Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Eccentric Translation

Julia A. Ireland

“Translating” [“Übersetzen”] is not so much a “trans-lating” [“Über-setzen”] and passing over into a foreign language with the help of one’s own. Rather, translating is more an awakening, clarification, and unfolding of one’s own language with the help of an encounter with the foreign language.

—Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” GA 53.

Accordingly then, the following interpretation of the [Hölderlin’s Pindar] ‘translations.’ Trans -lating as setting-over [Über-setzen] – onto another shore – onto the shore of an other!!

—Martin Heidegger, “Zu Hölderlins Übersetzung der Pindarfragmente,” “Zu Hölderlin”/Griechenlandreisen, GA 75.

In his earlier article from 1993, “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation,” Parvis Emad distinguishes between what he calls “interlingual translation” (translation of a foreign language into one’s own language) and “innerlingual translation” (translation within one’s own language), each of which is differently bound up with what he generically calls “foreignness.”¹ Thus, after detailing the significant ways, Heidegger comes into contact with the question of translation (this includes the fact that Heidegger himself consistently translates, that his translations substantially depart from the available standard translations, and that Heidegger makes explicit remarks about the process of translation, which include his understanding of it as an interpretation), Emad goes on to claim that what these encounters share in common is that “they explicate translation in terms of the root unfolding of language (das Wesen der Sprache).”² “Root unfolding” is, of course, a quite foreign translation of the German word “Wesen,” alternatively rendered as “essential sway” and “ownmost” in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), and comes to locate what, following a remark made by Heidegger in the 1942/1943 Parmenides lecture course, Emad takes up as “essential” or “original translation” (ursprüngliche Übersetzung).

This distinction has important implications for understanding the specific status of the foreignness of the foreign language under translation and the way Emad conceives of the relationship between interlingual and innerlingual translation – what it is that governs the direction of movement between the two – with respect to that foreignness. He accordingly goes on to identify what he calls the “two poles” of translation, which become the organizing insight of his piece and what is, to my mind, most philosophically (if also problematically) at stake in it. To quote Emad:

Heidegger is not concerned with the problems that dominate the discussion of translation in the “sciences” of language. Rather, he takes translation as a unique opportunity for the root unfolding of language. And this opportunity presents itself in the way in which translation responds to the very foreignness or strangeness which calls for a deeper translation in the root unfolding of language.

In Heidegger the question of translation has two poles. At one pole there are translation’s undeniable attachments to the foreignness which rules between languages. At the other pole is the root unfolding of language as a response to that foreignness. Our co-enactment with Heidegger’s thinking on translation requires that we consider what gathers at each of these poles.³

As Emad goes on to elaborate, the encounter with foreignness that takes place through interlingual translation “elicits” or “occasions” the encounter with the foreignness at issue in the root unfolding of language. Thus, where interlingual translation operates in terms of the specific differences between languages, Emad claims that innerlingual translation “turns us away from [those] differences” through the invitation it issues to respond to this still deeper level of foreignness.⁴ In other words, the specifically initiatory dimension of the foreignness of the foreign language moves us from the pole of interlingual translation to the pole of innerlingual translation, “translating” us, so to speak, into the very movement of translation as this is realized in the root unfolding of language. After citing the quotation from Heidegger’s “The Ister” lecture course included as my first epigraph, Emad writes:

…[T]here is more to translation than just a transfer of words from one language to another. To initiate the move in such a transfer is to face the difference between languages as the foreignness that rules between them. By forcing us to see the foreignness and unfamiliarity of the languages under translation, the activity of translation clarifies our relationship to our own language. Thus, rather than serving as a means for transporting “meanings” across the so-called language barrier, translation invites us to return to our own language. When we, in translation, turn back from the foreignness of another language, we discover another translation, one that occurs within our own language.⁵

While Emad acknowledges the “undeniable attachments to the foreignness, which rules between languages” and what, in the concluding paragraph of his article, he describes as “the unresolvable foreignness that always remains in interlingual translation,” the encounter with the foreignness of the foreign language is understood to undo difference on the way to a deeper, but also curiously generic encounter with the foreignness taking place at the root or core of language’s unfolding.⁶ The specific differences between languages at issue in interlingual translation would thereby seem to be subsumed under the foreignness of innerlingual translation, which as the foreignness that governs the movement between the two poles of translation is the foreignness that matters for Emad.

Emad’s unusual formulation in the above quotation provides an important clue here. For Emad nowhere touches on what I want to explore as “the fact of difference” at stake for Heidegger in interlingual translation, but instead consistently refers to the foreignness that “rules between languages.” But is not this “foreignness that rules between languages” already the foreignness of innerlingual translation – the foreignness that the movement of interlingual translation is supposed to get us to, but that the specifically initiatory dimension of interlingual translation also cannot be reducible to, unless what we have here are not “poles” but a single step within a thinly disguised dialectic? In other words, is not Emad trying to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to the specific status of the foreignness of the foreign language? Acknowledging Emad’s superb treatment of the relationship between original translation and the making of a way of thinking and language, what would it mean to bring forward the “undeniable attachments” and “unresolvable foreignness” of interlingual translation in order to find ourselves, as Heidegger writes, not just set onto another shore, but onto the shore of an other?

