name for an experience of absence, one marked by exile from, and mourning for, a possibility of authentic poetic dwelling. What Hölderlin attempts in his poetry is a complex retrieval of a Greek experience that never happened, of a vision of originary beauty whose power is not historical, but futural. That is, for Hölderlin, Greece exists as the name of a tragic hope born out of the painful loss of something irrecoverable, a hope whose very utterance bespeaks the power of homecoming. In this notion of homecoming to the foreign, Hölderlin locates the most authentic problem facing Western consciousness, a problem that for him comes to define the very identity of the German people as they strive to define their role within the contorted legacy of Western history/destiny. For what the term “Greece” comes to signify for Hölderlin is the name of an experience where the force of the sacred is still a living reality for human beings in their comportment to the gods. In “The Gods of Greece” (1788), Schiller had already spoken of the deus absconditus that would mark modern existence as a time of destitution and default. In so doing, he had articulated for Hölderlin the task of the modern German poet: to recover in poetic song the trace of the fugitive gods. This was to become Hölderlin’s defining vocation and the essence of his poetic craft—to attend to the vanishing of the sacred as the theme conditioning modern life. And it is here, in a preeminent sense, that the Greeks help Hölderlin to craft his own poetic vocation as the voice for a new German identity. But Hölderlin offers a clear warning: we study the Greeks not to imitate them, but so that we might fashion a new kind of identity out of our very difference from them.

What Hölderlin attempts to articulate in both his poetic hymns and in his translations of tragedy is a sense of the utter lostness of human beings within the modern condition. We stand, the poet claims, in a “destitute time” besieged by the loss and absence of the gods, fated to wait for their return, yet powerless to effect it in any meaningful way. And yet the poet’s highest calling for Hölderlin involves the attempt to bring about a reversal of such a condition by pointing to our need for a poetic attunement to absence, departure, loss, and privation. Only in experiencing such loss, Hölderlin wants to say, can we come to a sense of our own purpose and fulfillment.

Perhaps nowhere is Hölderlin’s attunement to such loss as enigmatically expressed as in his majestic hymn “Remembrance” that addresses the question of loss and absence by turning to the thematics of memory and recollection. Here language enacts a break or caesura from the unity of life, leaving the poet alone and grief-stricken at the thought of losing a dearly loved one. Moreover, here we come to understand memory as double-edged. On the one hand, it is necessary to grieve the beloved, but just as necessary to let go of excessive grief so as not to abandon oneself to boundless self-indulgence or self-abnegation. In this symbol of memory, Hesiod found the origin of all poetic song since it was the Muses who bequeathed to him the source of their ambivalent kerygma:

We know how to say many lies as if they were true,
And when we want, we know how to speak the truth.

Hesiod, Theogony, vv. 27-28.

What the poetic Muses taught Hölderlin was the art of negotiating the difficult boundary between the truth of the word and its beguiling artifices. In few realms does such a contest for truth take place as powerfully as in the realm of translation. Translation becomes for Hölderlin the arena within which the poet undertakes a work that threatens him with dispossession and forfeiture. It is no surprise, then, to find that the German term for translation, Übersetzung, finds its etymological echoes in word roots related to displacement (Versetzung), transposition (Umsetzung), shake-up (Umbesetzung), and shock (Entsetzen).Constantine’s labors here attend to the strange and uncanny process that takes place in Hölderlin’s translations from the Greek to the German. Moreover, in his own English translations, Constantine addresses not only the technical process of finding accurate word equivalencies, he also focuses on how, for Hölderlin, translation itself functions as a way to bring us closer to the essence of language that manifests itself in the poetic word.

At the very heart of Hölderlin’s preoccupations as a poet is the absolute precedence of language. For him, language is not an instrument of communication, a tool designed to enable us to transmit or convey “information;” it constitutes, rather, nothing less than the supreme event of human existence, a world-forming power that exposes us to the highest possibilities of our being. In this function as poet of the Germans, Hölderlin’s fate as a poet comes to be reflected in German history itself. As one of the great Hölderlin commentators of the last century, Bernhard Böschenstein, put it : “Hölderlin is perhaps the sole German poet of the age of Goethe who has served as a mirror for the whole of the 20th century.”[3] And yet it is the way Hölderlin would be read in his 20th-century German reception that has led to such difficulty in properly assessing his work.

