Entry into the Realm of the Poem as Word
§11. The beginning and conclusion of the poem
Der Nordost wehet,
Der liebste unter den Winden
Mir, weil er feurigen Geist
Und gute Fahrt verheißet den Schiffern.
The northeasterly blows,
Most beloved of the winds
To me, for it promises fiery spirit
And good voyage to mariners.
“The northeasterly”—that wind is named which, in the broad regions of the Swabian homeland, sweeps and clears the sky with its biting coolness, clearing a space for the fire from the heavens, “the sun,” a space in which its illumination and glow can unfold. This wind clears the air. In such an air, that which is cold, bold, and unerring opens up; this air directs us into the open distances, yet in such a way that it makes our vision steadfast and capable of seeing all things loom forth and repose, as their outline emerges from all haze and mist. This wind brings an assured transparency into the world, grants a pervasive constancy to the weather, and anchors our attunement. A later draft that may even be related to “Remembrance” also names the “northeasterly”; in this draft it is said of the migratory birds, of the “starlings” (IV, 257):
Und ihnen machet waker
Scharfwehend die Augen der Nordost . . .
And their eyes are made steadfast
By the northeasterly’s bite . . .
“Remembrance” begins with the word “The northeasterly blows.” This sounds like the ascertainment of a fact, although we are not told directly when it blows. Nor is it immediately clear where it blows. “The northeasterly blows”—and not the southwesterly. Is the northeasterly blowing now, as the poet begins to compose this poem? Is the first line meant, perhaps, to ascertain the direction of the wind at the time when Hölderlin is beginning to write down this poem? Perhaps everything is the other way round instead. The poem names the northeasterly, not because there is a northeasterly air at the moment of the poetic composition of this poem. Rather, it is because this entire poem must be said from out of that which it poetizes that there lies already over everything the cool clarity and pure decidedness of a simple knowing. This is why it must begin with the naming of the northeasterly.
“The northeasterly blows.” This is neither the factual ascertaining of wind conditions, nor the description of a contingent weather situation, nor a “poetological” “framing” for subsequent “thoughts.” “The northeasterly blows”: with this first line there begins already the mystery. Indeed, this line contains the mystery of the entire poem. This first line resonates in every line that follows. As we transition from each strophe to the next, we must hear this line. This first line attains its full resonance only in the last line.
It might now appear as though we were looking for mysteries even in those places where “rational human beings” find none. And yet we must assert the following: “The northeasterly blows”—taken by itself, this word indeed leaves indeterminate the point in time and the location of that of which it speaks. Nevertheless, it names the time-space from out of which comes the attuning favor of the poetizing that is now needed and is yet to come, in order that this poetizing may fulfill its essence and that poets may be. “The northeasterly blows”—that is to say: the time-space of poetizing, of the poetizing that is also poetized in this poem, stands open. We avoid saying that the first line is an “image” for this “thought.” We are indicating only that, if the first line says what we have named, then between the beginning of the poem and its conclusion there lies an essential relation that at once embraces this poem in its totality: “The northeasterly blows”—“Yet what remains, the poets found.”
What stands between the first and last lines of this poem is drawn out discursively and in writing in the sequential ordering of its strophes. The sequence of lines is an accumulation of words, and yet we name what is said and what speaks as a whole “the word” of the poem—more precisely, the poem as this word. Because our pointer concerning Hölderlin’s poem moves within this realm of the word, already with the first line we must give thought to something essential concerning the word and language.
§12. Concerning language: the poetizing word and sounding words
“Language” is the faculty of the word. What gets formed in the process of speaking we call the “words” of a language. Words [Wörter], however, are something other than the word [Worte].[3] The statements of the thinker Heraclitus, for example, indeed consist of words, yet we do not say “the words” of Heraclitus, but the word [die Worte]. There are words only where there is language. Yet language itself exists only where there is the word.[4] The word is the origin of language. Yet what does this mean: “the word” as the origin of language? In the unfolding of this lecture course, we are to learn to give thought to some aspects of this question.
Language enunciates the word [Worte], and what is enunciated can disintegrate into “words.” As a result of long habituation, we are all too inclined to determine the essence of language and of the word on the basis of such words, and thus also to interpret on this basis the relationship of the poem as a linguistic construction to what is poetized. We thus arrive at the view that that which is said, which is something poetized, is itself reproduced in the sequence of sounds and words of the poem.