To bring out the foreignness at issue in interlingual translation, I want to make the case that Heidegger’s comments on translation in “The Ister” and Parmenides lecture courses need to be located in terms of his interpretation of Hölderlin’s Dec. 4th, 1801 letter to Böhlendorff, which is the single most important document for clarifying what Heidegger means by “foreign” (das Fremde) and “one’s own” (das Eigene) as well as the relationship between the two.⁷ My interpretation thus marks a significant departure from Emad in both its orientation and governing conception of foreignness by asserting two working theses.

First, I want to make the claim that the question of translation for Heidegger specifically concerns the inverted, but seemingly symmetrical or reciprocal apportioning of “endowments” (Mitgift) and “tasks” (Aufgabe) between the Greeks and the Germans as this is articulated in the Letter to Böhlendorff. It is first with his 1934–1935 lecture course, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” that Heidegger develops a framework within which to understand what is at stake in his own translations of the Greeks – namely, a self-conscious violence and excess that serves to correct a deficiency within the German’s endowment of the “clarity of presentation” as this is accomplishable only through the encounter with the Greek foreign. Emad, by contrast, goes back to Heidegger’s 1931 translation of Plato’s Theatetus, schematically tracking out the differences between Heidegger’s and Schleiermacher’s respective translations as evidence of the movement between thinking and original translation. In setting aside crucial aspects of Heidegger’s philosophical development, Emad misses both how Heidegger’s comments on translation are directly informed by his interpretation of the Letter to Böhlendorff and how his translations of Sophocles, the pre-Socratics, and, most particularly, Hölderlin enact that interpretation.

Second, I want to problematize Emad’s language of “two poles” as being overly schematic in presupposing an essentialist (or at least unproblematically “given”) conception of the difference between a foreign language and one’s own language. Essentialism cannot emerge as a problem for Emad because foreignness is not finally about the specific differences between languages at the same time those specific differences are understood to implicate the movement between interlingual and innerlingual translation. What Heidegger’s interpretation of the Letter to Böhlendorff importantly shows is that the translation of a foreign language into one’s own language is not one-directional (and this includes understanding innerlingual translation as a “return”). Rather, the movement of translation as a settingover is instead the “intersecting” or “crossing over” (Überkreuzung; emphasis mine) of the reciprocal, but also asymmetrical surpassing of foreign and own, Greek and German, as a being given into difference.

This in turn changes how the direction of movement between interlingual and innerlingual translation might be conceived in ways that Heidegger’s interpretation of the Letter to Böhlendorff richly suggests, but also cannot quite account for given the fact that innerlingual translation for Heidegger traverses the dialogue between thinking and poetizing as this is taken up in Heidegger’s encounter with Hölderlin’s own dialogue with the Greeks. Instead, it is Hölderlin’s effort to “correct” (verbessern) the Greek by way of the German through his “Orientalization” of key Sophoclean odes that reveals that interlingual translation is already an innerlingual translation, one that in operating by way of a structure of transposition and excess–that is, by way of a certain kind of eccentricity – succeeds in bringing forward the “undeniable attachments” and “unresolvable foreignness” in its accomplishment of a Greek that never was. Yet this is what it means to translate German into German. Couldn’t such eccentricity also be the model for understanding the root of the foreignness and even violence of Emad’s translations of Heidegger with respect to what we understand both English and translation to allow?

1 Hölderlin’s Dec. 4, 1801 Letter to Böhlendorff

Hölderlin’s Dec. 4, 1801 Letter to Böhlendorff was written on the eve of his departure for Bordeaux and towards the end of what, in retrospect, would prove to have been one of his richest creative years. While the letter is clearly intended to praise and congratulate his friend Casimir Böhlendorff on the successful execution of his tragedy, Fernando, by in part supplying the terms for that success (“you have achieved so much in precision and suppleness, and not lost anything in warmth”), Hölderlin scholars have read the Letter as addressed more to Hölderlin himself than to Böhlendorff.⁸ In falling more than 2 years after his Sophocles translations (and likely shortly before his great Pindar translations), the Letter serves as the articulation of the poetic theory Hölderlin came to work out in the context of those translations. And, as his 1803 “Remarks” to the Oedipus and the Antigone further reveal, it continues to guide Hölderlin’s increasingly radicalized attitude towards translation whose logical, if also eccentrically extreme, extension is to “correct” the Greek original as this is possible only through its translation into German.

