translation and exegesis in hölderlin

7/30/2019 Translation and Exegesis in Hlderlin

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Translation and Exegesis in HlderlinAuthor(s): David ConstantineReviewed work(s):Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Apr., 1986), pp. 388-397Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3729704 .

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TRANSLATION AND EXEGESISIN HOLDERLIN

Several times in his poetry (but never in his letters or in his theoretical writings)Holderlin depicts or speaks of the poet as mediator between God and Man or asinterpreter of God's word to Man. The best-known such occasion is in the poem'Wie wenn am Feiertage .. .':Doch unsgebiihrt s,unterGottesGewittern,IhrDichter!mitentbloBtemHauptezu stehenDes VatersStral, hnselbst,miteignerHandZufassenunddemVolk nsLiedGehiilltdie himmlischeGaabezu reichen. (1.56)1He often seems, in the course of a poem, to be engaged in an act of interpretation-of a landscape, an event, a story,or a text. Thus he treats the course of the Rhine orthe Danube, or the trend of the hills north-west from Vienna into Germany. Headdresses himself continually to the French Revolution and the subsequent wars,with the intention of making sense of them in a hopeful way. Both into 'DieWanderung' and into 'Stimme des Volks' (2. Fassung) he incorporatesa legend orhistorical account; both poems implicitly and at times explicitly interpret thatmaterial as they proceed, and the latter concludes with the statement:... wohlSindgutdieSagen,dennein GedichtniB indDem H6chsten ie,dochauchbedarfesEines,dieheiligenauszulegen.'Patmos' may be said to practise its own concluding advice 'daBgepfleget werdeDer veste Buchstab, und bestehendes gut Gedeutet' by retelling, with manyallusions to St John's Gospel, the story of Christ's Ministry and Passion andformulatingon the way consolatory aphorisms in Pindar's manner: 'Denn alles istgut' (1.88) or 'Und es griinen Tief an den Bergen auch lebendige Bilder'(11. I9-20). Although there is more to the poem than that (telling the story andinterpreting it as consolingly as possible belongs in a context: it answers thepredicament depicted in the opening lines) 'Patmos' may be indicated here asHolderlin's most sustained act of exegesis within the economy of a poem, most likePindar's way with hismyths (in 'Pythian iv', forexample).Holderlin commonly adopts the stance of mediator or interpreterin his verse.Nevertheless, that stance cannot be taken at face value. It was not one that could besustainedin H6lderlin's life and times. Like so much else that he derived from orwastempted towards by Pindar he could not honestly make it work, or not as it hadworked for Pindar.H6lderlinknew the differencesperfectlywell;his failure to finish'Wie wenn am Feiertage .. .' must in part be due to his realizingthe untenability ofhis self-depiction,and it is unfortunate that he should oftenappearin literaryhistoryin that impossible pose.1Compare also 'Dichterberuf',11.4-16. All quotationsfromHolderlin'sworks are based on the text ofthe Grofie tuttgarter usgabe, dited by Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck, 8vols (Stuttgart, 1943-85).References to passages other than the text of the poems aregiven to volume and page in this edition.


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DAVID CONSTANTINE 389The conditions in which a poet might credibly claim to be acting as God'smediatoror interpreterdid not exist in Holderlin's life and times;his poetry, whichis rooted in the painful awareness of that fact, longs for circumstancesin which hemight really occupy such a role. Put ratherdrastically:he labours to create a God ofwhom he might be the interpreter.He does not speak, as prophet or mediator, to acommunity, but labours to create a communityhe might address. The condition ofH6lderlin's poetry is, precisely, the absence of God and community; through hispoetry he seeks to recover, create, or realize them. It is true that much of what hewrites, both in concrete detail and in tone, seems to assume and proclaim bothcommunity and divine presence; but in context a constant illusoriness will bediscerned. Indeed, it is there,in discernible illusoriness,that muchofthe pathos andpoignancy of his work is felt. What Holderlinwanted was divine immanence, but themost he could honestly proclaim,and that in the teeth of an unpromisingworld,was