And yet words [Wörter] are never reproductions or copies of that which they signify. Onomatopoeic words [Worte] like “cuckoo,” “buzz,” “whizz,” or “hiss” appear to contradict this. Yet even the articulated sound “cuckoo” is a word only whenever we mean and say “the” cuckoo: what this “the” means, and what it conveys and imparts to the articulated sound “cuckoo”—none of this lies within the mere sounding of the reproduced call of the bird, no matter how often, or how loud, or how imitative this sound resonates. Nonetheless, sound and sounding do belong in a certain manner to the “word” [“Wort”]; indeed, the way in which the sounds, the vowels, and the consonants are conjoined also in one respect contributes to the form of what we tend to call “the beauty” of a “language.”
Why do we mention such “things”? To indicate that the essence of the word [des Wortes] (of words [der Wörter] and of the word [der Worte]) is indeed familiar to us in certain aspects, yet in truth is altogether hidden from us. For this very reason we find it difficult to grasp the unity of the sounding words and the poetizing word, as we simultaneously let ourselves enter the sequence of lines and strophes and nevertheless maintain a relation to that which is poetized in the poetizing word.
When we say “and nevertheless,” then this seems to confirm an opposition between the word-form of the poetizing and that which is poetized. We may be of the opinion that that which is poetized is a separate “spiritual meaning,” and the verbal sound [Wortlaut] of the poem its contingent “sensuous image” [“Sinnbild”]. Ever since Plato, the entire Western view of art has stood under the force of this distinction between “suprasensuous” and “sensuous.” The “sensuous image”—as symbol—has the task of bringing the two together and conjoining them. “Language” itself becomes forced into this schema too, such that the articulated sound of the word is conceived as the “body,” and the meaning of the word, on the other hand, as the “soul” or “spirit” of language.
§13. Language in our historical moment
Our relation to language, to words and to the word, has for a long time been confused, indeterminate, and without grounding. Language is like some present at hand thing; why should it, too, not be exploited as an instrument of “organization” and as something human beings arm themselves with, and be secured as a means of power and as a form of domination? No one today can exclude himself from this process, which is “metaphysical” in nature and remains withdrawn from the predilection, negligence, and zeal of the individual.
For this process of the “instrumentalization” of language does not have to proceed in a purely negative manner. Within this same sphere, it can call forth a countermovement that strives for a new “instrumentation” of language in order to achieve for it the highest degree of “accuracy.” This relationship to language, which is, for example, embodied by Ernst Jünger, still belongs entirely to that metaphysical space determined by Nietzsche’s interpretation of being as will to power. Just like “film,” language is a way of arming oneself, a way through which the “Gestalt of the Worker” comes to dominate the “world.” The word as a weapon of the highest order and of the deepest concern is distinguished only in degree, and not according to its essence, from the word in its Americanized form, which, in piecing together the first letters of its syllables and component parts, turns both the Auswärtige Amt [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] and the Aufklärungs-Abteilung [Instructional Division] into the “AA.”
This technical instrumentation of the essence of language itself plays a role in shaping our historical moment. In a metaphysical, historical moment that is determined in this way we must indeed be instructed about our relationship—or distorted relationship—to language and to the word. It may then become clear to us that it is only through patient effort that we arrive at the path whereby we may apprehend Hölderlin’s poem as the poetizing of what has been poetized.
§14. Preliminary consideration of the unity of the poem
To our immediate, indeterminate hearing, the first line, “The northeasterly blows,” names an isolated occurrence within “nature” that can be sensuously experienced. To our fleeting reflection, the last line, “Yet what remains, the poets found,” names an essential law in the supreme realm of “spirit”––if, for the purpose of a preliminary understanding, we are permitted to speak of “nature” and “spirit” in such general terms. Yet at the same time it became evident that the first line is not a description of nature, but rather names the favor of the poetic and its time-space. Correspondingly, the concluding line perhaps does not simply give us a didactic “sententia” about the essence of poetry, but, in speaking of what remains, in fact names “nature,” without thereby depicting something that can be experienced.
When in advance we retrace the poem from its beginning and from its end in the direction of its as yet concealed unity, our inner ear is already becoming more concentrated. Even that which at first only appears as a tranquil description, “The northeasterly blows,” will in the future, from time to time, become fuller and have more to say.