Heidegger first cites the Letter to Böhlendorff at the conclusion of his 1934–1935 Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” echoing its words in the concluding lines of the course by calling on the Germans to “learn the free use of the national.”⁹ While Heidegger is generally unconcerned with the larger context that situates the Letter (and this includes the debt it owes to Herder’s conception of a people and the answer it issues to Schiller on cultural formation), it is central to how Heidegger comes to understand his own encounter with the pre-Socratics and Sophocles, beginning with the 1935 Introduction into Metaphysics. Thus, although Heidegger does not make general statements that connect translation to the specific language of the Letter as, for example, he does in “The Ister” lecture course, his interpretative “translation” of Sophocles’ Antigone with its emphasis on “violence” (Gewalt) carries through on the conceptual framework first developed in the Letter. Heidegger first starts translating in what might be called a “Heideggerian manner” beginning with his infamous translation of the Greek word deinon with “unheimlich” (uncanny, unhomely). I cite Heidegger’s own citation of the Letter to Böhldendorff from the “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” lecture course – which although it includes only its first half – is his most complete reproduction of the Letter¹⁰:

We learn nothing with greater difficulty than the free use of the national. And, as I believe, that it is precisely the clarity of presentation [Klarheit der Darstellung] which is so originally natural to us, as the fire from the heaven is to the Greeks. It is for that reason that they will need to be surpassed [übertreffen] in beautiful passion, which you too have retained, rather than in that Homeric presence of spirit and gift for presentation.

It sounds paradoxical. But I will put it forward yet again, and submit it to your test and free employment, that in the progress of culture, the properly national always assumes less precedence. For that reason the Greeks are less masters of holy pathos because it was inborn in them whereas, from Homer onward, they excel in the gift for presentation because this extraordinary man was sufficiently soulful to capture the Western Junonian sobriety for his Apollonian realm, and thereby to truly appropriate the foreign. With us it is the reverse. That is why it is also so dangerous to abstract the rules of art solely and in isolation from the model of Greek excellence. I have long labored on this and now know that, with the exception of what must be the highest for the Greeks and for us, namely, to have a living relation and destiny [Geschick], we must not bear any resemblance to them. But what is one’s own [das Eigene] must be learned just as well as what is foreign [das Fremde]. That is why the Greeks are unavoidable for us. Only we will not keep up with them precisely in what is our own, the national, because, as I said, the free use of one’s own is the most difficult.

Though I will return to Heidegger’s interpretation of the Letter in the “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” course, I want to clarify its basic structure by way of a schematic outline included in Heidegger’s fragmentary notes, “Zu Hölderlins Übersetzung der Pindarfragmente,” provisionally dated 1944. This schematic not only has the advantage of making the basic moves of the Letter visually clear, its dating places it within the same period as Heidegger’s most detailed remarks on translation in “The Ister” and Parmenides lecture courses. Indeed, the often-cited reference from the Parmenides course to translation as being “set onto a new shore” receives its more interesting formulation in this set of notes (cited in my second epigraph as the “setting-over onto the shore of an other”):

“living relation” (“destiny”), “the highest”
“free use”
“the national,” “one’s own,” what has been endowed (E), what is
↕ “originally natural.” From whence, in the first instance, this difference? (Animal rationale? No! The crossing over: what is ownmost and foreign.)
“what is foreign.” A task (T) laid claim to.

“the most difficult” to be achieved, and thus what is most readily “to be surpassed.

what is easier — what? The “foreign” (taken in itself). — “What is most difficult”: the acquisition of what one possesses in the service of its dispensation.

E and T; own and foreign; both must be learned.

That for us from out of T “fire” does not come into the freedom of its destined ordering !¹¹

While this schematic helps make vivid the inverted and seemingly symmetrical apportioning of foreign and own, Greek and German (Hölderlin’s “with us it is the reverse”), the conceptual originality of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Letter lies in his posing of the question, “From whence, to begin with, this difference? [Woher, zunächst, diese Unterscheidung?],” and his answer, “The crossing over: what is ownmost and foreign [die Überkreuzung: Eigenstes und Fremdes],” which is indicated graphically, and no doubt insufficiently, by the doubly directed arrow.

