Abstract
We begin our exploration of Hölderlin’s poetry by looking at his early epistolary novel Hyperion, his attempt to write a tragic play, The Death of Empedokles, and his early epigrams (such as Sophokles). These works are complemented by reflections in essays such as On Religion and Becoming in Perishing. Nevertheless, the key to the birth of Hölderlin’s poetic voice lies in his translations, already at this time, of Greek tragedy, something that is further enhanced by his rendition of several Pindaric songs. To investigate this historical experience of poetry, the chapter turns to Hölderlin’s translation of (1) Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, (2) various odes by Pindar, and (3) the first 24 lines of Euripides’ Bacchae. Now the power with which Hölderlin confronts competing Dionyisac and monetised/visualised chronotopes, as articulated in Part I, begins to become clear.
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Notes
- 1.
What is significant here is not that Hölderlin composed an ode “Kepler” in 1789—Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 1, Gedichte, Schmidt 72–73, 540—, but instead that, as Dichterberuf from over a decade later in 1800/01 makes clear, the poet’s retrieval of Dionysian Greece distanced him from the dangers of early modern science and visual technologies such as the telescope, and their questionable relation to the individual egoism that accompanies money.
- 2.
Hegel, Georg, Werke, hg. E. Moldenhauer and K. Markus, vol. 1, Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986) pp. 230–233.
- 3.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 1, Gedichte, Schmidt 91.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid. pp. 565–566.
- 8.
Ibid. p. 552.
- 9.
Ibid. p. 177.
- 10.
Ibid. p. 568.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
See also W. Burkert, Homo Necans: Interpretationen altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen (Berlin: de Gruyter, Berlin, 1997) p. 316; and G. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Princeton: Prinecton University Press, 1961) pp. 263–264.
- 13.
Hegel, Georg, Werke, Moldenhauer and Markus, vol. 1, Frühe Schriften pp. 234–336.
- 14.
Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus significantly mentions the Eleusinian mysteries. See verses 1050–1053. Sophocles, Oidipous at Kolonus, in Sophoclis Fabulae, Lloyd-Jones 401. Aeschylus apparently revealed secrets of the Eleusinian mysteries in his lost tragedy Oedipus (T93, Radt). As Seaford points out: “Another lost play that may have contained the absorption of Theban cyclicality into an Attic aetiological chronotope was his Eleusinians, which dramatised the events leading up to the burial (denied them by Thebes) of the famous seven heroes, at Eleusis.” Seaford, Cosmology and the Polis 335, ftnt 61.
- 15.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 1, Gedichte, Schmidt 675.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Sophocles, Oidipous at Kolonus, in Sophoclis Fabulae, Lloyd-Jones 361.
- 20.
Ibid. p. 383.
- 21.
Ibid. p. 417.
- 22.
Ibid. p. 424.
- 23.
Ibid. p. 425.
- 24.
Ibid. p. 358.
- 25.
Ibid. p. 384. See also Seaford, Cosmology and the Polis p. 334.
- 26.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 199.
- 27.
Ibid. p. 90.
- 28.
Ibid. p. 50.
- 29.
Ibid. p. 155.
- 30.
Ibid. p. 209.
- 31.
Ibid. p. 71.
- 32.
Ibid. p. 168.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid. p. 16.
- 38.
Ibid. p. 565.
- 39.
Seaford, Dionysus 138. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 61.
- 40.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 61.
- 41.
Ibid. p. 50.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Ibid. p. 384.
- 44.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 1, Gedichte, Schmidt 362.
- 45.
Ibid. p. 392.
- 46.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 1197.
- 47.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 1, Gedichte, Schmidt 221.
- 48.
Pindar, Thirteenth Olympian Ode, Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, Maehler and Snell, Pars I, Epinicia 44.
- 49.
Pindar, Fragment 75, in Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, Maehler, Pars II, Framenta Indices 84. See also Pindar, Fragment 153, in Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, Maehler, Pars II, Framenta Indices 128.
- 50.
