{"id":10043,"date":"2018-12-21T15:04:46","date_gmt":"2018-12-21T14:04:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10043"},"modified":"2018-12-21T15:05:34","modified_gmt":"2018-12-21T14:05:34","slug":"friedrich-holderlin-selected-poetry-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10043","title":{"rendered":"Friedrich Holderlin | Selected Poetry<\/em> | reviewed by Ian Pople<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friedrich Holderlin | Selected Poetry<\/em>, trans. David Constantine | Bloodaxe: \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Holderlin was born at an extraordinary time, in 1770, the same year as Hegel, Wordsworth and Beethoven. He attended a Lutheran seminary with Hegel and Schelling, and at university he met Fichte and Novalis, and knew Schiller and Goethe. It is suggested that Holderlin influenced Hegel\u2019s notion of dialectic because of Holderlin\u2019s study of Heraclitus\u2019 \u2018unity of opposites\u2019. Holderlin also became part of the school of German idealism, which holds, and here I\u2019m paraphrasing badly, that reality is mentally constructed, that we can only know the world through our mental activities. After university he became a private tutor in a number of households in Germany. The most important of these households was that of Jakob Gontard, with whose wife Susette, Holderlin fell in love. David Constantine, in his introduction to this volume, sums up their situation as, \u2018They were severed, she died, his mind collapsed.\u2019 It is speculated that Holderlin succumbed to schizophrenia, and he spent time in a clinic in Tubingen, from which he was discharged as incurable, and given \u2018at most three years to live\u2019. Holderlin was discharged into the care of a carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, who knew Holderlin\u2019s epistolatory novel \u2018Hyperion\u2019. He lived on in Zimmer\u2019s house for the last thirty-six years of his life. <\/p>\n

That is a bald summary of the life. However, after a dip in his reputation, Holderlin\u2019s writing has affected a range of German writers from Rilke to Trakl and Celan, and has inspired a huge variety of composers from Brahms to Benjamin Britten, though Luigi Nono, and Ligeti, to Wolfgang Reim. And philosophers from Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault have written about the poetry and essays. Holderlin is clearly a writer whose writing has resonated from his own time through to ours, if, possibly, more with German artists than English language artists, with some of the exceptions noted. And not just with German artists, \u2018During the First World War Holderlin\u2019s hymns were packed in the soldier\u2019s knapsack together with cleaning gear\u2019 (Heidegger). <\/p>\n

David Constantine\u2019s Selected<\/em> offers over 350 pages of poems and Constantine\u2019s translations of Holderlin\u2019s own translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex<\/em> and Antigone<\/em>. Constantine comments in his introduction that he has tried to stick \u2018close, but not so close\u2019 to the metres and rhythms of Holderlin\u2019s original forms. That was obviously tricky, and there is a comment from the Oxford Professor of German and translator, Karen Leeder, that Constantine has gone \u2018for an \u201cequivalence of spirit\u201d in a more familiar idiom\u2019 in his translations. That is followed by praise for Constantine\u2019s translation, but, at the same time, it might offer a little nudge to the reader that his \u2018familiar idiom\u2019 does not reproduce what are obviously difficult areas of Holderlin\u2019s diction and address. This is particularly true in the translations of Oedipus<\/em> and Antigone<\/em>, where sometimes the language seems to flirt with, to be entirely bathetic, a kind of \u2018Yoda\u2019 speak. Constantine\u2019s comment here is, \u2018I kept close to his strange German, in the hope of arriving at an analogous strangeness in English. But his language is beautiful and trouble too, and in the carrying over much of that will have been lost like precious water from a leaky vessel.\u2019 One way to look at this might be to view these \u2018plays\u2019 as plays to read rather than perform, in the way that Ibsen wrote a play such as \u2018Emperor and Galilean\u2019, though Constantine again comments that the plays \u2018are generally recognised and admired nowadays.\u2019 For Constantine, Holderlin wrote these translations to \u2018quicken hearts and minds in the torpid present [of Holderlin\u2019s Germany]\u2019.<\/p>\n

Holderlin\u2019s own importance to the poets such as Rilke and Trakl who looked to him was that he was preoccupied almost from the beginning with the idea of poetic truth. Holderlin was preoccupied with what might constitute the limits of sayability and meaning, \u2018the problem of the relation between thought or consciousness \u2013 having or being of language \u2013 and world\u2019. Thus Holderlin appealed to a thinker like Heidegger for the sense in Holderlin of his \u2018letting-be of things as a letting-go of representational consciousness\u2019 or \u2018attendance to things in their own elusive self-unfolding\u2019; what Heidegger called Gelassenheit<\/em>, sometimes translated as \u2018meditative thinking\u2019; an aspiration for a lot of poetry, perhaps. These latter seem somewhat different to Heidegger\u2019s espousal of Nazism, as Derrida later pointed out calling Heidegger\u2019s interpretations of Holderlin \u2018a catastrophe\u2019. So Holderlin, like many great artists, before and since, has been held hostage to his interpreters\u2019 various agendas. <\/p>\n

In addition, in a letter, Holderlin asked what room was left in the rationalism of philosophy and politics for human harmony, by which he means joy in life, wonderment at nature and other more communal celebrations of life. In his preface to Hyperion<\/em>, he comments, <\/p>\n