“The northeasterly blows.” This is an unconditioned event, which here stands immediately in the word, and consequently is. “The northeasterly blows.” Its blowing is arrival, and is a going that points and carries off into something futural. Everything is replete with coming. The title “Remembrance” becomes less and less fitting:
Der Nordost wehet,
Der liebste unter den Winden
Mir . . .
The northeasterly blows,
Most beloved of the winds
To me . . .
The northeasterly is singled out before all other winds. “Most beloved . . . to me . . .” Here Hölderlin speaks of himself. Certainly. But is it the I who is speaking and who judges the different winds and weather conditions in relation to the personal state he finds himself in? Is Hölderlin here expressing his “sensitivity to nature” through a depiction of nature in which the thought of the wind also plays a role? “Most beloved . . . to me . . .” With this “me” Hölderlin indeed means himself. Yet the I who speaks of itself there is not Hölderlin the person. The basis of this predilection for the northeasterly is not to be found in the personal leanings, wants, or biographical relationships of the human being Hölderlin; for the grounds for this predilection for the northeasterly, which immediately follow in the next lines, can in no way be traced back to the personal taste and “mode of lived experience” of Hölderlin the human being, and not at all to the mental or physical state that an individual human being finds himself in. Rather, the northeasterly is the most beloved of the winds “to me”:
. . . weil er feurigen Geist
Und gute Fahrt verheißet den Schiffern.
. . . for it promises fiery spirit
And good voyage to mariners.
The northeasterly is named, and is singled out as the most beloved, in view of its relation to “mariners.” Who are the “mariners”? Men, in any case, for whom the northeasterly is a promise, which is to say: advance notice, assurance, bestowal. All this in a twofold way: The northeasterly points the direction to where the spirit is fiery, and at the same time it carries and brings those who set forth into a “good voyage.”
We have now taken our first step over the threshold in our attempt to interpret Hölderlin’s poetry. The threshold is the place of transition in stepping from one domain into another. The domain familiar to us is the poem as a thing present at hand, as it were: the written, read, spoken phonetic construction. This is what lies before us; it is we who have the poem at our disposal and can make of it what we will. There has lately been talk of the “handling of poetry.”
The other domain is the poem as the word, which we do not have before us, but that instead, proceeding from itself, is to take us up into the space of its truth. The word is never something we can “handle”; instead, the word will either “affect” us or pass right over us.
Both these domains, that of the linguistic construction present at hand and that of the word, would however never be captured if we were to conceive the former as the exterior and the latter as the interior. For this distinction between “outside” and “inside” still falls within that first domain, insofar as one attributes to the linguistic construction a meaning that it bears “within” itself as its “content.”
Yet we are seeking something different here, something that will in general presumably entail a transformation in the relation of the word to ourselves. It is questionable whether such a transformation may be ventured outside the domain of Hölderlin’s word. For this word, as the word of his hymnal poetizing, is singular, in a sense that is itself singular in turn. This word is like a solitary mountain range that, rising from an exigency that has emerged, first opens another space of truth around itself. Nothing in this poetizing is embellishment, and there are no blank spaces. This word is not a statement “about” something to someone who might assume power over the word.
We ourselves can no longer gauge the fact that our relation to the “word” is completely disrupted, and has been for decades, through the rampant production of idle scribble, through groundless idle talk and through idle and indiscriminate reading. For this reason we should also not expect to regain this relation to the word at a stroke, for instance by bringing into play our so-called “direct lived experience” when encountering a poem by Hölderlin. Heartfelt sensitivity and artistic intuition are fine things. Yet the question remains whether such recourse to “lived experience,” even when it is genuine, does not in fact still remain within our already disrupted relation to the word, and thus is capable neither of recognizing, nor of overcoming this disruption.
To now reach even just the perimeter of the sphere of Hölderlin’s word, a different and higher-level exertion is required, one that must pass through the clarity of a particular knowing. Such exertion is, among other things, reflected in the laboriousness of our interpretation. You may very well run up against this laboriousness. Well and good. You may very well consider this all an intellectual violation of the “artistic,” which after all, as one hears, remains reserved in the first place for the domain of “feeling” and of “taste.” Well and good. Yet you may also one day want to check whether a light has not suddenly been turned on for you as a result of this conceptual laboriousness.