As Heidegger’s adoption of the terms “Mitgift [endowment]” and “Aufgabe [task]” for Hölderlin’s “Eigene” and “Fremde” suggest (Hölderlin twice uses the word “Darstellungsgabe”), what is one’s ownmost cannot be understood as simply “given” and thus as a function of what is native or “originally natural.” The still further implication of this insight is that the difference between Greek and German also cannot be assumed as “given” in, for example, the way that a Goethe or Winkelman straightforwardly assumes the final accomplishment of Greek culture as the basis for imitation by the Germans. Instead, if we follow what Heidegger is after here, the endowment, so to speak, “invests” a task through which the givenness of the endowment as an endowment is realized or comes into its own only by way of the task. Indeed, it is this “as” that reveals translation to be a movement not of encounter and return, but a transposition that is the “setting over” into differential relation. With regard to this apportioning of endowments and tasks between the Greeks and the Germans respectively, the Greek “fire from heaven” and the German “clarity of presentation” “intersect” or “cross over” one another as each “surpasses” the other not in what is their own, but in what is in each case foreign to them. What emerges from out of the peculiar “givenness” of this structure is not a logic of identity nor an easily mapped binary, but instead the reciprocal exceeding by the foreign in what is in each case other to them. As we will see in Hölderlin’s various translation experiments, this excess serves to bring forward the fact of difference between foreign and own, Greek and German, without thereby presupposing that difference as either essentially given or even fully accomplished as a difference. Hölderlin is acutely aware of the counter-intuitive nature of what it means for the Germans to surpass the Greeks in what is their own, characterizing it as “paradoxical.” While this paradox in part derives from, as Heidegger writes, the foreign “taken in itself” being “easier,” Hölderlin is positively interested in the structure of this excess as creatively, which is to say, differentially generative. As the subsequent content of the Letter makes clear – and this is variously captured in Heidegger’s parentheticals – absent the encounter with the foreign, what is one’s own is subject to a version of deficient excess that turns its original tendency back onto itself. For the Greeks, the native “fire from heaven” is threatened by the impulse to be “consumed in flames” through which the desire for immediacy is recuperated in the undoing of the experience of difference that itself constitutes self-consciousness. This is understood as the nostalgic desire for “unboundedness” or unification with the One, and it is exactly this repressed impulse that Hölderlin seeks to bring forward in his “eccentrically enthusiastic” and corrective translation of Sophocles. For the Germans, by contrast, the native “clarity of presentation” is impelled by the tendency towards excessive conceptualization and self-consciousness – Heidegger’s otherwise surprising reference to “ratio” – whose literally final manifestation is, as Hölderlin later writes in the Letter, being “boxed up in a coffin.” Hölderlin’s calling on the Germans to surpass the Greeks in “holy pathos” is thus to serve as a kind corrective excess for the deficient excess to which what is one’s own is otherwise subject.

Heidegger’s interpretation of the Letter in the “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” course is governed by this insight into deficient excess together with his specific concern for the German “national.” Though Heidegger does not cite Hölderlin’s “Remarks to Antigone,” he interprets the Letter in terms of a passage that directly resonates with its basic structural framework in contrasting the “primary tendency” – here described by Hölderlin as a “weakness” (Schwäche) – that distinguishes the Greek and German styles of representation: “…our poetic art must be patriotic such that its materials are selected in accordance with our view of the world, and its representations patriotic, differing from Greek representations insofar as their primary tendency is to be able to grasp themselves [sich fassen] because their weakness lies therein; whereas, in contrast, the primary tendency in the modes of representation in our time is the ability to hit on [treffen] something, to have destiny, since the lack of fate, dusmoron, is our weakness.”¹² Notably, however, and in a way that directly anticipates his own 1935 interpretation of Sophocles, Heidegger not only approaches the Letter through the terminology of this passage, he approaches this passage through Hölderlin’s early translation of the opening lines from the second choral ode of the Antigone in which Hölderlin translates the Greek word deinon with “gewältig” (violent). That is, Heidegger translates back into the Letter what Hölderlin’s translation and commentary on the Antigone enact as the German confrontation with the Greek foreign, which is, of course, informed by the Letter. In this terminological crossing over, the Greek endowment of the “fire from heaven” becomes for Heidegger “the having become struck by the violence of be-ing [das Betroffenwerden durch die Gewalt des Seyns]” and “the passion for the overpowering [die Leidenschaft zum Überwältigenden],” while the Greek’s task is the “taming of the untameable in the struggle over the work, grasping, bringing-to-stand [die Bändigung des Unbändigen im Erkämpfen des Werkes, das Fassen, Zum-Stand-bringen].”¹³ The “Western Junonian sobriety” first captured by Homer is thus here being conceived in terms that Heidegger subsequently takes up in the Introduction to Metaphysics as τέχνη (techne).

While I will return to the problem Homer presents for Hölderlin in the next section, the latent connection between the “clarity of presentation” and τέχνη is important to keep in mind as Heidegger goes on to parse out what is endowed and tasked to the Germans. For in contrast to some interpretations of Heidegger, the Greeks and translation, Heidegger is not about “out Greeking” the Greeks, as though the surpassing of the foreign were something that could be “taken in itself.” (This would be simply to substitute how the foreign is “easier” for the “weakness” of what is one’s own as a further avenue to evade the difficulty of appropriating one’s own.) Rather, the problem for Heidegger is precisely the deficient excess inherent in what is the German’s own as this is tied to his nascent insights into τέχνη. As Heidegger writes: “To the Germans it is endowed: the ability to grasp, the getting straight and planning of domains and spaces, ordering to the extreme of organizing. Tasked to them is the becoming struck by beyng.”¹⁴ As this passage reveals, the weakness inherent in the “grasping” of the “clarity of presentation” shows up precisely in the drive towards compartmentalization, which substitutes the buoyant aliveness of the outline of the work for a frame and framework. In his later interpretation of the Letter to Böhlendorff in “The Ister” lecture course, Heidegger thus comments on the danger of mistaking the excess that shows up in the setting up of limits for the sake of the setting up of limits for “the fire itself.”¹⁵