We have fallen out with nature, and what was once one \u2026 is now in conflict with itself, and each side alternates between mastery and servitude. Often it appears to us as though the world were everything and we nothing, but also often as though we were everything and the world nothing\u2026 To end that eternal conflict between our self and the world, to restore that peace that passeth all understanding, to unite ourselves with nature so as to form one endless whole, that is the goal of all our striving \u2026 although one that is achievable only in infinite approximation. <\/p>\n

      This is a three stage process; outlined by Abrams as \u2018a self-educative journey, both       of the lyric speaker and of the human race, moving from a natural and happy unity,       though progressive division, estrangement, and conflict, to a crisis which eventuates       in a new and complex integrity.\u2019 This is also a theory of history which resembles a       spiral. <\/p>\n

Such a context might point towards the nature of Holderlin\u2019s lyricism; that Holderlin\u2019s greatest poetry resembles most closely Eliot\u2019s definition of the lyric as the voice of the poet talking to himself, or to nobody. The early \u2018The Oak Trees\u2019 begins, in Constantine\u2019s translation \u2018Out of the gardens I come to you, sons of the mountain\u2019 with it\u2019s clear echoes of Psalm 130 \u2018Out of the depths I have cried unto thee; Lord hear my voice.\u2019 Here, Holderlin apostrophises the oak trees and see them as \u2018belonging only to yourselves and the heavens\/ Who nourished and raised you and to the earth, your mother.\u2019 Holderlin sees the trees as exemplifying \u2018a free confederacy.\u2019 In contrast to himself, \u2018If I could bear my servitude never would I envy these trees \/ But to the social world I would fit myself gladly \/ Were I no longer shackled to the social world by my heart \/ That cannot stop loving, how gladly I\u2019d live among you!\u2019 Holderlin\u2019s truth here appears to be that the trees are \u2018each one a god\u2019, but that his loving heart shackles him to the social world, as much as he resents it. In this poem, Holderlin describes the \u2018unity of opposites\u2019 he ascribes to Heraclitus, albeit a unity which exacts a toll. <\/p>\n

These contradictions are more than present in the poems he writes to \u2018Diotima\u2019 his name for Susette Gontard. At the same time as she \u2018reconciled the elements\u2019 and \u2018quieten[ed] for me the chaos of the times\u2019, \u2018she too seeks after the sun\u2019 which \u2018the sun of the spirit, the lovelier world, has gone under \/ And in the chilling night there is only the hurricane\u2019s strife.\u2019 The quietening and the strife are, perhaps, natural elements in a love affair; the beloved is both the source of peace and also the source of conflict. In terms of Holderlin\u2019s three part schema, it is the beloved who reconciles being with the natural world; it is the rupture with the beloved, which wrests the self, with its \u2018the sun of the spirit\u2019 and its perfect context, \u2018the lovelier world\u2019. <\/p>\n

Although much of this does sound schematic even where that schema clearly organises the structure of the poem, Holderlin\u2019s cleaving to the \u2018real world\u2019 means that the poetry is beautiful and absorbing. An instance of this is in the so-called \u2018late elegy \u2018Bread and Wine\u2019. The poem is organised in nine numbered verses, each three roughly equating the three stages of unity, disruption and reconciliation. The first three begin with a loving evocation of a town at the end of the working day, \u2018Town rests now, all around, the lit streets quietening \/ Carriages leave in a flare of lamps with a rush. \u2026 empty the bustling market stands \/ of grapes and flowers and rests from the works of the hand.\u2019 This feels like Holderlin absorbed in the market at the end of the day. From this moment of rest, Holderlin moves to the sense of night which \u2018mov[es] the earth and the hopeful soul in people.\u2019 And yet, out of this emerges an urgency, a \u2018jubilant madness\u2019 even, which finds its outlet in the paradise of classical Greece, \u2018where the coming god comes.\u2019 This slightly odd locution points the reader to the one god, the mono-theistic Christ figure who is also, for Holderlin, representative of the absconded God, but is also at one with the Greek gods, Dionysus and Herakles, and who in the final stanza \u2018even in the darkness fetches \/ Down to the godless a trace of the vanished gods.\u2019 At the same time it is \u2018we [who] are the shades, heartless, till our \/ Father of light is known and belongs to all.\u2019 Such complicated mythologies may not sit well in the twenty-first century. But they were part of Holderlin\u2019s search for poetic truth, the melding of being and world.<\/p>\n

David Constantine\u2019s elegant and moving translations are accompanied by a very useful set of annotations for most of the poems, and a glossary of the Greek names for those of us with post-classical educations. Holderlin has inspired a range of translators from Michael Hamburger, whom Constantine generously acknowledges at various times in the book, to Edwin Muir, John Riley and Daniel Bosch. This Selected<\/em> clearly shows why. Holderlin\u2019s endless search for the nature of that poetic truth seems as relevant to the baffled twenty-first century as it would have been to the young German at the end of the eighteenth century bathing in the heady waters of nascent German romanticism.<\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friedrich Holderlin | Selected Poetry, trans. David Constantine | Bloodaxe: \u00a314.99 Holderlin was born at an extraordinary time, in 1770, the same year as Hegel, Wordsworth and Beethoven. He attended a Lutheran seminary with Hegel and Schelling, and at university he met Fichte and Novalis, and knew Schiller and Goethe. 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