aid of the foreign principle of differentiation.
This is why, in the same letter, Hölderlin declares that "the athletic [character] of the southern people in the ruins of the ancient spirit made [him] more familiar with the
specific essence of the Greeks".
specific essence of the Greeks".
What is properly Greek is the necessity of applying the athletic principle of form in order to protect one's own self from the excess of oriental fire that constitutes one's nature, whereas with the modems, it is precisely the opposite.
From this we can shed light on what HOlderlin was saying in the first
letter to Bohlendorff:
Hence it is also so dangerous to deduce the rules of art for oneself
exclusively from Greek excellence. I have laboured long over this,
and know by now that, with the exception of what must be the
highest for the Greeks and for us - namely, the living relationship,
and destiny - we must not share anything identical with them.
Yet what is familiar must be learned as well as what is alien.
This is why the Greeks are so indispensable for us. It is only that
we will not follow them in our own, national [spirit] since, as I
said, the free use of what is one's own is the most difficult.30
We cannot simply imitate the Greeks because our art has to respond to a
nature which is diametrically opposed to theirs. We have to appropriate
what is natural to them, sacred pathos and celestial fire, exactly as they
had to appropriate what is natural to us, clarity of presentation and
Junonian sobriety. We see from this that Holderlin is opposed to
classicism, for which Greek
art arte
is the norm for all future
art.
According to
him, we must be modems and not look to antiquity for our models. But Ma
we have, however, something in common with the Greeks, which is
neither nature nor culture, but is higher than either of them, and of which
they are only abstract elements: das lebendige Verhiiltnis und Geschick,
the living relation, and destiny, or the address, which imply that, like
29 29
Ibid, p. 152.
30 30
Ibid, p.150.
them, we have to appropriate what is foreign to us. This is why, despite
the fact that the Greeks cannot and should not be imitated, they remain
indispensable for us. For we have yet to learn the use of what is proper to
us, that is the clarity of presentation and Junonian sobriety that the Greeks
mastered inasmuch as it was, for them, the foreign element of their
culture. cultura. Therefore, the Greeks cannot help us with our art, but since
Greek art gives us an image of our nature, it can help us accomplish what
the Greeks lacked themselves, the achievement of free use of what is
proper. corretta. The Greeks can then help us achieve what HOlderlin, in the
Remarks on Sophocles, will name die vaterliindische Umkehr, the native
reversal.
The originality of the Holderlinian conception of the relation between
antiquity and modernity stems from the fact that, for HOlderlin, the Greek
does not simply differ from the Hesperian as nature (infancy) from
culture (maturity), but that both of them are in themselves divided
between nature and culture, phusis and techne. Holderlin, unlike Schiller,
does not oppose the Greeks to the Modems in an external manner. This is Questo �
why there is no question, for him, of choosing between the Greek and the
Modem side, between past and future. The Greeks are, in a way, an
inverted mirror image of ourselves, they do not represent something of a
bygone past. For they have more opened the possibilities of life than
produced works that ought to be imitated. This is why they remain an
example even though it clearly appears that they cannot nor should be
imitated. We must, indeed, distinguish between the model and the
example, between what has to be imitated in a static sense of
reproduction, and what can be followed in a dynamic and inventive
way.31 We can learn a lesson from the failure of the Greeks, in the sense
that what caused their ruination, the obsession with form, can serve for us
as an example to follow which can lead us to turn our original cultural
tendency towards the unlimited in the opposite direction, and direct it
towards our earthly nature. We should not imitate their art and their
culture, but we can nevertheless follow their example in such a way that
we return to our proper nature and accede to this hyperculture which is
the learning of the free use of what is proper to us.
It Essa
is thus in their
failure itself that the Greeks remain an example for us modems.
31 31
See in this matter Beda Alleman, who, in her article "Holderlin between the
Ancients and the Modems" ('HOIderlin entre les Anciens et les Modernes', Cahier de
l'Heme HOlderlin, 1987, p.315) cites Klopstock's epigram, entitled 'The Resolution
of Doubt': "To imitate is forbidden, and yet it names me! Your sonorous praises,
always ever Greece! If the Genius in your soul is burning! Then imitate the Greek.
The Greek invented."
