 It is difficult to remember a time when the figure of Hölderlin, along with the extensive body of translation and commentary which his work has spawned in an impressive range of languages, was not a massive and unavoidable ‘presence’ in the fields of textual criticism, comparative literature, or literary and cultural theory. Yet it was well into the last century, almost a hundred years after the death of the poet, before a significant response to his work began to make itself felt in the anglophone context. If his name was occasionally encountered much earlier, this was usually in connection with historical discussions of the origins of German Idealism, or in schematic accounts of the German romantics amongst whom he was generally numbered (as a minor ‘offshoot of romantic poetry’, as the German critic Rudolf Haym put it in a standard nineteenth-century history, or as a self-doomed ‘Werther of Greece’, in the words of Theodor Vischer which would provoke the sarcastic ire of the young Nietzsche). In the first general introduction to Hegel's life and thought published in English, in 1883, the author had described Hölderlin as a young poet ‘filled with a kind of romantic longing for Hellenic art and poetry, similar to that which was more powerfully expressed by Schiller’ – a judgement that many would probably be minded to reverse today. It was only in the 1930s that a few critics and translators in English began to take Hölderlin seriously as an artist in his own right rather than as a peripheral figure of largely historical interest, partly as a result of the emphatic rediscovery and re-evaluation of the poet that had been well underway in Germany since the turn of the last century, but also under the influence of contemporary modernist and surrealist trends in art and literature. This was the context of the very free but often highly effective ‘translations’ of a handful of Hölderlin's mature poems and fragments by David Gascoyne in 1938 (actually variations or ‘imitations’ derived from modern French versions of the originals). New and ever more extensive selections began to appear over the next couple of decades, by Frederick Prokosch (1943), Michael Hamburger (1943), J. B. Leishmann (1944 and 1954), Hamburger again in revised form (1952). Hamburger in particular, to whom the present edition is dedicated, was a crucial figure both as critic and as translator in spreading an awareness of Hölderlin's range and stature for an English-speaking readership, constantly rethinking his verse translations and expanding his selections from 1966 through to the fourth and last edition of his substantial bilingual collection, Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments (2006). Also important was his bilingual edition of Selected Verse (1961, revised 1986) with close prose translations which were nonetheless often successful in capturing the dithyrambic character and semantic content of the original in an appropriate stylistic tone. Other distinguished translators of Hölderlin's literary work have included Christopher Middleton (1972) and more recently Richard Sieburth (1984), David Constantine (1996), and David Farrell Krell (2008). This growing body of translation and retranslation has been accompanied, from the mid-1970s onwards, by the emergence of substantial historical and biographical studies of Hölderlin and detailed critical interpretations of his work, many of them reflecting the impact of hermeneutic, deconstructive, and poststructuralist developments in literary and cultural theory. And more recently, in philosophy and across the humanities, the intensively renewed interest in the contributions of early German romanticism and post-Kantian Idealism, along with the persisting influence of the Frankfurt School, has also played a significant role. Most of Hölderlin's prose writings on aesthetic, poetological, and religio-philosophical questions have also appeared in good English translations, albeit under the uninviting title Letters and Essays On Theory, and again recently in an excellent edition by Jeremy Adler and Charles Louth (2009), along with a generous selection of the poet's letters. And we have even had translations of Hölderlin's own translations, an ambitious undertaking at the limits of hermeneutic possibility which attempts in a further ‘image of an image’ to communicate the strange, compelling force of the poet's controversial and often creatively inaccurate versions of Sophocles (which indubitably capture the ‘enigmatic depth’ which Nietzsche prized in the ancient tragedians). As far as the ‘case of Hölderlin’ is concerned, the contemporary reader is confronted with an embarrassment of riches now that so many of his writings are available in such a range of translations produced from different critical perspectives and embodying different hermeneutic assumptions regarding the task of translation itself (far more primary texts than were ever available throughout the nineteenth century to any German readers). This comprehensive new collection of Hölderlin's Selected Verse edited and translated by Emery George, a name that will be familiar to those active in the field of Hölderlin scholarship, thus enters a crowded field. If the reader is looking for a comprehensive single-volume edition of the mature poetry in verse translation, with the German text on facing pages, then the natural point of comparison would still be the final edition of Hamburger's collection. He offered a good representative selection of the poetry written between 1797 and the poet's death in 1843, with an understandable focus on the work that preceded his enforced hospitalization in 1806, and he included most of the major odes and elegies, the second and third ‘versions’ of the unfinished verse drama The Death of Empedocles, the famous late hymns with various associated drafts and fragments, the Pindar Fragments and the accompanying prose commentaries, one or two contested texts, and an apt selection of the so-called ‘Turmgedichte’ from Hölderlin's long final phase of relatively benign incarceration. He did not include the telling and characteristic ‘Dankgedicht’ written for the poet's grandmother, the long poem Emilie vor ihrem Brauttag – a rather uncharacteristic venture into the genre of domestic idyll – or the striking elegy generally known as Der Gang aufs Land (whose arresting opening phrase – ‘Komm ins Offene, Freund!’ – would be taken up as a highly appropriate rallying cry for Dietrich Sattler's pioneering Frankfurt Edition of Hölderlin). Emery George's edition includes all these poems, along with all the other major odes and elegies, but he provides a rather larger selection, and on occasion differently constituted versions, of the hymns, fragments, and prose drafts that belong to the period beginning around 1800, along with a greater number of the post-1806 poems. He does not include the aforementioned Pindar texts, or any material from the Empedocles project, but, unlike Hamburger, he furnishes an instructive selection of Hölderlin's earlier work, including poems composed during his adolescent and student years at Maulbronn and Tübingen, and some of the important lyric poetry of the years between 1793 and 1798. He does not include any major examples of the rhyming ‘Hymns to the Ideals of Humanity’, as Dilthey called them, but he offers a version of the substantial hexameter poem Canton Schweiz. A fair number of the poems from the earlier period of the poet's career have never appeared in English before (22 of the 65 or so texts which the edition expressly indicates as ‘first translations’ date from between 1784 and 1798). Thus in purely quantitative terms this edition represents a welcome extension of the primary material available to English-speaking readers of Hölderlin, particularly if they are interested in tracing his intellectual and artistic development as a poet, from the ardent and other-worldly Pietism and epic rhetoric of his earliest efforts influenced by Klopstock, through the sentimental poetry of friendship and the effusive generalizing idealism of the Tübingen and Waltershausen years, to the growing mastery of classical form from the mid-1790s that allowed him to unite the utmost lyrical intensity with pregnant concision in poems of matchless craft and beauty that show how, in his way, he did learn from some of Schiller's well-meant criticisms. There are other significant points of contrast with Hamburger's volume and the present edition. Although he made a significant contribution to Hölderlin research, Hamburger was reluctant to become embroiled in the critical and philological wars that erupted over the contested legacy of this most eirenic of poets, being content to provide a very general introduction to the life and sensibility of the poet, offering little comment on the textual sources and only a few notes regarding implicit references or more obscure allusions in the poems. In this regard George offers something rather more like a critical edition, providing a detailed chronology of the poet's life and work, a substantial introduction, and details concerning the various metres the poet employs. The verse texts are presented in broadly chronological sequence, with accompanying notes at the end of the book providing information about sources and editorial issues, elucidation of allusions, cross references to other poems, remarks of a more general critical and interpretive nature, and some useful pointers to relevant articles and discussions in the secondary literature (mostly in German). The volume concludes with a bilingual index of titles and opening lines to facilitate easy reference. There is also a bibliography with information on a few earlier translations and a rather sparse selection of secondary sources and ‘recommended reading’ in German and English. Although this field is indeed vast, and George's focus is principally on the verse, there are surprising omissions here: no Heidegger texts, a good number of which have also appeared in English; a single essay by Dieter Henrich, but no reference to the excellent English translation of this and several other of his essays on the poet; no mention of the 1999 collection The Solid Letter, edited by Aris Fioretos; a reference to the German but not the English translation of Jean Laplanche's study of 1961; and little reference to some of the classics of German criticism or the substantial recent works that have explored the meaning of ‘the Gods’ in Hölderlin's poetry, the role of myth, the complex entwinement of Christian and pre-Christian motifs, the range of his debt to Pindar. Hamburger relied largely on the monumental Stuttgart edition by Friedrich Beissner, which some critics have felt was overconfident in its reconstructions of successive ‘versions’ of the ‘same’ poem on the basis of the complex manuscripts, although for some of the later hymns he also drew on the texts of the rival Frankfurt edition. For a significant part of Hölderlin's work, however, such editorial controversies often make little or no difference with regard to fair copies and authorized published texts. These latter, in addition to his epistolary novel Hyperion and the ill-fated Sophocles translations, amount to around seventy poems, including some of the most celebrated odes and elegies. The present edition does include a number of interesting