At this juncture, it is necessary to return to how Heidegger understands the endowment to be realized as an endowment only by way of the task. Thus, where what is one’s own is natively original, this originality curiously comes into its own only by way of the task, which as Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes in the “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” course is something “won through struggle” (erkämpfen). Acknowledging that Heidegger’s martial language has a rhetorical urgency in relation to the “national,” the task – though appointed – is something that the Germans and the Greeks each freely give themselves precisely in its being taken up as a task. While this, of course, includes the appropriation of the “fire from the heavens” and the “clarity of presentation” respectively, the struggle to make the task one’s own serves to transform the very structure of what it means for the endowment to have been given as an endowment. This is simply to reiterate that for both Hölderlin and Heidegger, it is the excess implicit in the appropriation of the task that uniquely opens up the space for “learning.”

Where this certainly presupposes a kind of distance, the movement here is not the encounter with the foreign followed by the return to what is one’s own (this would be to reduce the generative creativity of Hölderlin’s paradox to a dialectic), but the transposition or, again, “crossing over” of foreign and own as this is accomplished only through the task. In an important but underdeveloped passage Heidegger writes, “Historical determination is always about transforming what has been given, the ‘national,’ into a task” – an insight echoed and given a still more compelling formulation at the conclusion of the “Origin of the Work of Art”: “History is the ecstatic transport of a people into its task as its return into what has been endowed [Geschichte ist die Entrückung eines Volkes in sein Aufgegebenes als Einrückung in sein Mitgegebenes].”¹⁶ This highlights a crucial point: The Germans’ encounter with the Greek foreign is never just the encounter with the Greek foreign. Instead, it is always simultaneously the encounter with the Greeks’ own excessive appropriation of the “clarity of presentation” through which the Germans are transposed into differential relation with what is their own, and transposed into differential relation with what is their own only by exceeding the Greeks’ in what is the Greeks’ own. (Here it is worth noting that the German word for “surpass” in the Letter to Böhlendorff is “übertreffen,” suggesting that the Germans learn how to “hit the mark” (treffen) only by overshooting it.) It is first through the excess of the task that the German’s enter into the possibility of learning what is their own not just as foreign, but from the position of the foreign. This is what it means to be set over not just onto another shore, but onto the shore of an other.

This suggests an importantly different reading of Heidegger’s 1935 interpretation of the second choral ode from the Antigone in the Introduction to Metaphysics. While a number of scholars have called attention to the distinct pathos of that interpretation, Heidegger’s confrontation with Sophocles needs to be understood in terms of the surpassing of the Greek foreign through which the Germans are transposed into the task of their own as this becomes uniquely available in the “yes” to the tragic downgoing of the capacity to grasp. Here, particular emphasis must be given to Heidegger’s concluding provocation from the “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” course that “the violence of be-ing must once again become a real question for the capacity to grasp.”¹⁷ In other words, Heidegger is not engaged in what for some is simply a heightened version of a typically idiosyncratic approach to the Greeks (and in this case one complicated by his comments on the Greek polis [πόλις]). Instead, the excessive aspect of Heidegger’s self-confessed interpretive violence enacts the appropriation of the Greek foreign according to the terms laid out in the Letter to Böhlendorff. The act of translation, then, is not limited to Heidegger’s “actual” translation of the ode or even to his three-staged interpretive commentary on that translation, but is to be found in the quality of the tonal excess of that interpretive translation, which exactly culminates with the inability of τέχνη to overpower the overpowering.

2 Hölderlin’s Eccentric Translation

Where the translation of German into German is enacted for Heidegger through his dialogue with Hölderlin’s poetry, which uniquely becomes the language of Heidegger’s own thinking, it is Hölderlin’s “corrected” translation of Sophocles’ Greek together with his extraordinarily literalized experiments with Pindar that provide the best model for what it means to carry through on the “undeniable attachments” and “unresolvable foreignness” of interlingual translation. Such attachments are evidenced in, for example, not only Hölderlin’s singular parataxis, they are intrinsically related to the realization of what Hölderlin calls the “Hesperian.” That is, they are intrinsically related to how German first comes to speak German through the achievement of specific poetic effects learned only in the eccentric or literalized translation of the Greek, and whose traces Hölderlin’s new “German” German bears. In attempting to show what is at stake in these corrections as an extension of the Letter to Böhlendorff, I’ll be drawing from Françoise Dastur’s article, “Hölderlin and the Orientalisation of Greece,” and from Wolfgang Binder’s, “Hölderlin und Sophokles.”¹⁸ In addressing Hölderlin’s Pindar experiments, I refer the reader to David Constantine’s outstanding, “Hölderlin’s Pindar: The Language of Translation,” whose feel for Hölderlin’s “translated” German exceeds what I myself am capable of hearing in German.¹⁹ This, of course, not only begs its own interesting set of questions with respect to translation, it directly pertains to Hölderlin’s effort to bring forward a still other foreign in his “corrected” version of the Greek “original” by way of the German.