imminence. And the true motto or injunction of his poety is: 'O kommt! o macht eswahr!' ('Stutgard', 1.I05).Clearly, Holderlin cannot be regardedas the exponent of any orthodox theology,but not as the exponent of any unorthodox one either. His 'theology' does not pre-exist or exist outside his work. Religious persuasion in his poetry is of his ownmaking; it comes into being, or is realized,only as the poem progresses.A poem byH6lderlin is amakerf sense, not the interpretationof any pre-existenttext, belief, orcoherent significance. H6lderlin's predicament was that described by FriedrichSchlegel as characteristicallymodern: he lacked a mythology, and was obliged tocreate one. What he set up in his poetry has remarkablecoherence and persuasive-ness, but remains none the less a fiction,of his making.When he says in 'Der Rhein'of the Alps that they are the citadel of the gods 'nach alter Meinung' the phrase isonly a semblanceofauthority.Hedesignated them thus in hismythology,as the 'mir'in the previous line more or less admits:. . des Alpengebirgs,Das mirdieg6ttlichgebaute,DieBurgderHimmlischen eiBtNach alterMeinung.. (1.4)The whole geographical-mythologicalconstruct, in which the Alps rise at the heartof the New Hesperia, is radiantly illusory. When later (in 'An die Madonna')H6lderlin etymologizes over the Knochenberg in Westphalia or broods on thesluggishness of the Danube ('Der Ister', 11. I f.) these are instances, less successfulas his poetic tact deserted him, of the same ostensibly interpretativebut actuallyinventive process. Then within the mythology thus created, as a workingpart of it,the poet himself appears, in the roleof mediator and interpreter.H6lderlin shared both the Romantic presumptionthat all materialand spiritualrealityis so much stufffor the poet's imagination to work with and create what it canof, and also the Romantic anxiety that what the imagination thus constructs willcollapse in the end likea house of cards. But in H6lderlin's case the illusoriness oftheimages is never denied and his anxiety concerns their efficacyor the proprietyof hiswhole poetic-religious undertaking. Anxiety becomes longing that the visions betrue, and by anxious longing the poem is drivenonward to more and more beautifuland persuasive realizations of the lost and (he prays) imminently to be recoveredideal. The poetry is like a perpetual prayer to or assault upon God, to force His


