{"title":"Translating Centaurs: Notes on Hölderlin’s ‘The Life-Giving’","authors":"Bruno C. Duarte","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"In The Life-Giving, the last of the nine Pindar Fragments Hölderlin translated between 1803 and 1805, the myth of the Centaurs as wild, brutal creatures is transfigured into what appears to be a straightforward narrative of the movement of rivers, symbolizing the ritual foundation of culture and the emergence of civilization out of chaos. Such linearity, however, is called into question by the different ways in which the three parts of Hölderlin’s text are made to interact: title, translation and interpretation. In his commentary on the fragment, Hölderlin speaks of ‘the concept of the centaurs’ as something that can be fully grasped only as it emerges from ‘the spirit’ of a river and seeks to uncover the places in nature where ‘its image’ is to be found. This interweaving of concept and image, rather than representing a dialectical or evolutionary conception of history, is rooted in a radical understanding of translation as a complex self-reflexive process that ultimately redefines the materiality and the visuality of poetic writing.","PeriodicalId":124161,"journal":{"name":"Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature","volume":"29 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116631709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hölderlin’s Local Abstraction: The Natural-Historical Sublime in ‘Voice of the People’","authors":"Márton Dornbach","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"In Hölderlin’s river poems, the symbolic investment of rivers with a sublimity that transcends particulars stands in tension with the geographical and historical specificity of the landscapes being evoked. This tension between abstraction and concreteness determines both the composition history and the formal structure of the ode ‘Voice of the People’. My reading clarifies the poetic logic that drives the transition from the opening generic image of rivers to the river Xanthos that shaped the history of the eponymous city remembered in the narrative extension of the final version. Based on the linkage suggested by Hölderlin between the determining force of nature and the hazards of cultural transmission, I argue that the poem stages a meditation upon the relation of succession that connects modernity to a Greek antiquity defined by exposure to a natural dimension whose affinity with the absolute threatens the separateness and artifice of human life. Against the backdrop of contemporary appropriations of Plutarch, Hölderlin’s recourse to Parallel Lives in the narrative extension invites an allegorical reading that grasps the vexing relation between post-revolutionary France and Hölderlin’s Germany as an identity-in-difference articulated in terms of the difference-in-identity between antiquity and modernity.","PeriodicalId":124161,"journal":{"name":"Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature","volume":"62 12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132097016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Not Rhythm","authors":"J. Mieszkowski","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the concept of rhythm in Hölderlin. It opens by asking why scholars have been quick to identify the gnomic ‘Everything is rhythm’ as a key tenet of Hölderlin’s poetics despite the fact that he never penned the line and may well never have said it. In an effort to elucidate Hölderlin’s understanding of rhythmic and counter-rhythmic interruptions, the discussion turns to ‘Voice of the People’ and ‘Germanien’, where the negative operator nicht threatens to expose any given verbal formation as contingent rather than necessary. In these poems, rhythm is never reducible to a single schema but instead manifests as the expression of multiple – possible and impossible – patterns. In this respect, Hölderlin’s notion of rhythm is a return to the Ancient Greek conception of rhuthmos, which names less a predictable series of changes than a volatile, protean form.","PeriodicalId":124161,"journal":{"name":"Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125076460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Untamed Earth: The Labour of Rivers in Hölderlin’s ‘The Ister’","authors":"Rochelle Tobias","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers the relation of rivers to history in Hölderlin’s late poetry and his translations of Pindar’s fragments. It argues that Hölderlin develops his theory of history through a broader reflection on the four elements, in which each element is said to need its opposite in order to restrain its potentially infinite expansiveness. The chapter shows that this is particularly true of the earth, which would turn into an ever-expanding desert, were it not for the paths that rivers etch in it. Such etchings at the same time submit the earth to a peculiar temporality in which the past returns as the future and antiquity reappears as modernity. Hölderlin’s cosmology is intertwined with his idea of historical reversals outlined in his letters to Böhlendorff and his remarks on Sophocles’ tragedies.","PeriodicalId":124161,"journal":{"name":"Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129781320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘My whole being fell silent, and read’: Peter Handke’s Hölderlin and Heidegger Reception","authors":"Jacob Haubenreich","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the reception of Hölderlin by Peter Handke during his ‘classical turn’ or ‘turn to nature’ in the late 1970s. Emerging out of a deep crisis of writing, Handke launched a new poetological project of slowness and the re-auraticization or re-mythification of reality. Handke’s manuscript notebooks reveal a much more intensive engagement with Hölderlin’s writing during this period than is generally recognized. Considering Handke’s project of writing as a new ‘new mythology’, this chapter examines the formative influence of Hölderlin – mediated in part by Heidegger’s Hölderlin essays – on Handke’s practice of attuning to nature and everyday experience, and on his investigations of the nature of poetry, the textual representation of nature, and the writer’s task. This influence was not merely one of abstract metaphysical reflection; rather, it shaped Handke’s physical, material practice of writing at a pivotal moment in the development of his career.","PeriodicalId":124161,"journal":{"name":"Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128285097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Order of the Unbound: Time and History in Hölderlin’s ‘The Titans’","authors":"Achim Geisenhanslüke","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454155.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the connection between time and experience in Hölderlin’s poetics of nature. As the late poem ‘The Titans’ shows, Hölderlin develops a concept of a time that struggles to explain different forms of change in history. The mythological battle between the Olympic gods and the Titans as reported by Hesiod functions for Hölderlin as a reflection of his own experience of time in a period of revolutionary upheaval. The revolution Hölderlin refers to is both political (i.e., the French revolution) and poetic (i.e., Hölderlin’s turn to tragedy as a basis for a new poetics). The task of the poet consists in constructing a dialectics of nature and history as the ground for political and poetic revolutions in time.","PeriodicalId":124161,"journal":{"name":"Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123755459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}