As I have attempted to show in my analysis of the Letter to Böhlendorff, the Greeks and the Germans surpassing appropriation of what is in each case the other’s own is to serve as a kind of corrective excess for the deficient excess of what is native or “originally natural” to each. While Hölderlin, as we have seen, characterizes this reciprocal surpassing as “paradoxical,” his 1803–1804 correspondence with the publisher Friedrich Wilmans on his Sophocles translations reveals that he came to see that the reversed or inverted symmetry between the Greeks and the Germans was haunted by a still deeper and unaccounted for asymmetry. And the locus of this asymmetry is Homer’s literally being “full of soul [seelenvoll].” Carrying through on the logic articulated in the Letter, this soulfulness not only allowed Homer to capture “Western Junonian sobriety,” it initiated the German “clarity of presentation” while simultaneously anticipating it as the foreign.

Though the German word “erbeuten” (“to capture”) has connotations of “ensnaring” rather than of “grasping” as conceptualizing (“fassen”), Homer’s radical innovation lies, as it were, in his capturing of “capturing.” Yet what the Letter to Böhlendorff importantly glosses over is how the Greeks are to enter into relation with what is their own, which requires not the Germans as the foreign “taken in itself,” but the Germans’ surpassing appropriation of what is the Greeks’ own. If, as Hölderlin writes, the Greeks are “unavoidable” for the Germans, the Germans might be described as “inevitable” for the Greeks, for Homer’s initiating by way of anticipating of the German foreign curiously presupposes the Greek as “given” without actually being able to accomplish it. As Hölderlin writes in fragment to a late hymn cited by both Binder and Heidegger:

Namely, they [the Greeks] wanted to found
A kingdom of art. But in this
The patriotic was neglected
by them and wretchedly went
Greece, the most beautiful, to its downfall

The asymmetry that attaches to Homer’s radical innovativeness generates an unexpected symmetry between the Greeks and the Germans. Where the Germans are subject to deficient excess in the “clarity of presentation” as what is their own, the Greeks are subject to a still different excess in their surpassing appropriation of an as yet also unaccomplished foreign – a foreign who, in surpassing the Greeks in what is their own, first creates the differential excess that would allow the Greeks to enter into relation with what is originally native to them. This is to say that the Greeks succumb to precisely that excess of the clarity of presentation that also threatens the Germans.

Hölderlin’s increasing awareness of this asymmetry leads him to transform both where and how he locates a necessary and corrective excess at the same time he retains the basic structure of the letter to Böhlendorff, with regard to what is apportioned to the Greeks and the Germans respectively. In contrast, then, to the reciprocal surpassing of Greek and German in what is in each case the other’s own, Hölderlin attempts to reach back behind Homer’s original innovation in order to bring forward through the translation of Greek into German a still other foreign already residing within the Greek foreign. As Hölderlin writes in his September 20th, 1803 Letter to Wilmans: “I hope that Greek art, which is foreign for us due to the national conformism and deficiency which it has been able to abide, will thus be presented in more a lively manner to the public than is customary by my bringing out the Oriental it had always distanced itself from, and by correcting its aesthetic deficiency.”

As Wolfgang Binder has shown in his article “Sophokles und Hölderlin,” Hölderlin’s retranslations of key Sophoclen odes attempt to correct these aesthetic faults by restoring the “aorgic principle” of the oriental – the wild passion and drive to undo individuation that Nietzsche will later designate the “Dionysian” – through what Hölderlin calls “eccentric enthusiasm.” It is important to be clear that what Hölderlin is doing here is not simply translating the Greek into German, but instead bringing the Greek into its own through the encounter with the German foreign, which peculiarly entails the recuperation of a still other foreign.²⁰ Significantly, however, to “correct” the Greeks’ excessive appropriation of the German foreign by way of the Oriental is simultaneously to “correct” the excess inherent in the “clarity of presentation” as what is the Germans own. This, then, is to simultaneously accomplish a Greek that never was, and in so doing to bring German into its own through the translation of a still other foreign within the foreign.