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TranslationndExegesisn Hilderlinappearance.Some theologians think ofChrist's crucifixionsimilarly, as a willed act,to force the Father's hand. What is reallywanted is revelation,of which the poemswould then be the documents. Instead: a constantassault, by ever more poignantlypersuasive fictions. The danger of catastrophic disappointment in this enterpriseisobvious. Holderlin, Nerval, and Rimbaud resemble one another in the suicidalboldness of their bids for revelation. Rimbaud concluded: 'Enfin, je demanderaipardon pour m'etre nourri de mensonge.'2H6lderlin's poems are not the documents of a revelation, nor are they aninterpretationof the ways of God to Man. They arepoems, moved primarilyby thelonging for revelation and for immanence, and the interpretativetone and stancewhich they sometimes adopt are only elements among others in their total compo-sition.H6lderlin's poetological essays are so strangeand difficult that they can scarcely bethought of as attempted elucidations of the poetic process. He could write perfectlyclearly on the workings of poetry when he wanted to, as his letters to Neuffer, alsowritten in Homburg, veryoftenprove. True, he cannot have intended the essays forpublication in the form in which they survive, but even if he was writing privatelyand even if our texts are only drafts, still that manner of writingis extremely odd. Itake the essays to be an attempt to write about poetryin prose- in a prose by whichthe subject, poetry, would not be in the least reducedor travestied.His prose itselfthen is obliged to undergo or enact something akin to the process it is seeking todescribe. For example, the monstrous opening sentence of congregates within one syntactic unit,within the protasis of a conditional sentence, all those preconditions of the act ofcomposition which must be simultaneously fulfilled beforecomposition can begin.At the moment of their fulfilment they arefelt as a whole state; in the medium ofprose discourse, however, they can only be listed in a manner all but exceeding thereach of the rationally readingmind. There is a fundamental contradictionbetweenthe pose of the essay - its apparent undertakingto describe the poetic process -and the language in which that description then ensues. So perhaps the poeticprocess cannot be described but can only be enacted, and prosewhich is the naturallanguage of description and elucidation is pushed beyond its limits in the attempt.The prose of the essay, like the poem itself, is to serve as a means of realization;andrealization, enacted in the text and undergone by the reader as he reads, is a fullerexperiencethan the rationalcomprehensionwhich anelucidatingprose might bringabout. The proper medium for such realization is undoubtedly poetry, and theessays may be said to founderon the intrinsic nature of prose (its inherent inabilityto enact the poetic process). Still, there are moments:In eben diesemAugenblike,wo sich die urspriinglicheebendige,nun zur reinen einesUnendlichen mpfanglichentimmung elauterteEmpfindung,ls UnendlichesmUnend-lichen,alsgeistigesGanze mlebendigenGanzenbefindet,n diesemAugenblikest es, womansagenkann,daBdieSprache eahndetwird,und wennnun wiein derurspriinglichenEmpfindung ine Reflexion rfolgt, o ist sie nicht mehrauflosendundverallgemeinernd,vertheilend, ndausbildend, iszurblosenStimmung,iegiebtdemHerzen lleswieder,wassie ihm nahm,sie ist belebendeKunst,wie sie zuvorvergeistigendeKunstwar, undmiteinem Zauberschlage um den andern ruft sie das verlorene Leben sch6ner hervor, bis eswieder so ganz sich fuihlt, wie es sich urspriinglich fiihlte. (iv, 261)2 Rimbaud, (EuvresParis, I962), p. I98 ('Une saison en enfer').

390


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DAVID CONSTANTINE 39IBut realizationsin verse will come more readilyto mind:

Des gemeinsamen Geistes Gedankensind,Still endend in der Seele des Dichters,DaBschnellbetroffensie, UnendlichemBekannt seit langer Zeit, von ErinnerungErbebt, und ihr, von heilgem Stralentziindet,Die Frucht in Liebe geboren, der Gotterund Menschen WerkDer Gesang, damit er beiden zeuge, gliikt.('Wiewenn am Feiertage.. .', 1.43)

Or:Da rauschten

Lebendiger die Quellen, es athmetenDerdunkelnErdeBliithenmich iebendan,Und lachelnd iiber Silberwolken

Neigte sich seegnend herab derAether.('Geh unter,sch6ne Sonne', 1.I2)Both poems, at those moments, enact the coming of fulfilment, they realizeimmanence, render it tangible, 'fiihlbarundgefuihlt'n H6lderlin's phrase (IV,243).The business of poetry, according to H6lderlin, is to express the Spirit. When apoet composes a poem he renders the Spirit 'fiihlbar', he makes it able to beapprehended, he realizes it. Poetry then is an act of translation ('Ubertragung') ofSpirit into appropriate form, and the poem itself, in its total working, is a processthrough which the Spirit may be realized. There is nothing especially difficult in thisview of poetry, except to know what Holderlin means by the Spirit. Elsewhere hespeaks of the lyric poem as 'eine fortgehende Metapher Eines Gefuihls' (iv, 266), andthere we are on more familiar ground. In that understanding the poem serves toexternalize an emotional state, which will not necessarily be the feelings the poet hasin his own personal life but which must nevertheless derive 'aus des Dichters eigenerWelt und Seele . . . weil sonst ilberall die rechte Wahrheit fehlt, und fiberhauptnichts verstanden und belebt werden kan' (iv, I50). The poetic process is then acarrying-over of 'das eigene Gemiith und die eigene Erfahrung in einen fremdenanalogischen Stoff' (iv, I50). The metaphor, that into which the feelings are carriedover, must be a fitting one, it must be 'analog'; but also, interestingly, it must be'fremd'. Poetry translates intangible feelings into tangible equivalents; it displacesor 'alienates' them. But more than this, which most poets would subscribe to,H6lderlin also believed that the expressiveness of material correlatives in poetrywould be increased by their being in some way at odds with the intangibles they wereserving to express. I need not pursue this here; I only indicate that creativecontradiction is at the heart of H6lderlin's poetics.From the 'Verfahrungsweise' we learn that the feelings a poet has are notthemselves the Spirit that his poem must express. Those feelings, Holderlin says, arethemselves material at the disposal of the Spirit as it progresses in the poem towardsself-realization. Spirit then, pressing to be realized, will use our own feelings as ameans.The terminology of H6lderlin's poetics is, again and again, religious. Poetry wasfor him a religious act and all religion was, he said, 'ihrem Wesen nach poetisch'(iv, 281). The Spirit wanting expression via poetry is divinity itself; or, put another