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Fran<;:oise Dastur
170 170
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Starting from this, we can try to understand the project of the later
Holderlin, the HOlderlin of the translations of Sophocles's tragedies. For,
clearly this enterprise is concerned with trying to understand oneself and
one's age better by taking this detour through foreign lands that Holderlin
had himself actually undertaken in his journey to Bordeaux. For, as is
noted by Wofgang Binder in his article on 'HOlderlin and Sophocles',32
there is a third way between mimetic academicism and rupture with
tradition, and it is the one leading HOlderlin, as he writes to Schiller in
1801, to look to free himself from "servility to the letter of the Greek",
showing that "the great precision" of Greek authors comes from their
"fullness of spirit", in other terms showing that the "aorgic" spirit of the
Greeks, pushed towards the unlimited, had to give itself in its art the
strictest form in order to "be able to seize itself' - which is the problem
of the Greeks itself, as HOlderlin says in his
Remarks on Antigone,
whereas that of the modems is, on the contrary, in the absence of
separation that characterises them, and because of their birth in a world of
convention, where everything is rigidly structured in disciplines and
compartments, to "be able to reach somewhere". It is then a matter of
both making apparent the original oriental nature of the Greeks that they
themselves have made redundant by losing themselves in what Schiller
names "the far-away country of art", and of letting out those Modems
Holderlin names more exactly Hesperians, inhabitants of the land of dusk,
from their native world of convention by opening for them the possibility
of fulfilling their destiny and thus of opening themselves up to the
oriental foreignness of their culture. For the re-channelling of the Greek
to its proper coincides with the accomplishment of Hesperian culture,
which implies, as Wolfgang Binder stresses, that "Holderlin translating
Sophocles as it would have appeared if, in a favourable moment of the
world, the Greeks were permitted self-accomplishment, does nothing
other, when it comes to direction, than what his later poetry, that wants to
be a 'native', and therefore hesperian poetry, will do".33
This is what he explains to his publisher, Wilmans, in a letter of
September 2thO, 1803: "I hope that Greek art, which is foreign for us due
to national conformism and defaults which it has been able to abide, will
thus be presented more vividly
(lebendiger)
than is customary by my
accentuating the Oriental element it had always distanced itself from, and
by correcting its aesthetic faults.,,34 Holderlin proposes to orientalise
32 32
Cahier de I'Herne Holderlin, op.cit., p.265.
33 33
Ibid, p.267.
34 34
S, 6.1, p.434.
Sophocles, in order to correct his artistic fault, which is that of an excess
of art. What thus characterises HOlderlin, in relation to the classical
purism for which the Greek can never be Greek enough, is his will to
stress in the Greek what is non-Greek, what is
oriental.
This term has to
be understood as one of the extremes between which world becoming
unfolds, as can be understood from the lines in
"Wie wenn am Feiertage"
that say of nature that she is "older than the ages", and then, "than the
Gods of Orient and Occident".35 For, as is indicated by several poems
where there is a reference to the Orient, to the forests of Indus ('The
Eagle', Germania', 'The Ister'), to the cities of the Euphrates and the rues
of Palmyra ('Patmos'), to Asia and the east ('At the Source of the
Danube'),
der Orient,
the Orient, the East, means the country of origin of
the dionysiac, which is to say of ecstatic enthusiasm, as Holderlin shows
in in
Dichterberuf,
'The Poet's Vocation':
Des Ganges Ufen horten des Freudengotts
Triumph, als allerobemd vom Hindus her
Der junge Bacchus kam, mit heiligen
Weine vom Schlafe die Volker wekend.
The banks of Ganges heard how the god ofjoy
Was hailed when conquering all from far Indus came
The youthful Bacchus, and with holy
Wine from their drowsiness woke the peoples
36 36
Oriental, then, means: more original, more free, more foreign, non
classical, non-conventional, immediate, dionysiac. We have to note,
however, that with HOlderlin the duality is not, as with Nietzsche, that
between Dioysus and Apollo, the dioynisiac being the oriental principle
of the unlimited, and the apollinian the Greek one of form and limit. In In
The Birth of Tragedy,
Nietzsche opposes these two principles like
musical to plastic art, intoxication to dream, and shows how what
differentiates the Greeks from the oriental barbarians is precisely the
reconciliation of the organic and the orgiastic in tragedy, where the
chorus is the musical and orgiastic element, and the action of the
characters the apollinian dream which gives form and limit in the epic
element to the dionysiac vision of the chorus. Nietzsche thus defines
35 35
Wie wenn am Feiertage, lines21-22 in Holderlin, Poems
& &
Fragments, translated
bl
Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil, 1994).
