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4 Suspending The Translation of Tragedy in Hölderlin’s Essays The conception of the idea of poetry as that of prose determines the whole Romantic philosophy of art. . . . Above all, however, this fundamental philosophical conception founds a peculiar relation within a wider Romantic circle, whose common element, like that of the narrower school, remains undiscoverable so long as it is sought only in poetry and not in philosophy as well. From this point of view, one spirit moves into the wider circle, not to say into its center—a spirit who cannot be comprehended merely in his quality as a “poet” in the modern sense of the word (however high this must be reckoned), and whose relationship to the Romantic school, within the history of ideas, remains unclear if his particular philosophical identity with this school is not considered. This spirit is Hölderlin, and the thesis that establishes his philosophical relation to the Romantics is the principle of the sobriety of art. —Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism,” 1919 Heidegger’s encounter with Hölderlin’s poetry has exposed the particular nature of the poetic word as one that both offers a relation to what is, but also undermines that relation in doing so. This, for Hölderlin, would seem to constitute the tragic nature of poetry, in that its writing reveals its word to be endlessly evasive and resistant to that which it is attempting to reach. His response to this problem is to pursue this textual finitude as the basis for a renewed understanding of translation. This does not mean that Hölderlin simply turns this impossibility into a possibility, but instead comes to an understanding of what the finitude of language implies about the nature of its relation. In turning to Hölderlin now I hope to be able 123 to show not only the depth of his thinking on this issue of the relation of language, but also to indicate how the complexity of his writings grants to his thinking a liminal position that means, as Walter Benjamin pointed out in the epigraph, that his work is both within and without the sphere of poetry. It is this singularity that motivates Heidegger’s readings and that enables him to read Hölderlin as both a figure of the tradition and as the most futural figure of our modernity who exposes us to the necessity and possibility of a writing to come. This proves to be a most important point, as it reveals a significant aspect of the relation of language to temporality: the nature of the moment of the word. To begin this inquiry we cannot continue to think of Hölderlin simply as a poet; instead we must treat with all seriousness the fact that he was essentially a writer. The oeuvre to which the name “Hölderlin” is attached consists of many different types of text: poems, plays, letters, translations, essays, a novel, and other assorted fragments and notes. Moreover when we look closer and find that his poems consist of a wide range of odes, hymns, and elegies, and that his novel is epistolary in form, it becomes apparent that writing was for Hölderlin primarily an address; like an ode or a letter it was written toward someone, something, or somewhere . Whether directed toward the past or the future, nature or the gods, friends, colleagues, or lovers, the style that seems to hold over all of Hölderlin’s writing is that of the apostrophe; the projected address or call whose conditions are that of radical instability and indeterminacy. For inherent in the apostrophe is the possibility of failure, as the call is issued under conditions of extreme loss: that it will either go unheard or unanswered , and Hölderlin’s work persists in the inescapable nature of this uncertainty. All but two of the letters that make up the novel Hyperion are written by Hyperion himself, and the poems, plays, essays, and letters also seem to be written both “toward” and “against” (gegen) this absent and perhaps unreachable other. This raises the next important aspect of Hölderlin’s writing, as its apostrophic nature is partly responsible for its fragmented quality. In the years before his collapse Hölderlin seemed to be only infrequently capable of bringing his projects to conclusion as he seldom had the response from his peers or his works that would enable him to bring his thoughts to completion . Instead, his...

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