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392 TranslationndExegesisnHolderlinway, what the poet wants his poem to do is to realize divinity, incorporateGod.There are several very poignant moments in H6lderlin's verse when he ascribes tofeeling humanity a role as the vehicle of God:DennweilDieSeeligsten ichts iihlenvonselbst,MuBwohl,wennsolcheszusagenErlaubtst,inderGotterNahmenTheilnehmenduhleneinAndrer,Den brauchen ie ... ('Der Rhein', 1. og9)The gods need human beings in that capacity:'Denn es ruhn die Himmlischengernam fuihlendenHerzen' ('DerArchipelagus',1.235).3We ourselves,in ourcapacity tofeel, serve as a materialization ofdivinity.We aremetaphorsofGod, that into whichHe is driven to put Himself. It hardly needs pointing out that this process,by whichthe gods, themselves unfeeling, realize themselves through sentient humanity, isakin to the act of 'Ubertragung' (translationand metaphor) which is the compo-sition of a poem.But to say that the Spirit, God, the gods, or divinity are pressing for utterance inhumankind and human art is only metaphorical- and of what? Of ourlonging forGod, whose manifest absence is the premiseof everypoem.4Thus any poem servingthe realization of the Spirit, and aiming as it proceeds at the condition ofimmanence, in practice realizes its own illusoriness: it is all projectand prayer,andits true immanence, what is fully realized, 'fiihlbar und gef'ihlt', is absence andlonging.All poetry is an act of making manifest, and all poets are fascinated by ex-pressions. H6lderlin, raisingpoetryto religiousstatusandwishing the poem to serveas the expressionofdivinity itself,naturallyconnectedcompositionand incarnation.Just as in the composition of a poem feelings are 'alienated' into materialequivalents, so too pure Spirit is realizedin the 'impurity'of matter ('das Reine kansich nur darstellenim Unreinen' (vI, 290) ), and so too God alienated and expressedHimself in the personof Christ ('eussertsich selbs Iund nam Knechts gestalt an', inLuther's versionofPhilippians 2. 7). In Holderlin's eclecticmythologyChrist is onlyone such figure.Dionysos and Herakles are two more. Zeus in that sense manifestedhimself freely: ... undS6hn' nheiligerArtUnd Tochter eugteDer Hoheunterden Menschen. ('DerEinzige', .Io)Divinity manifests itself in other ways too:Was stGott?unbekannt, ennochVollEigenschaftenst dasAngesichtDesHimmelsvonihm.Die BlizenemlichDer Zorn ind einesGottes ..

(II, 2I0)

3 Compare in the same poem lines 27 and 6o-6I; also II, 123, 11. 5-20, and 'Die Titanen', 11. 3-54. Lifeon earth is 'sinnig' ('Die Titanen', 1.59).4 Similarly, in Rilke's FirstElegy:'Ja,die Friihlingebrauchten dich wohl.' Really:weneed to be needed.


