About these translations...

 

In 1978 these translations appeared as a very small-press publication entitled The Fire of the Gods Drives Us to Set Forth by Day and by Night, published by Hoddypoll Press, San Francisco, California.  These web pages present a somewhat revised and expanded version of the original work.

Since I view Friedrich Hölderlin as the last poet in European literature to have thematicized ecstatic religious experience, or the loss thereof,  convincingly, I have selected mostly those poems which seemed to me most representative of his visionary force at its greatest intensity, and which deal explicitly with man's relationship to the gods.  Thus most of his best-known poems appear here.  A somewhat more comprehensive selection of translations can be found in Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems, translated by David Constantine, Bloodaxe Books, 1990 and 1996. Very useful also is Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated and introduced Richard Sieburth, Princeton University Press, 1984, which includes several fragments and drafts, as well the major hymns.

Given the circumstance that Hölderlin's poems have remained all but unknown in the United States,  it seemed useful to provide translations that indicate what the poems mean, rather than to attempt a display of their rhyme, verse form, metric schemes and highly idiosyncratic syntax.  Thus these translations were conceived in reaction to the only translations of Hölderlin originally available to me in 1978, namely Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, by Michael Hamburger,  Routledge and Kegan Paul, London: 1966, which was the basis for a subsequent Penguin paperback, and a further Penguin edition in 1998.  I felt then as now that Mr. Hamburger's valiant attempt to reproduce something of the original structure of the poems could only lead to a diminished understanding of their meaning.

I suppose also that "literalness" — by which I mean economy, simplicity of expression, and common vocabulary — carries and sustains aesthetic value for me, whereas antiquated German verse forms, often themselves imitative of ancient Greek ones, decidedly do not.  So I have not restrained myself from occasionally changing apostrophic sentences into declarative ones, or from translating certain words and phrases from the standard vocabulary of Romantic sentimentalism, such as "soul" or "heavenly," as "mind" or "of the gods,"  where it seemed contextually permissible.

The result is to some extent a modernization of the original text,  and I hope that anyone who comes upon Hölderlin here for the first time will remember that he was a poet of considerable formal complexity, often attempting to Germanize Hellenic forms, and bound as well of course to the language and vocabulary of his times.  That he could also break out of these forms and other contemporary poetic practices into amazingly modern modes of expression may not, I am afraid, be as well understood from my translations.

The original texts are taken from the critical edition of Friedrich Beissner, Friederich Hölderlin: Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart: 1943-1961.  I owe special thanks to my longtime friend Bernd W. Seiler, Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Bielefeld, for his exceptional assistance and encouragement.

I dedicate these pages to the memory of Kenneth Rexroth, a poet of San Francisco, whose translations of Chinese poems into common and simple English first showed me that older texts of poetry from quite foreign cultures and languages could be successfully realized in this way.

"In the fine spring rain it is impossible to see very far,
And the mist rising from the water has hidden the hills."



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