This invention of German through translation is made still more vivid in Hölderlin’s translation experiments with Pindar, which come to transform Hölderlin’s own poetic language. As Constantine elaborates in his article, “Hölderlin’s Pindar: The Language of Translation,” Hölderlin in an extended translation experiment attempted to follow as exactly as possible Gottlob Heyne’s 1798 edition of Pindar, which divides Pindar’s poetry into short and purely metrical lines. (Interestingly, this often included Heyne’s dividing of individual words.) While Hölderlin’s effort to render Pindar in the most literal possible manner sometimes led to versions of poems at the limit of intelligibility, Constantine emphasizes Hölderlin’s attempt to find a mechanism that would allow him to “minimally deviate” from the Greek in order to best approximate the poetic effect of the Greek in German. This included, for example, when and how Hölderlin choose to depart from the Greek word order in the effort to achieve, as Constantine writes, “the best possible effect for the smallest departure [from the Greek original].”²¹

While Hölderlin’s debt to Pindar has long been acknowledged, at the conclusion of his article Constantine – who is himself both a poet and translator – calls attention to how Hölderlin’s translations come to inflect his poetry by introducing a kind of strangeness. Commenting on how Hölderlin’s mature poetic language “bears the Greek in mind” in the most Hölderlinian of words, he writes:

But my point is not that in reading Hölderlin one frequently comes up with Graecisms. Rather, that his most characteristic and powerful usages have a strangeness about them, they shock the mind, almost as though they had been translated — and from where? His use of the word ‘Gespräch’ for example…It is as though the word has connotations in another language — tones and overtones which the poet had appropriated, and was inducing into his native German.²²

While Constantine does not connect Hölderlin’s Pindar experiments with the Letter to Böhldendorff in this particular article (he includes a discussion of the Letter in his book, Hölderlin), it is clear that this strangeness reflects the translation of German into German as this is learned only through the translation of Greek into German. In contrast to Emad’s privileging of a generic conception of “the foreignness that rules between languages,” this strangeness, together with the unplaceable, but familiar “connotation” would seem to point back to the “undeniable attachments” and “unresolvable foreignness” at issue in interlingual translation. This, finally, cannot be separated from innerlingual translation. In answer to Constantine’s question, “from where?,” the alternative to the silence of the root-unfolding of language would be this very strangeness, which marks the presence of the foreign not just within what is one’s own, but that has elicited or occasioned the movement of coming into one’s own and whose irreducibility points beyond itself in bearing witness to the specificity of its attachments as difference.

Acknowledgement I want to thank Tom Davis for his conversations about my work, and for his comments on an early draft of this paper. I also wish to acknowledge the influence of William McNeill, who first called my attention to the significance of Hölderlin’s Dec. 4th, 1801 Letter to Böhlendorff while we were translating Heidegger’s Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.”

Notes

1 Parvis Emad, “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation: Essential Translation and the Unfolding of Language,” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1993), pp. 323–340. It clearly informs Emad’s subsequent discussion of translation in his 2007 book On the Way to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). Clearly and importantly, Emad abandons in his book the translations of Wesen as “root-unfolding.” For an alternative discussion of Emad that focuses on this later work and the central role that intralingual translation plays in the development of the key terms that govern Heidegger’s thinking, see Frank Schalow’s “Attunement and Translation,” which is also included in this volume.

2 Emad, “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation,” p. 324.

3 Ibid.

4 Emad, “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation,” p. 337.

5 Emad, “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation,” p. 326.

6 Emad, “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation,” p. 337.

7 At different junctures throughout his three Hölderlin lecture courses, Heidegger cites from Hölderlin’s two letters to his friend Casimir Böhlendorff. The first letter, which is dated Dec. 4^th, 1801, was written shortly before Hölderlin’s departure for Bordeaux. It is this first letter to Böhlendorff that is the basis for this article, and is referred to throughout as the “Letter to Böhlendorff” or simply as the “Letter.” The second letter to Böhlendorff, which famously refers to Hölderlin’s having been “struck by Apollo,” is undated, but is generally thought to have been written sometime during the spring of 1802. The first Letter to Böhlendorff plays a crucially important role in framing all three of Heidegger’s Hölderlin lecture courses. For Heidegger’s treatment of the Letter in the 1934/35 Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, GA 39 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), see pages 290–294 of that volume; for his discussion of it in the 1941/42 Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken”, GA 52 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), see the “Drittes Hauptstück: Die Suche nach dem freien Gebrauch des Eigenen,” pages 123–150; and in his 1942/42 Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister”, GA 53 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984), pp. 168–170. Holderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 135–37. The seminal discussion of the Letter within the context of Hölderlin’s own biography and writings is given by Peter Szondi, “Überwindung des Klassizimus: Der Brief an Böhlendorff vom 4. Dezember 1801” in Schriften: I. (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1978), pp. 345–366. Szondi’s chapter discusses various Hölderlin scholars’ interpretation of the Letter, including Norbert von Hellingrath’s with whose work Heidegger was clearly familiar.