alternative versions and reconstitutions of the post-1800 hymnic poetry and some new fragmentary and draft material (as in the case of Der Einzige). The interested reader or professional student of literature who has insufficient German to read the original texts with facility, to whom one assumes such bilingual editions are principally addressed (though there are also obviously some who are specifically interested in the hermeneutic issues of literary translation itself), will be primarily concerned with the nature and quality of the English versions, and how accurately and eloquently they communicate the thought and affective power of those originals. The difficulties which literary German, and poetry of this period in particular, already presents to the English translator are often only magnified by specific aspects of Hölderlin's language. The union of lyrical intimacy and rhetorical formality, of the profoundly personal and a more public, impersonal, or ‘objective’ epic discourse, for example, may lend itself more easily to certain traditions of French or Italian literature than to any genre of English poetry. Hölderlin's verse is characterized by frequent inversions and delayed subjects, sometimes extreme ellipsis, and a fondness for dynamic participial forms and elaborate compound adjectives reminiscent of some of the effects of ancient Greek verse. Then there is the frequently proleptic deployment of pronouns (‘Denn sie, sie selbst, die älter denn die Zeiten …’; ‘Nicht sie, die Seeligen, die erschienen sind …’); the ubiquitous use of nominalized adjectives (‘der Höchste’, ‘die Gütigen’, ‘die Himmlischen’); the intensive neuters (‘das Offene’, ‘das Heilige’, ‘das Andere’) that evoke a privileged dimension of experience; the deployment of quasi-impersonal or de-subjectivized verbal forms that recall the Greek middle voice and emphasize the epiphanic character of intransitive processes (‘es kommt’, ‘es nahen’, ‘es waltet’); and a striking attachment to particular prefixes, prepositions, and adverbs that express the reciprocal interplay of elements and undo the ossified antithesis of subject and object (‘um’, ‘rings’, ‘umspielen’, ‘umatmen’, ‘aneinander’). Some of these features are difficult to capture elegantly when translating from a grammatically gendered and more highly inflected language into English, where extra words may be required to clarify the sense of appositional phrases and qualifying expressions, or to specify the precise reference of pronouns. Thus it is often difficult to match the expressive urgency and concision of Hölderlin's verse without loss of semantic and syntactic clarity. There are of course notorious ‘obscurities’ in his poetry, especially the later work, but this is quite different from the sort of unnecessary obscurity that can result from the process of translation itself. Perhaps because George is concerned to replicate the metre and syntax as closely as possible, we sometimes find renderings that are almost impossible to decipher unless we can understand the original. Thus in the poem Man we read ‘and the animals | Steer shy of him, for he is a different sort, | Man is; no equal of the Father | Or you; for daring in him, unique too, | His Father's high soul, one and conjoined with your | Pleasure, O Earth, and mourning, from evermore’. Bathos threatens at the beginning here, for the human being is not just ‘a different sort’, but the uncanny creature, a thought captured by the ‘Übermut’ of line 26 (‘presumption’ or ‘hubris’, here translated as ‘bravado’) and anticipating the dimension of violence and monstrousness Hölderlin will emphasize in his version of Antigone. The final phrases here are also difficult to construe where the original is not, since the adverbs ‘kühn’ (‘boldly’) and ‘einzig’ (‘uniquely’) appear as dangling adjectives, and the main verb has been suppressed. Apart from such structural considerations, there is the equally important issue of appropriate tone and diction, and the other expressive means the poet exploits, such as assonance, alliteration, and rhetorical repetition. Although Hölderlin's language is not self-consciously recondite or ‘antiquated’, it would be problematic to describe it in a one-dimensional sense as ‘contemporary’ – in terms of his own time, or ours. His work is full of biblical allusions, with echoes of Lutheran usage, and the kind of Pietistic German to be heard in the cantatas and passions of Bach and his contemporaries. There are reminiscences of Klopstock, whose rhetorical idiom already sounded ‘old-fashioned’ to Hölderlin's contemporaries; we encounter phrases that evoke, and simultaneously de-familiarize and re-contextualize, established religious language: ‘der heilige Lebensgeist’ (‘the holy spirit of life’), ‘der Höchste’ (‘the highest one’), ‘das Rettende’ (‘the saving power’). We find vivid borrowings from Pindar and other ancient sources, and there is the poet's constant allusion to ‘die Sterblichen’ (‘mortal ones’) which unites Homeric precedent with the Judaeo-Christian emphasis on creatureliness, and is unusual in poetry by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Above all, perhaps, alongside moments of blinding clarity and simplicity, there is a certain Baroqueness of expression in the later Hölderlin not unlike the vivid and strangely emblematic language of Hamann, a trait which looks backwards as well as forwards, and contributes to the ‘untimely’, provocatively ‘anachronistic’ character of his work. George's edition sometimes attempts to reproduce the classical metres and the German syntax at the expense of the most fitting semantic equivalent. George has undertaken to translate into ‘a fresh