3 3
Ibid, p.l77.
JI.
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172 172
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10 (2000)
Homer as the artist of dream, completely abandoning himself to the
beauty of appearance and form, but sees in him "the total victory of the
apollinian illusion" against Dionysos, whereas Holderlin sees the victory
of Junonian sobriety over Apollo. For Apollo, the sun-God, is for
HOlderlin not the principle of art, but in the contrary that of celestial fire.
That the Nietzschean dionysiac coincide with apollinian fire can be no
doubt explained by the double nature of Apollo, at once the most Greek
of Greek gods and nevertheless also of foreign origin, asiatic or nordic, at
once the god of art, having the lyre as attribute, but also the God bearing
the bow menacing from afar, dispersing death, and communicating the
future through oracles, with the intermediary of Pythia at Delphi.
Things, however, become more complex once we take into account
that, in a letter to Willmans of April 2nd, 1804, Holderlin specifies:
I believe I have written throughout against excentric enthusiasm
and have thus attained Greek simplicity; I also hope to remain
faithful to this principle - if I may express more boldly what is
forbidden to the poet - against excentric enthusiasm.
3 3
? ?
Is not excentric enthusiasm the opposite of sobriety, the tendency to be
borne towards the divine unlimited, the native and thus oriental element
of the Greek? There seems to be a blatant contradiction: how can
Holderlin at once orientalise Greek tragedy, that is to say draw out the
unlimited element in it, and write against it, against excentric enthusiasm?
According to Beisner, who is here followed by both Beda Alleman and
Wolfgang Binder, the entire problem has its root in the word
gegen,
which, in German, can have the sense of both "against" and "towards" or
"turning to" (which, parenthetically, makes more of an enigma of the
famous Nietzschean affirmation at the end of
Ecce Homo:
"Hat man mich
verstanden? Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten ...).38
If Se
we interpret it in
its second sense, the Hesperian poet follows his cultural tendency which
is celestial fire, and thus attains Greek simplicity, which is nothing other
than the ecstatic natural of the Greeks, their native opening to celestial
fire. fuoco. If we keep the oppositional sense of "against", we then have to
assume that the orientalisation concerns only Antigone, which is the
tragedy where the famous native reversal is produced, which is to say the
tendency to return to the proper, the oriental element, whereas with
Oedipus it is the cultural tendency that is strongest
It Essa
would then be
37 37
S, 6.1, p.439.
38 38
"Have I been understood? Dionysus against the crucified",
173 173
Frangoise Dastur
speaking solely of Oedipus that Holderlin could have written against
excentric enthusiasm, by translating it to achieve his own Hesperian
return to the native. At least this is the interpretation given by Beda
Alleman in her book on
Holderlin and Heidegger.
Without being able to undertake, at this moment, an examination of
these "corrections" that Holderlin proposes to bring to Sophocles's text, it
remains to conclude on this project of "orientalising" translation. For we
are dealing, as Binder notes, with a triple project: that of the transcription
of one language into another, of Greek into German; but also of the
transposition of the original into a state of accomplishment it has missed
by drawing out the oriental under the Greek; finally, an accomplishment
of the Hesperian itself, since the oriental constitutes its cultural tendency.
For HOlderlin this means neither transposing the Greek into German,
which would no longer be Greek, nor carbon-copying the German from
the Greek, which would still be Greek, but unreadable to us. Rather, it
means correcting the excess of art which lead Greece to its downfall by
making its oriental nature appear, which is to say, in the end,
translating
the Greek into Greek
by letting it pass into another language and thus
accomplishing what it could not bring itself to good end. What reveals
itself in such a trans-lation is, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe stresses, that
"Greece,
as such, Greece
itself, se stessa,
does not exist,,:39 it is torn, doubled, not
sutured into a monolithic, stable essence, which should be said of any
people. le persone. What we know of it, the na'ive, Junonian sobriety, Homeric
clarity, the athleticism of form, is a
received opinion
[un
acquis]
destined
to suppress the elemental force of the native Greek tendency to transgress
finitude, this
oriental orientale
principle of celestial fire that prevents Greece from
coinciding with itself, and it is thus, paradoxically, this impropriety that
constitutes precisely this "proper" which is for the Modems to learn, as
always, in foreign lands.
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