Pindar, Fragment 75, in Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, Maehler, Pars II, Framenta Indices 84.
- 51.
Pindar, Fragment 85, in Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, Maehler, Pars II, Framenta Indices 86.
- 52.
Pindar, Fragment 70b, in Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, ed. H. Maehler, Pars II, Framenta Indices pp. 75–77.
- 53.
Pindar, Fragment 131a, in Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, ed. H. Maehler, Pars II, Framenta Indices 119. See also Seaford, Dionysus p. 119.
- 54.
Pindar, Fragment 133, in Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, ed. H. Maehler, Pars II, Framenta Indices pp 119–120.
- 55.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 761.
- 56.
Ibid. p. 730.
- 57.
Apollodorus, Library, 3.4.3, in Apollodorus, The Library, Frazer, vol. 1, Books I-III 320.
- 58.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 730.
- 59.
Ibid. 696. Pindar, Second Olympian Ode, Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, Maehler and Snell, Pars I, Epinicia 8.
- 60.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 696.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Pindar, Second Olympian Ode, Pindar carmina cum fragmentis, Maehler and Snell, Pars I, Epinicia 8.
- 63.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 696.
- 64.
Here we might also note the “lament”, pénthos (V 1225), Jammer (V 1244), to which the messenger refers at the beginning of the fifth act in Oedipus the Tyant. ocles, Oidipous Tyrannos, in Sophoclis Fabulae, Lloyd-Jones 168; and Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 838, respectively.
- 65.
Although not as important as Bacchae, it should be noted that Hölderlin translated a fragment from Euripides’ Hecuba, which engages the problem of redeeming the uncared for dead, in 1796. B. Böschenstein, “Übersetzungen”, in Hölderlin-Handbuch. Leben, Werk, Wirkung, hg. J. Kreuzer (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler 2011), p. 273.
- 66.
Ibid. p. 690.
- 67.
Ibid.
- 68.
Aelii Aristides quae supersunt omnia, Bd. 1, p. 72.
- 69.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 690.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Ibid.
- 72.
Ibid.
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
Euripides, Bacchae, in Euripides fabulae, ed. J. Diggle, vol. 3, Helena, Phoenissae, Orestes, Bacchae, Iphigenia, Avlidensis, Rhesus p. 291.
- 75.
Böschenstein, “Übersetzungen”, in Hölderlin-Handbuch. Leben, Werk, Wirkung, hg. J. Kreuzer pp. 274–275.
- 76.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 1, Gedichte, Schmidt 360.
- 77.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 690.
- 78.
Cited in Seaford, Dionysus 28.
- 79.
Euripides, Bacchae, in Euripides fabulae, ed. J. Diggle, vol. 3, Helena, Phoenissae, Orestes, Bacchae, Iphigenia, Avlidensis, Rhesus p. 309.
- 80.
Ibid. 300.
- 81.
Ibid. p. 293, 296.
- 82.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 2, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, Schmidt 690.
- 83.
Ibid. Emphasis added.
- 84.
Euripides, Bacchae, in Euripides fabulae, ed. J. Diggle, vol. 3, Helena, Phoenissae, Orestes, Bacchae, Iphigenia, Avlidensis, Rhesus p. 292.
- 85.
Hölderlin, Friedrich, Sämtlich Werke, Frankfurter Ausgabe, hg. D. Sattler, vol. 17, Frühe Aufsätze und Übersetzungen (Basel, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1991) pp. 628–29.
- 86.
For the richest visual source of mystery-cult, see the frescos of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. The Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii: Ancient ritual, Modern muse, ed. Gazda et al.
- 87.
Euripides, Bacchae, in Euripides fabulae, ed. J. Diggle, vol. 3, Helena, Phoenissae, Orestes, Bacchae, Iphigenia, Avlidensis, Rhesus p. 293.
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Murrey, L. (2015). The Dionysiac Chronotope (Pre-1799–1799). In: Hölderlin’s Dionysiac Poetry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10205-4_7
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