Selected Poetry

Friedrich Hölderlin

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781780374017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780374024
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Friedrich Hölderlin was one of Europe's greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in these remarkable verse translations. This is a new expanded edition of Constantine's widely-praised Hölderlin Selected Poems (1990/1996), containing many new translations as well as the whole of Hölderlin's Sophocles (2001), in which he sought to create an equivalent English for Hölderlin's extraordinary German recreations of the classic Greek verse plays. Constantine won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1997 for his translations of Hölderlin. This new volume presents a substantial selection from the work of a poet who, writing around 1800, addresses us ever more urgently two centuries later. Hölderlin translated all his writing life. Through translation he reached a poetic language of his own, so that much of his best poetry reads like a translation from elsewhere. He was intensely occupied with Sophocles in the winter of 1803-04. His versions of Oedipus Rex and Antigone (he worked at but never finished Oedipus at Colonus and Ajax) came out in the spring of 1804 and were taken, by the learned, as conclusive proof of his insanity. He was by then very near to mental collapse, but no one now would dismiss his work for that. He translated in a radical and idiosyncratic way, cleaving close to the Greek yet at the same time striving to interpret these ancient, foreign and – as he thought – sacred originals, and so bring them home into the modern day and age. Constantine has translated Hölderlin's translations, carrying as much of their strangeness as possible into his English. The plays themselves need no introduction or apology. These double translations, links in literature from land to land and from age to age, demonstrate the vitality of ancient and modern poetic tradition. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• DESCRIPTION
• TITLE PAGE
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Greece
• The oak trees
• To Diotima (‘Come and look at the happiness…’)
• Diotima (‘Heavenly Muse of Delight…’)
• ‘The peoples were silent…’
• Empedocles
• To the Fates
• To her good angel
• Plea for Forgiveness
• To the Sun God
• Hyperion’s Song of Fate
• ‘When I was a boy…’
• Achilles
• ‘Once there were gods…’
• ‘If I heeded them warning me now…’
• Parting
• The Zeitgeist
• Evening fantasy
• Morning
• The Main
• That which is mine
• ‘Another day…’
• ‘The sun goes down…’
• Peace
• Heidelberg
• The Gods
• The Neckar
• Home
• Love
• Course of life
• Parting, second version
• Diotima (‘You are silent, you suffer it…’)
• Return to the homeland
• Encouragement, second version
• Sung under the Alps
• The calling of poetry
• Voice of the people, second version
• The blind singer
• Poetic courage, first version
• Poetic courage, second version
• The fettered river
• Chiron
• Tears
• To Hope
• Vulcan
• Timidity
• Ganymede
• Half of life
• Ages of life
• Hahrdt Nook
• Menon’s lament for Diotima
• A walk into the country
• Stuttgart
• Bread and Wine
• Homecoming
• The Archipelago
• Those sleeping now
• As when on a holiday…
• To Mother Earth
• At the source of the Danube
• Celebration of Peace, first version
• Celebration of Peace, final version
• The journey
• The Rhine
• Germania
• The only one, first version
• The only one, ll. 50-97 of the second version
• The only one, third version
• Patmos
• Patmos, fragments of a later version
• Patmos, ll. 136-195 of work on a final version
• Remembrance
• The Ister
• Mnemosyne, second version
• Mnemosyne, third version
• ‘As birds slowly pass over…’
• ‘As upon seacoasts…’
• Home
• ‘For when the juice of the vine…’
• ‘On pale leaves…’
• ‘When over the vineyard…’
• To the Madonna
• The Titans
• ‘Once I asked the Muse…’
• ‘But when the heavenly powers…’
• ‘But formerly, Father Zeus…’
• The Eagle
• Nearest and best, third version
• Tinian
• ‘And to feel the lives…’
• ‘Where we began…’
• …the Vatican…
• Greece, first version
• Greece, ll. 13-21 of the second version
• Greece, third version
• ‘Severed and at a distance now…’
• ‘I have enjoyed…’
• ‘When out of heaven…’
• Spring (‘When new joy quickens…’)
• A happy life
• The walk
• The churchyard
• Not all days…
• Spring (‘How blessed to see again…’)
• Autumn (‘The stories that are leaving earth…’)
• Spring (‘The new day comes…’)
• View (‘To us with images…’)
• ‘In a lovely blue…’
• TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GREEK
• HÖLDERLIN’S SOPHOCLES
• TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
• GLOSSARY
• COPYRIGHT