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DAVID CONSTANTINEH6lderlin loved to use words forthe act of showing forth:'zeigen', 'Zeichen', 'Wink','Merkmal', and so on occur often and strikingly, especially in his later verse;in thelast rhyming poems, so curious in their mixing of abstractions with bare phenom-ena, the word 'zeigen' recurs almost compulsively. The fragment 'Was ist Gott?',from which I quoted above, states categorically: 'Jemehr ist eines | Unsichtbar, chiket es sich in Fremdes.'The moving spirit of Holderlin's world is a perpetual striving for manifestationand utterance. Phenomena are more or less explicit renderingsof urgent abstracts:DennSchnee,wieMajenblumenDasEdelmiithige, oEsseie,bedeutend, linzetaufDergriinenWieseDerAlpen,halftig.. ('Mnemosyne',.Fassung, .25)In such a world it is natural that the poet himself sometimes should step forward asinterpreterand point out these signs or help them into greaterexplicitness.H6lderlin associated poetry's usual aim (making manifest) with the revelationand incarnation of divinity in material and apprehensiblethings. Indeed, in his ownideal conception of poetic vocation and practice the two would actually fuse: whatthe ideal poem manifests is God. But in practice that fusion is only longed for. Thetwo spheres - poetic expression and divine incarnation - may be persuasivelydepicted as analogous, but that is all. The poetry depicting such attractivecoherenceis in fact labouring to bringit about. Simply:he wishes the analogieswereliterally true. Much of the poignancy of Holderlin's images lies in their would-beeffectiveness; they seem by their beauty and persuasiveness to be engaged ineffectingtheir own realization.H6lderlin, being a 'difficult'poet, is often readreductivelyand acquisitively. It maybe that the pose of interpreter and the metaphor of exegesis in his work haveencouragedreaders,or editors and critics at least, to follow suit. But if the writingofpoetry is, in Holderlin's terms, the translation of Spirit into appropriateform, thereading of it cannot be merely a translating back. The poem in its entirety is ametaphor, and it is axiomatic that metaphorsarenot reducible back into what theybody forth. Spirit is not apprehensible except in the poem's form; it cannot berendered back, because by such a process it would become inapprehensible again.The products of such an attempted renderingback- elucidations,explanationsare not the Spirit itself but mere 'Wissen um', in Nietzsche's phrase. Strictlyspeaking, in strict accordance with H6lderlin's poetics, thereis no way ofsayingwhata poem is about; we realizeit as we read, in the poem's preciseforms,and to convertthat realization into discursive 'knowing about' is not a gain but a loss. Suchknowledge, once acquired, can actually hinder and impair our readings thereafter.We know in advance what we think and what we ought to feel, our readyinterpretation immunizes us against the poem; or, worse, as we reread we try toremember what we thought (what we knew)and what we ought to feel. But whatmatters is realization;and knowledge in advance, rememberedknowledge about, isa hindrance to that. To read these poems well we need constantly to forget.That is an extremeposition, andit may be an absurdone, andprobablyno reader,however well disposed to do so, would be able in practiceto adopt it. But I do believe