8 A complete citation of the Letter can be found in Hölderlin: Werke und Briefe, vol. 2. Edited by Friedrich Beißner and Jochen Schmidt (Insel Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1969), pp. 940–942. For a translation of the Letter, see Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. by Thomas Pfau (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988), pp. 109–116, as well as Dennis J. Schmidt’s, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 165–167. I have drawn from both translations in coming up with my own translation of the Letter to Böhlendorff.

9 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, GA 39 (Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1980), p. 294.

10 Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, pp. 290–291. The portion of the Letter as cited by Heidegger reads:

Wir lernen nichts schwerer als das Nationelle frei gebrauchen. Und wie ich glaube, ist gerade die Klarheit der Darstellung uns ursprünglich so näturlich, wie den Griechen das Feuer vom Himmel. Eben deswegen werden diese eher in schöner Leidenschaft, die Du Dir auch erhalten hast, als in jener homerischen Geistesgegenwart und Darstellungsgabe zu übertreffen sein.

Es klingt paradox. Aber ich behaupt’ es noch einmal, und stelle es Deiner Prüfung und Deinem Gebrauche frei, das eigentlich Nationelle wird im Fortschritt der Bildung immer der geringere Vorzug werden. Desswegen sind die Griechen des heiligen Pathos weniger Meister, weil es ihnen angeboren war, hingegen sind sie vorzüglich in Darstellungsgabe, von Homer an, weil dieser ausserordentliche Mensch seelenvoll genug war, um die abendländische Junonische Nüchternheit für sein Apollonsreich zu erbeuten, und so wahrhaft das Fremde sich anzueignen. Bei uns ists umgekehrt. Desswegen ists auch so gëfahrlich, sich die Kunstregeln einzig und allein von griechischer Vortrefflichkeit zu abstrahiren. Ich habe lange daran laborirt und weiss nun, dass ausser dem, was bei den Griechen und uns das höchste sein muss, nemlich dem lebendigen Verhältniss und Geschik, wir nicht wohl etwas gleich mit ihnen haben dürfen. Aber das Eigene muss so gut gelernt seyn, wie das Fremde. Desswegen sind uns die Griechen unentbehrlich. Nur werden wir ihnen gerade in unserm Eigenen, Nationellen nicht nachkommen, weil, wie gesagt, der freie Gebrauch des Eigenen das schwerste ist.

11 Martin Heidegger. “Zu Hölderlin” in Griechenlandreisen, GA 75 (Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 2000), pp. 346–347.

12 In German this sentence reads:

…und unsere Dichtkunst vaterländisch sein muß, so daß ihre Stoffe nach unserer Weltansicht gewählt sind, und ihre Vorstellungen vaterländisch, verändern sich die griechischen Vorstellungen insofern, als ihre Haupttendenz ist, sich fassen zu können, weil darin ihre Schwäche lag, da hingegen die Haupttendenz in den Vorstellungsarten unserer Zeit ist, etwas treffen zu können, Geschick zu haben, da das Schicksallose, das dusmoron, unsere Schwäche ist.

In Hölderlin: Werke und Briefe, vol. 2., pp. 783–790. A full translation of Hölderlin’s “Remarks to Antigone” can be found Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory. Translated and Edited by Thomas Pfau, pp. 109–116. For Heidegger’s brief discussion of this line in “The Ister” lecture course, see p. 136 in the English and p. 169 in the German.

13 Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, pp. 292–3.

14 Ibid.

15 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, p. 136 in English, p. 141 in German.

16 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, GA 5 (Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1977), p. 65.

17 Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, p. 294.

18 Françoise Dastur, “Hölderlin and the Orientalisation of Greece.” Pli 10 (2000): 156–173. Wolfgang Binder, “Hölderlin und Sophokles.” Hölderlin Jahrbuch 16 (1969): 19–37.

19 David Constantine, “Hölderlin’s Pindar: The Language of Translation.” The Modern Language Review, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Oct., 1978): 825–834.

20 As Dastur writes in referring to Binder in “Hölderlin and the Orientalisation of Greece”: “We are dealing with a triple project: That of the transcription of one language into another, of Greek into German; but also of the transposition of the original into a state of accomplishment it has missed by drawing the oriental under the Greek; finally an accomplishment of the Hesperian itself, since the oriental constitutes its cultural tendency. For Hölderlin this means neither transposing the Greek into German, which would no longer be Greek, nor carbon copying the German from the Greek, which would still be Greek, but unreadable to us. Rather, it means correcting the excess of art which led Greece to its downfall by making its oriental nature appear, which is to say, in the end translating the Greek into Greek by letting it pass into another language and accomplishing what it could not bring itself to good end,” p. 173.

21 Constantine, “Hölderlin’s Pindar: The Language of Translation,” p. 831.

22 Constantine, “Hölderlin’s Pindar: The Language of Translation,” p. 834.

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