The interpretation depends upon this alone. The interpretation is not being given for its own sake. The goal of genuine interpretation consists solely in making itself superfluous. The more complete an interpretation is in its construction, the more decisively it dismantles and thus effaces itself by its end, so that only the word of the poet speaks. If, by contrast, we take only what we understand and what we “feel” as the measure of what the poet may have said and may have been allowed to say, then we lack the first condition for all hearing, and that is: the quiet passion for the unsaid:
Der Nordost wehet,
Der liebste unter den Winden
Mir, weil er feurigen Geist
Und gute Fahrt verheißet den Schiffern.
The northeasterly blows,
Most beloved of the winds
To me, for it promises fiery spirit
And good voyage to mariners.
The time-space of bold clarity has opened itself up, and the poet himself knows himself within this open realm. This open realm is a being directed into the remoteness and assurance of that which is coming. The northeasterly promises “fiery spirit.”
§15. Poetizing and the explanation of nature in modernity. On the theory of “image” and “metaphor”
The “fiery” initially refers to the particular “fire” that we call the sun. The second poem we shall draw attention to, “The Ister,” begins thus (IV, 220):
Jezt komme, Feuer!
Begierig sind wir
Zu schauen den Tag, . . .
Now come, fire!
Eager are we
To see the day, . . .
Yet the same thing applies to the fire and the sun as to the wind, the northeasterly, which, proceeding from our accustomed habit, we “at first” take to be things of nature. From this perspective, we are tempted to say that sun and wind manifest themselves as “natural phenomena” and then “in addition” signify something further; they are “symbols” for us. When we talk and think in such a way, we take it for granted that we know “the” sun and “the” wind “in themselves.” We believe that earlier peoples and civilizations too “at first” came to know “the sun” and “the moon” and “the wind,” and that they then proceeded to use these supposedly “natural phenomena” as “images” for whatever worlds lay beyond. As if it were not the reverse, that “the” sun and “the” wind already first come to appearance from out of a “world” in each case, and are what they are only insofar as they are poetized from out of this “world,” although it may remain an open question just who is poetizing here. (See “The Wanderer,” line 80: “Intimative mariners”; line 106, and the entire elegy, especially the conclusion.)
It is not the case that the “astronomical” sun and “meteorological” wind, which we of today believe ourselves to know in a more advanced and better way, are poetized any less than the “fire” in the poem, just less skillfully and less poetically. The poetizing of astronomy and meteorology, the “poetizing” explanation of nature in modernity is of the type that calculates and plans. Planning is also a poetizing of sorts, namely, the counteressence and privative essence of poetry. Even if the humankind of today and that which comes after it is technologized and armed to the extreme, anticipating a global situation in which the very distinction between “war and peace” belongs to those things that have been abandoned––even then the human being still lives “poetically” upon this Earth . . . but within the counteressence of poetizing, and for this reason without need, and thus also without access to poetizing’s essence.
What Hölderlin thinks when he speaks of “fiery spirit” and “good voyage” must become clear in due course. For now, we should note only that the master key to all “poetics,” the theory of “image” in poetry, of “metaphor,” neither unlocks a single door in the realm of Hölderlin’s hymnal poetizing, nor brings us anywhere into the open. Here it suffices to ponder only this one point: even the “things themselves” are already each time poetized before they become so-called “symbols.” The only question that remains is in which essential realm and from out of which truth of poetizing.
§16. “The northeasterly blows.” The favor of belonging to the vocation of poet
The northeasterly bestows favor and grace upon the mariners, those men of whom the fourth and fifth strophes of the poem tell. We must keep solely to what is said in these strophes, in order to know who the mariners are who are named here. The fourth and fifth strophes are already drawn into a clear connection with the beginning of the entire poem. Initially, we can only assert: “The mariners” are “the poets.” The northeasterly is the “most beloved” “to me,” Hölderlin says, because here he speaks as poet from out of his belonging to the mariners. The northeasterly is the most beloved to the poet, but not because it provides a personal sense of well-being or pleasure, or promises comfort. This “most beloved” belongs to the loving predilection of a genuine love.
To this genuine love belongs the shared willing of those beings that determine and thoroughly attune us in our essence, a willing that that which determines us be as it is. The word and concept “willing” and “will” fluctuate in their manifold meanings. In the willing that wills that the beings that determine us be, will does not mean a mere self-initiated, forcible bringing about of some wish that is itself reckoned upon. (On essential wishing, cf.: “The Walk in the Country,” lines 19–20.[5] On essential willing: Fragment 25 (IV, 257): “Yet there comes what I want.”)