Hölderlin was born in 1770 and died in 1843, but at the age of 36 he experienced a profound mental breakdown that led to his being admitted to the Autenreith clinic in Tübingen. After several months of incarceration there, with no hope of improvement, he was released to the care of a carpenter who tended to him in a tower overlooking the Neckar River for the last 36 years of his life. This image of the mad poet in the tower came to shape the mythology of Hölderlin that dominates his German reception. Neglected for a century (except by Brentano, Nietzsche, and Fontane), Hölderlin’s work was rediscovered by a young German academic, Norbert von Hellingrath, who devoted a study to Hölderlin’s hymns and to his Pindar translations, producing a new edition highlighting the late work and setting off a Hölderlin Renaissance in 1914. The effects of such a revival touched leading poets and thinkers such as Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Martin Heidegger, among others.What emerged from this Hölderlin-reception at a decisive point in German history was a bifurcated path—a left-wing Hölderlin and a right-wing Hölderlin— that reflected the profound divisions of German culture during the epoch of the two world wars, and afterwards in the Germany divided between East and West.[4] Hellingrath became a decisive figure in the Hölderlin reception; after his death at the battle of Verdun in 1916, he was turned into a martyr for a Hölderlin-inspired German nationalism later taken up by National Socialist ideologues, including Josef Goebbels. Indeed, the Nazi politicization of Hölderlin went to such extremes that, in 1943 on the hundredth anniversary of his death, Nazi supporters descended on Tübingen to honor the poet’s grave by bestrewing it with swastikas.[5] In conjunction with this nationalist orgy of Hölderlin-mania in Tübingen, the first truly critical edition of the poet’s work was instituted by Friedrich Beissner. Beissner also founded the Hölderlin Society there as well as the first leading journal of Hölderlin studies, both of which still stand today as the leading organs of Hölderlin scholarship.[6] In the journal’s inaugural issue one contributor praised Hölderlin for “clearly calling to our consciousness the significance of Nordic blood for understanding the world of the ancient Greeks” and for recognizing “the depth of the racial affinity of both peoples.”[7]

Given the obscenities committed in Hölderlin‘s name, it took several generations of German scholarship to cleanse the poet’s pallet and allow for a new reception of his work, including a radically new critical edition begun by D. E. Sattler in 1975 that has only recently been completed.[8] To understand why it has taken so long for Hölderlin’s work to be properly recognized for its genius in the English-speaking world, requires a retracing of the deep political divisions—both within Germany and without—that marked the history of the last century. Given this history, it can only appear as ironic that the first book-length translation of Hölderlin into English also occurred in 1943, the centenary marking Hölderlin’s death. This first translation was undertaken by an émigré German Jew, the nineteen-year old Michael Hamburger, who stated in the “Introduction” to this first edition: “My aim, in these translations, was to reproduce the poems as literally as possible.”[9] Hamburger added that he sought above all to avoid “an intrusion of the translator’s idiosyncrasies into the author’s work” and to provide translations solely “as an introduction to Hölderlin’s work or as an aid to those who cannot read the original with ease.” Much has indeed changed both in Hölderlin scholarship and in translation studies since that time.

We now have seven new translations of Hölderlin’s work into English over the last decade. This remarkable outpouring of poetic skill, academic rigor, and scholarly excellence has succeeded in elevating Hölderlin’s profile in contemporary cultural discourse. And yet despite all this new activity there is, I would argue, still an unclear sense of what this legacy means and how it is to be interpreted. Hölderlin doesn’t easily fit into the premade categories of historical alignment that go under the names “Romanticism,” “Idealism,” “Neo-Classicism.” On the contrary, his verse seems to defy such conventions and to offer a problematic view of Western history since it is so deeply rooted in a commitment to, and a yearning for, myth. It is perhaps on that account that Hölderlin’s work has endured so powerfully through all its contradictory phases of reception and interpretation. The English-language reception of the poet’s oeuvre has been muted by the lack of a dual-language edition of Hölderlin’s poetry with critical commentary and scholarly interpretation, something akin to the three-volume editions in German undertaken by Jochen Schmidt and Michael Knaupp, or the superb single-volume Italian edition by Luigi Reitani.[10] Until there appears such a thorough—and critical—edition of Hölderlin’s work, we will have to work through the flaws that mark Hölderlin’s work in translation. And yet the appearance of David Constantine’s new 400-page collection of Hölderlin in translation is truly a welcomed addition.

But there are several caveats. Almost half of this new edition has appeared previously under different guises; the notes, while helpful, are sparse and incomplete; while all the Pindar fragments are translated, there are none of the odes from Pindar at all. One could quibble about this or that defect here and there, but the advantages far outweigh any carping criticisms. On the positive side of the ledger, Constantine has added more than 60 new poems in translation, as well as new renderings of Hölderlin’s own translations from the Greek of Pindar, Sophocles, and Euripides which, taken together, comprise over half of this new publication. This strange and compelling practice—of rendering into English Hölderlin’s own German translations of the Greek—marks this collection as a bold and daring challenge. For what Constantine stakes out here in his translations of Hölderlin’s translations is the very problem of language itself and what poetry can mean all its fractious and recalcitrant potential.Translation sets language against itself and, in so doing, it sets us into a struggle with and against our own language, so that we come into the danger of losing our own tongue (249).What genuine translation achieves, in this sense, is a proper transposition into what is improper, an attempt to make our own that which remains strange and foreign. Ultimately, translation is unsettling; it dislodges us from our native haunts, deposes us from our settled positions, and forces us to confront the alien otherness that haunts language in all its irreducible singularity and uniqueness. Language resists being converted into an equivalent. For all its malleability and openness to being colonized by the other, language—at its heart, in its poetic essence—resists being converted into a tool for smooth commercial transactions and mercantile exchange.