American English and at the same time into an idiom that characteristically weds the spirit of classical antiquity to the poet's and the translator's modern strivings'. This suggests the desire to eschew the trappings of ‘poetic’ diction, and harness a more direct contemporary mode of expression (we may recall fussy translations of Goethe that sound like Spenser, or old versions of Plato that read like the Authorized Version). Yet the idea of linguistic contemporaneity itself harbours a host of thorny problems. The danger is that we are confined to a limited register of current speech, and confronted with a language bereft of history, lacking those resonances, overtones, and associations that link the present with the past. This question of tone is reflected even in the titles of certain poems: Mein Vorsatz appears as My Plan (the poem expresses a fervent aspiration rather than a career objective), and Die Wanderung as The Itinerary (as if the venture had been efficiently organized in advance). Sometimes the numerous enclitics (‘denn’, ‘gar’, ‘nämlich’) are rendered in a demotic way that detracts from the elevated and oracular tone, undermining the sublime mode so characteristic of the poet: ‘Vom Abgrund nemlich haben wir angefangen’ becoming ‘From the chasm, you see, we have set out.’ The celebrated opening of Patmos, ‘Nah ist | Und schwer zu fassen der Gott | Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst | Das Rettende auch’, George renders as ‘Up close | And hard to hold fast, is the God. | But where there is danger, there grows | The rescuer also.’ The word ‘rescuer’ downplays the redemptive theological associations, yet over-personalizes the ambiguous neuter of the nominalized participle (as if Hölderlin had written ‘Der Retter’ or ‘Der Rettende’), and it sounds odd to say that the rescuer ‘grows’. There are other places where the religious and philosophical resonance of the language is marginalized or almost expunged. In Ermunterung the climactic lines ‘der Gott, der Geist | Im Menschenwort, am schönem Tage | Kommenden Jahren, wie einst sich ausspricht’ are rendered: ‘the God, the mind speaks out its thoughts in human words'. This obscures the interdependence of the human and divine, the incarnation of spirit as word, and the rebirth of the spirit in the community. Similarly, words expressing proclamation, revelation, and manifestation are sometimes translated in a curiously neutral sense: ‘sich neuverkündet’ as ‘newly made itself known’; or ‘Und was zuvor geschah, doch kaum gefülht, | Ist offenbar erst jetzt’ as ‘What before took place, yet was hardly felt, | Is public knowledge only now.’ George translates some of the gnomic utterances in the later texts in an overly colloquial or even blandly bureaucratic manner: thus ‘Unterschiedenes ist gut’ as ‘differentiated is good’, and the magnificent ‘Göttliches trifft unteilnehmende nicht’ from Die Titanen as ‘The godly does not concern non-participants.’ The relentless pursuit of what George calls ‘metric fit’ between the strict poetic forms of the original and the translation can paradoxically result in a disconcertingly prosaic tone. The critic Hanslick once complained of the ‘immoderate exultation’ he found in Bruckner, as if there were a tamer and more acceptable kind. Hölderlin is certainly immoderate, though equally possessed of an immaculate sense of form and measure. It is a daunting challenge for any translator to capture the turbulent ‘dialectical’ dynamics of this verse, the subtle interplay of pathos and sobriety, the way in which this poetry, like the bridge in the ode Heidelberg, soars at once ‘light and strong’ – ‘leicht und kräftig’ – across the waters. The present edition, with its accompanying notes, may prove particularly useful to readers who have some knowledge of German, and would like to work through the original texts and orient themselves in some of the critical debates surrounding them. To appreciate the singular ‘spirit’ of this poetry, especially if they are entirely dependent on English translations, readers would do well to explore and compare the range of versions currently available. However careful, elegant, or technically accomplished the best metrical translations of Hölderlin may be, it is a curious and thought-provoking fact that the effect in English can sometimes seem decorously pastoral rather than radiantly rapt and impassioned, and the emphatic musical impact of these poems when read aloud can sound so different. Because the metres Hölderlin favoured sometimes sit uneasily with the rhythms of English, there is room for a much freer approach, even with respect to his classical odes and elegies, which sins boldly and draws on the full expressive resources of living English, in all its range and wealth, precisely in order to do justice to the poetic ‘craft’ – the Kunstcharakter – which the poet himself prized so highly. There are many mansions in the house of translation, with different versions serving different purposes and expectations, different needs and audiences. As with the performance or re-enactment of great works of art, some may prove exemplary in Kant's sense – setting new standards and encouraging others to original achievement – but none can be definitive. ‘Here is room for all’, Hölderlin says in An den Aether, a ‘house where all roam free, the path prescribed to none.’ The necessary and impossible task of translation will continue to inspire new efforts here where ‘the master turns apprentice’, as the poet puts it, where all we can do is fail, and try to fail better. |
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch translation
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