BOOKS
HOELDERLIN IN ENGLISH
HOELDERLIN. His Poems tronsloted by Michoel Homburger, with a
Criticol Study. (Bilinguol Edition.) Pontheon Books. $3.50.
The German Hoelderlin cult dates back several decades;
since then it has crossed the Belgian border, the English Channel and
finally, a full-blown fad, the Atlantic. But there is an encouraging side
to fads as there is to translations. A great writer who survives transla–
tion acquires at once a new dimension; if the translation is mediocre or,
better yet, wretched, his survival amounts to a veritable apotheosis. I
would say that such English versions of Hoelderlin as have previously
come under my notice are either stiff or bungling; the present proper
and somewhat nerveless; and that, having survived each successive or–
deal, his stature is closer to a god's than ever.
There is no nineteenth-century poet-not in Germany, certainly,
and hardly in the rest of Europe--who approaches the sustained excel–
lence of this one; and excellence here means pathos in utter control,
sublimity of vision no less than diction. The epithet means, for once,
the incredible thing it claims: a total absence of misses. Some pieces
stand out above the rest but I doubt the presence, in the whole Hoe!–
derlin corpus, of a single spoilt poem or of a half-baked one; nor has
rummaging in the archives brought any failure to light. The discards,
the early versions, even, with few exceptions, the juvenilia-all shine
with the same luster, and their ring is that of absolute poetic authority.
Stefan George, in large tracts of his verse, shares that ring, that luster;
yet there are times when his voice goes hollow. The work of Mallarmc,
so spotless and, at the same time, so profound in its beauty, may be
considered another rival; but the Frenchman is-though it hurts to say
this of any great master in comparing him with another-much the
smaller writer in range and resource.
Hoelderlin's style, once the poet had fought free of Schiller, was
conceived entirely in terms of what Dionysius of Halicarnassus calls
"severe joining"-Doric beauty, not Attic. The historical filiations of
that style are obvious. In its ardor and unremitting energy, as well
as
in its deep resonances, it shows a close kinship with the Homeric and