For Hölderlin, language appears as a fragile vessel, ever in danger of being broken through the careless intercourse between those human beings unremittingly bound to their bustling enterprises. And yet in his attempt to extend the boundaries of what the German language might be capable of saying, Hölderlin oftentimes found himself in a cul-de-sac.In his translations of Oedipus and Antigone, for example, he produced strange and unsettling manuscripts that proved difficult to understand.When the translation was read aloud to Goethe and Schiller, they laughed. Their friend Heinrich Voss remarked: “what can be said about Hölderlin’s Sophocles? Is the man crazy or is he only pretending to be, and is his Sophocles a covert satire on bad translators?”[11]

The grammatical and syntactical errors in the translations were partly due to faulty Greek manuscripts that Hölderlin relied upon, but also because Hölderlin’s own knowledge of Greek was that of a poet, rather than of a scholar. Yet despite all of his slips and miscalculations—Constantine relates that there were “more than a thousand errors” (251)—Hölderlin produced a translation of Sophocles that was both jarring and inspired, a work of art in its own right that dismantled the rules of traditional art down to their foundations. As Constantine claims, though Hölderlin “was not very sound in the grammar of the language, and in translating made basic mistakes,” it needs to be said that he “had more insight into the heart of ancient Greek culture than anybody else in his generation” (252). In coming to terms with the strangeness of Greek word order, grammar, and syntax, Hölderlin came to forcefully experience an estrangement from his own language that enabled him to hear it again in a new register. In this way, translation came to be experienced, literally, as a kind of alienation—of making what is familiar strange and, in so doing, becoming at home in an uncanny way with what is foreign, confounding, and threatening. It is this experience of what might be called an “alien homecoming” that Hölderlin saw as the very heart of Greek tragedy, where life and death were crisscrossed in a chiastic relation that severed one from the other precisely at their point of intersection. It was this same tragic grammar of an alien homecoming that shaped Hölderlin’s own attempt at writing tragedy, The Death of Empedocles. The logic of Hölderlin’s translations, then, was marked by a strange and enigmatic insight—that appropriating what is native to one’s own language can only be properly achieved by first losing oneself in “the experience of the foreign” that tears one away from one’s native endowments into the realm of the alien other. It is this vision of alien homecoming that continues to haunt Hölderlin’s work as dramatist, as translator, and as poet. It is as if in translating the foreign language into one’s native tongue, the foreign not only becomes native, but the native—if it genuinely enters into the strangeness of the alien idiom—becomes foreign to itself. The foreign meaning is thus written over with the grammar of the native, and in this cross-breeding transplantation, a nascent sense of the national comes into its own birth through the other.

Hölderlin’s work of translation, as much as the translation of the work of Hölderlin, comes to us, then, as a palimpsest—written over and erased by two centuries of fervent division between left and right, traditionalists and postmodernists, poets and translators—where we are left to add our own signatures. How are we to respond? What kind of meaning can we wrest from the work of this poet whose language resists easy appropriation and conversion into our own purposes? How to translate a poet of the absential whose work speaks to and from the abyssal? How, in confronting the very border of meaning that presses upon the edge of ineffability, can we give voice to a language that is genuinely our own? These are the challenges that Hölderlin’s work poses to us today as we attempt to situate it within the canon of an academic discourse burst asunder by the power of his poetic word. In coming to terms with such baffling and disorienting language—the enjambments that interrupt all sense of continuity and connection; the strange word combinations that call into question the meaning and function of “naming” as a cultural practice; the irregular, syncopated rhythms that come near to prose—we come into confrontation with the fundament of the poetic word itself. And, I think, it is this confrontation that makes Hölderlin’s work especially relevant to our own age. For in coming to terms with the foreign, we also come to a sense of the foreignness that reigns within us as well. It is this sense, as Trakl put it, that “the soul is a stranger to itself,” which marks Hölderlin as one of our own. This is what is at stake in Hölderlin’s translation of ancient Greek; this is what marks his attempts to make translation itself a poetic art.

It is as if Hölderlin wishes to write in a style not only incommensurable with its original Greek source, but with the German language as well—all with the effect of rendering incompatibility itself as a new poetic style. For what Hölderlin genuinely attempts to craft in his writing is a poetics of absence, of a language attuned to the vast incommensurability of word and meaning or, rather, of being able to render in words the tragic withdrawal and recession of being in all its various guises and configurations.

As Gadamer puts it: “The ideal of poetic saying fulfills itself in untranslatability.”[12] How to translate ‘absence’? How to render in poetic form the notion of abyss as a way into the unconditional untranslatability of what language aspires to render? How to come to terms with the recalcitrance of language as the abyss of translatability, one that aspires to native appropriation even—and especially—where within one’s indigenous language, what reigns is not nativity, natality, or nationality, but the foreignness of what is ever alien, strange, and foreign. In precisely this way, language comes to us as inappropriable to use and possession, as recalcitrant to human instrumentality. There, at the abyss of language, Hölderlin works to expose language to what is foreign to it and leaves it for us to make our own border crossing.