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394 TranslationndExegesisnHilderlinthat by such a reading, wereit possible, we should match Holderlin's poetics, and asa directionn reading, I believe it to be both practicableand desirable.Much harmis done by thinkingof the poem as a means to an end, and the gestureof exegesis, if we take it at face value, may reinforcethis harmfulattitude of mind.Poems arenot the merevehicles by which truthsareservedup for us to takeaway. Itis perhaps better to think of the poem as a means by which a realizationmay takeplace than as a means by which some possessablething is communicated.Again: theSpirit is apprehensible in the poem's form- but that form is not he Spirit,only themeans of its realization and its being made apprehensible. Perhapsthe truth of thepoem, ourgrowingrealization of the Spiritit is rendering,canand should be felt onlyas we read: we cannot take it away, because the truth of the poem is notapprehensible outside the poem's workings. If that also seems an extreme position,that we cannot have he truth of poems, then again it might be one worth movingtowards at least, as a counter to the view, in poetry and elsewhere, that everythingcan be had or that what cannot be had is not worthhaving.The gesture of exegesis in Holderlin's poetry, the gesture of handing on to thereader an elucidated truth, needs to be read as something consciously illusory, as ametaphor within a whole metaphoric structure whose emotional premise is,precisely, the absence of the conditions of real exegesis, and the poems themselvescontain many hints of the illusoriness of their own most confidentgestures. OftenH6lderlin aimed at a suspension ofpossible meanings in a conditionwhich is trueinthe poem but which breaksup into merelogical contradictionsand irreconcilables frendered into discursive exposition.5 But along with that very characteristictentativeness, equivocalness, and humility there runs also the wish to speakout, tobe indeed the forthrightexegete. In the late verse (afterBordeaux) this tendencyortemptation becomes very marked. 'Umsonst nicht. . .' and 'Vieles wareIZu sagendavon .. .' typify his compulsion to act as interpreter.To get at the poetry, at theaptness of the poetry to his predicament,we need to feel notjust the reticence, andcertainly not just the interpreting gesture and the pose of speaking out, but thetension between the two. There are similes in late H6lderlinwhich in practicebelietheir ostensible function: instead of servingto elucidate the less familiarby the more,they set up a parity, a mutual irradiationwhich we might call directionless.Thus:WieMeereskiisten, ennzu baun

Anfangen ie Himmlischen ndhereinSchifftunaufhaltsam,inePracht,das WerkDerWoogen, insumsandere,unddie ErdeSichriistetaus,daraufvomFreudigsteninesMitguterStimmung, u rechteslegendalsoschlagtesDemGesang,mit demWeingott, ielverheiBendembedeutendenUndderLieblinginDes GriechenlandesDermeergeborenen,chiklich likendenDasgewaltigeGutansUfer.(II, 205)6

5 I have tried to demonstrate this in 'The Meaning of a HolderlinPoem', OxfordGermantudies, (1978),45-67.6 'WieV6gel angsam iehn . .' works n the sameway,I think. take he word Fiirst' o meanboth'leader ftheflockofbirds'andalso prince'.Thustheprincescomparedo thebird,buttheirattributesandactivities emain uspendednparity.


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DAVID CONSTANTINEThe basic comparative structure ('Wie Meereskiisten ... also schlagt es demGesang .... das gewaltige Gut ans Ufer') is complicatedwithin the syntactic unit ofa single sentence, to such a degree that no easy passage from the comparisonto thesubject being 'elucidated' is possible. The essentially mysterious process of poetryremains contained within he phenomenon supposedly elucidatingit: 'Wie Meeres-kiisten .. . ans Ufer'. The same tendency, towardsparityand towardsan immunityagainst acquisitive reading, may be discerned much earlier: for example, in theHomeric simile which opens 'Wie wenn am Feiertage . .'. There too the details ofthe 'wie' clauses,offeredas theconcreterealdetailsof a comparisonandin that sensesubordinate to what follows after the 'so', belie that function and status by havingfirst latently and then actually a figurativesense in the context of the whole poem.The equivocal pronoun 'sie' in line Io, working, like others too (11. 7, 45), bothforwardsand back, stitches the strophestogether,so that the details in the openinglines are not merely a means to an end (our better understanding of the poets'predicament) and as such discardable once our understanding is assured; theycontinue in play, with greater and greater resonance, throughout. The opening of'Die Wanderung' workssimilarly: there is no clear division of literal and figurativeand so no subordinationof the formerto thelatter,but thelightoffigurativemeaning,like the apprehension of divine immanence, shifts to and fro over the landscape ofmountains, ice, and streams. Other instances, particularly landscapes at theopenings of poems, will come to mind. This technique effectivelyblocks any facile'ascent' from literal to figurative,as it were fromthe ostensible to the realmeaning ofthe poem. The real can only be realized in the ostensible.

