Friedrich Hölderlin - Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Classics: Poets in Translation)

FRIEDRICH HLDERLIN
SELECTED POEMS AND FRAGMENTS JOHANN CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH HLDERLIN was born in 1770 in Lauffen, south-west Germany. He was educated first at boarding school, and then at Tbingen seminary, where he met and became friends with G. W. F. Hegel and F. J. Schelling. Schelling.

Despite deciding not to enter the Church, he completed his studies and on graduation in 1793 found employment as a private tutor to the son of Charlotte von Kalb, friend of the poet Friedrich Schiller. It was in his second tutorial post, in the house of a Frankfurt banker named Gontard, that he became romantically involved with his employers wife, Susette. He became passionately attached to the young woman, who returned his affection, praising her as Diotima. Hlderlin began writing poetry at school, and not long after graduating from the seminary he began his only novel, Hyperion. It has been suggested that he explored the profound trauma of his parting with Susette Gontard in 1798 through the latter part of this work, and the pain of this event seems to have contributed to the onset of mental illness. In 1802, he returned home from a tutorial post in Bordeaux in a very disturbed state of mind, and, though he recovered for a short while, this condition soon returned.

After a brief period of institutionalization, he was taken into the care of a carpenter named Zimmer, with whose family Hlderlin lived in Tbingen until his death in 1843. Hlderlins abiding passion was for the ideal of classical Greece. He felt he had a mission to try to regenerate Germany by using his writing to instil in the country some of the Hellenic greatness he admired, and it was a source of considerable sadness to him that he was unable to fulfil this dream. While his talent was not widely recognized during his lifetime he has come to be regarded as one of the finest writers in the German language, producing a body of lyric poetry (primarily in classical forms, though later unpublished work was of a freer nature) and the epistolary novel Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (17979), which was set against the backdrop of the unsuccessful Greek revolt against the Turks in 1770. MICHAEL HAMBURGER has written, translated and edited across the fields of German, French, Italian and Romanian literature. Educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, he lectured at University College, London, and the University of Reading, and has held visiting posts at universities and colleges in America and Great Britain.

He has received many awards and honours, including two honorary doctorates, several prizes for his translations and, in 1992, an OBE. He has produced poetry throughout his writing life, his Collected Poems 19411994 being published in 1995 and his critical work on the subject, The Truth of Poetry, in 1970, by Penguin. He has also written his memoirs, String of Beginnings (1991), and published many critical works and translations. JEREMY ADLER is Professor of German at Kings College London. He studied German at Queen Mary College (University of London) and was a Lecturer in German at Westfield College before being awarded a Personal Chair. He is a sometime fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin, and a sometime scholar of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbttel.

He has written books on Goethes novel The Elective Affinities (1987), produced (with Ulrich Ernst) a catalogue of visual poetry, Text als Figur (third edition, 1990), and edited the collected works of August Stramm (1990). With Richard Fardon he edited Franz Baermann Steiners Selected Writings (1999) and recently edited Steiners collected poems (2000). His Franz Kafka, in the Penguin Illustrated Lives series, was published in 2002. He has published several volumes of poetry, including The Wedding and Other Marriages (1980), At the Edge of the World (1995) and The Electric Alphabet (third edition, 2001). Jeremy Adler is married and lives in London.

Translated by MICHAEL HAMBURGER Edited by JEREMY ADLER With a new preface and an introduction by MICHAEL HAMBURGER PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England www.penguin.com This edition first published by Anvil Press Poetry 1994 Published in Penguin Classics with a new preface and introduction 1998 Translation copyright Michael Hamburger, 1966, 1980, 1994 Preface copyright Michael Hamburger, 1998 This selection copyright Jeremy Adler, 1994 Foreword copyright Jeremy Adler, 1998 All rights reserved The moral right of the editor and translator has been asserted Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser ISBN: 978-0-14-196218-4 Michael Hamburgers Hlderlin translations have established themselves as a classic.

No German poet has been better, more devotedly served by an English poet and translator. Hlderlins metres and free rhythms, achieved through an intense dialogue with classical verse, find a true voice in these versions. Without exactly following Hlderlins own translation theory, Michael Hamburgers verse limpidly enables an alien style to go native. He thereby makes what is strange even in the German tongue amazingly accessible. In three successive editions, published in 1966, 1980 and 1994, he repeatedly enlarged the number of poems available in English, until, discounting the early rhymes and blank verse, he had translated practically the whole mature output. Having thus expanded his work, it proved impossible for him to shorten it for a Penguin Classic, and so, at his suggestion, and the publishers invitation, I took on the job.

We have worked as follows. Responding to my initial draft selection from the Anvil Press edition of 1994, which kept to the projected word limit, Michael Hamburger named all those excluded poems that he considered essential, as well as several others, where he left me a free hand. This formed the basis for my final choice, achieved by further cutting and adding. Thanks to the understanding of Paul Keegan at Penguin, this has led to a book much more substantial than was originally planned. The selection has been guided by a few simple principles: to include everything in the original bilingual Penguin Hlderlin, which has long been out of print; to represent all the great poems which any reader has the right to expect in an edition such as this; and to convey the range of the whole corpus as fully as possible. That has meant printing a substantial number of the odes; all the hexameters and elegies; practically all the hymns; and a major body of fragments and late poems.