One historical sense of the word 'deuten' given by Grimm is 'to renderinto thevernacular'- 'dem Volk, den Deutschen verstandlichmachen, verdeutschen'.7Tointerpretis to translate,and vice versa. In themonths afterhis returnfromBordeauxHolderlin seems to have been fascinated by that kinship. For then he was not onlyengaged in the translation and elucidation of Sophocles's tragedies (a translationbecoming more and more interpretative, one intending, as he said, to bring theoriginal closer to 'unserer Vorstellungsart' (v, 268)) but also, in the Pindar-Fragmente,omposing a curiously coherent work of translation and exegesis com-bined. Title, text, and commentaryof the Fragmente ake in every case a coherententity. But the text itself is a translation, sometimesvery literal in the manner of theearlier Pindar renderings and sometimes more interpretativein the manner of thelatest stratum of the Sophocles. As German, it reads, quite intentionally, liketranslatedlanguage; or we might say it has a strangenesswhich is at least analogousto and in places identical with the strangeness of true poetic language. Thisstrangenesscarries over into the commentariesthemselves,into thatpartof the totalwork which is ostensibly explicating (in the clear vernacular) the difficult foreigntext, as in the lovely VOM DELPHIN

Denindes wellenlosenMeeresTiefevonFlotenBewegthatliebenswiirdigerGesang.DerGesangderNatur, n derWitterung erMusen,wenn iber BliithendieWolken,wieFloken,hingen, undiiberdemSchmelzvongoldenenBlumen.Um dieseZeitgiebt edesWesenseinenTonan,seineTreue,dieArt,wieeines n sichselbstzusammenhangt. ur der7Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, DeutschesWMrterbuch,3 vols (Leipzig, I854-I971), II, I038.

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396 TranslationndExegesis n HolderlinUnterschiederArtenmachtdanndieTrennungnderNatur,daBalsoallesmehrGesangundreineStimmest,alsAccentdes BediirfnissesderaufderanderenSeiteSprache.Es ist das wellenloseMeer,woderbeweglicheFischdie PfeifederTritonen,das EchodesWachstumsndenwaichenPflanzen es Wassers lihlt. (v, 284)Also at this time H6lderlin was engagedin the radical revision of much of his ownverse. As is seen most clearly in the case of'Der blinde Sanger' and 'Der gefesselteStrom', this took the form of a translationline by line and metrical unit by unit intomore drastic language:

. . und nun gedenkter seinerKraft,derGewaltige, un,nun eilter,DerZauderer,rspottetderFesselnnun ...('Dergefesselte trom',1. I)

... Im ZornereinigtaberSichderGefesselte un,nun eilt erDerLinkische; erspottetderSchlaken un .. ('Ganymed',1. 1)

With the analogy of translationin mind it is instructive to comparethe versionsin thegreatestdetail. But morebroadlywhat happens is this: the poem, alreadyas poem ametaphor and structuredupon a furthermetaphor (the meltingof ice or the recoveryof sight), is shifted further nto metaphor,as the new titles 'Ganymed' and 'Chiron'indicate. This process is clearest in the rewriting of 'Der gefesselte Strom'. Themeaning of the poem (what it conveys) in both versionsis resurgence,re-animation,recoveryof the Spirit.In the first versionthatfeelingis enactedinorcarriedover intothe melting of the river'sice at the onset of spring.The ostensible subjectof the poemthen, serving metaphorically, is, as a discarded title indicated, 'Der Eisgang'. Theriver,itselfa metaphor,isdepictedasadivineyouth, thesonofOcean, in a torporandforgetful of his origins. And he, metaphor of the river, is depicted as fettered. Onrewriting Holderlin forfeited none of these strata but added another: that ofGanymede in his own versionof the myth, whichhas the boynow exiled from formerbliss in heaven and in the course of the poem recovering t. Ganymede, himselfactingmetaphorically, is depicted throughout with beautiful aptness (because of hisassociation with Ida of the many streams and his being the son of the nymphCallirhoe) as a river, as 'der Stromgeist'.The new metaphor, Ganymede, runningalongside and sometimesfusingwith theold, the releasedriver,intensifies ourfeelingof resurgence, helps us realizeit, but simultaneously hinders exit from the poem intodiscursive explanation. Wherethemetaphorsfuse there is greatintensity, and wherethey part and runparallelit is as though the sense of the poem werepassing betweenmirrorsand being cast to and frobeyond ourabilityto apprehend. In rewriting'Derblinde Sanger' Holderlin worked for the same effects. The basic metaphoricalpredicament,the blindpoet waitingforsight, itselfdepictedas a waitingfordaylight,is then shifted furtherand, I think, complicated, into the metaphor of the woundedChironlonging forhis release.The awaited light, sight, daybreakin the final versionis, with the coming of Herakles, simultaneously extinction.My point is this: certainly in the Pindar-Fragmentend to some extent in theSophocles translations and theirappended very difficultnotes, a structureis set up,one of theexegesisof a text, whichis actually beliedin itsownpractice.We are not led


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DAVID CONSTANTINE 397out rom Pindar's text via translation and exegesis into the clearvernacular. Insteadwe are kept withina work whose power to move us has been enhanced; this occursagain in the later versions of'Der gefesselteStrom' and 'Der blinde Sanger'. Indeedthe FragmentDas Belebende' greatly resembles those poems, notjust in its subject(centaurs and rivers) but also in that it holds its metaphors in parallel or inmutually-reflecting suspense.Longing, the condition, the 'Zustand des Herzens', which Holderlin's poemsrealizein themselvesand in the reader as theyproceed,constitutes the poem's moralpower. This wants emphasizing, because, by indicating those means by which thepoem resists reduction and elucidation, I may seem to have been suggesting thatH6lderlin's verse is hermetic. True, there is no way out of the poem into possessablediscursive meaning; true, particularly in the later verse, Holderlin strove con-sciously to block such facile exits. But what he thereby achieved is not somethinghermetically sealed within aesthetic formand having no connexion with our moraland practical lives. On the contrary, he achieved an intensification of the poem'sfundamental realization - the condition of longing. The injunctions of poetry arenever (or not often) very specific, but they may nevertheless be very powerful,andthose of Holderlin's poetry certainlyare. Longing drives his poems, drives them toutopian visions, and that then is the effect of the poem on a reader readingunacquisitively and realizing in himself or herself the poem's own process:we aremoved between regret and longing and filled with a conviction of the Spirit'stransforming power.H6lderlin concludes his 'Unter den Alpen gesungen' thus:

undfreiwill ch,soLang chdarf,euchall',ihrSprachen es Himmels!Deutenundsingen.The lines have to be read metaphoricallywithin the metaphor constituted by thewhole poem, but even taken at face value they might caution us against reductivereading. 'Deuten' is akin to translation. The writingof the poem is a translation ofthe Spirit into fitting form. That poem ('singen') is then the exegesis, or that is theform which the exegesis and translation of the Spirit have on this occasion taken.Thus what we read is not furtherexplicable, it is the Spirit's maximum, fullest, andfinestbodying forth,and in that sense thenit cannot,without impairment,be furtherelucidated. The exegesishas alreadytakenplace. What the reader has to do is realizeit. I have a lasting affection for B611's Leni Pfeiffer who sang and chanted acompilation of bits and pieces from'DerRhein' and 'Da ich ein Knabe war . ..'andrealized thus, perhaps more than most, the will that there is in all good poetry toexpand and liberate life.8 DAVIDCONSTANTINETHE QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD

8I am glad to acknowledge debt to ProfessorWaltherKilly,especiallyorhis article HolderlinsInterpretationesPindarfragments66'in UberHolderlin,ditedbyJochenSchmidt Frankfurt.M.,1970), pp.294-319; also to my former research student Dr Martin Simon, whose doctoral thesis'FriedrichHolderlin:The Theoryand Practiceof ReligiousPoetry'(Universityof Durham,1982)deservesobe betterknown.

translation and exegesis in hölderlin

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