Shared willing is rather a letting oneself go and releasing oneself into being. Shared willing is a having to, but a having to whose event transpires [sich ereignet] outside of mechanical compulsion, one that stems from an open belonging to beyng and returns back into it. This belonging, however, is the innermost essence of freedom.
The poet’s loving predilection for the northeasterly wills only this: that for the poet, a belonging to what is essential, in this case, the “vocation of poet,” remains. The northeasterly blows and swirls and carries the poet in the essential direction of that which he must fulfill. In the first line of the poem there resounds the good cheer that the poet is permitted to stand, and wills to stand, within the essence of that which first grants him his essence as his own.
§17. The “greeting.” On the dangerous addiction to psychological-biographical explanation
Yet we can scarcely believe our ears.
Der Nordost wehet,
Der liebste unter den Winden
Mir, weil er feurigen Geist
Und gute Fahrt verheißet den Schiffern.
Geh aber nun und grüße
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The northeasterly blows,
Most beloved of the winds
To me, for it promises fiery spirit
And good voyage to mariners.
But go now and greet
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Does not everything here turn into its opposite?
“But go now and greet . . .” The northeasterly is released. The poet remains behind. He no longer seizes the favorable moment for the good voyage across the ocean to faraway coasts. He now “only” lets the land of the “fiery spirit” and the shoreline and the ocean be greeted. With this greeting the poet still thinks back to his previous sojourn there. The recollection of something past comes over him. This is, after all, presumably why the entire poem is called “Remembrance.”
“But go now and greet . . .” Has the poet himself in the end grown tired of his voyages, exhausted and now taking flight into the mere recollection of something past? Does not this “But go now and greet . . .” indeed sound like the concluding strophe of the poem “Ganymede,” which Hölderlin published toward the end of 1804 together with other poems in the publication, “Journal for the Year 1805, Dedicated to Love and Friendship”? It reads (IV, 69):
Der Frühling kömmt. Und jedes, in seiner Art,
Blüht. Der ist aber ferne; nicht mehr dabei.
Irr gieng er nun; denn allzu gut sind
Genien; himmlisch Gespräch ist sein nun.
Spring is coming. And everything, in its own way,
Blossoms. But he is far away; no longer there.
He has now gone astray; for all too good are
Genii; heavenly talk is his now.
“But he is far away; no longer there. / He has now gone astray;”––does this not, with an uncanny precision, correspond to the “biographical” fact that Hölderlin, following his return from France, was plagued by the onset of mental illness? What is more natural than for Hölderlin himself, in his long, lucid intervals, to have clearly experienced that what was now being demanded of him was the renunciation of his poetic being?
“But go now and greet . . .”: Does not this speak of departure and renunciation, and do so precisely if the mariners refer to the poets, and the northeasterly to the favor and essential space of poetizing?
Already with this passage, and for the elucidation of the other poems as well, we must learn to see clearly. This means the following: we must free ourselves step by step from a comfortable, and, for this reason, especially stubborn and thus seemingly illuminating way of viewing things. This way of viewing things exhausts itself in considering a work to be grasped or even conceptualized when it is explained in terms of the psychological conditions of its genesis.
Now Hölderlin’s poetic works from the period between 1800 and 1806 are obscure; their internal connections appear to be missing. Having said this, we know of Hölderlin’s encroaching madness during these same years. The Hölderlin case is thus clear. No. Viewed in this way, it is not clear at all. For when seen from the perspective of this illuminating psychological-biological explanation of the work as “product” of “someone insane,” the word of the work does not have its say, but only the presumptuous know-it-all attitude of those who are supposedly “normal” and not deranged. The poet was indeed deranged, in the sense of a de-rangement [Ver-rückung] of his essence, which was removed from the night of his era. This essential derangement then had as its consequence a “derangedness” that was certainly also unique in kind. Yet from this consequence, the ground can never be grasped. We must free ourselves step by step from our addiction to psychological-biographical explanation. Step by step, because it cannot be achieved by a mere change of “views.” Nor does it suffice to discard our usual mistaken thoughts about Hölderlin.
§18. Norbert von Hellingrath on “Hölderlin’s madness.” Commemoration of von Hellingrath
In this regard, von Hellingrath already said what was essential in his lecture “Hölderlin’s Madness.” Von Hellingrath gave this talk to a small circle in Munich in March 1915 as the opportunity arose during a vacation; prior to this in February of the same year, he gave a first lecture on “Hölderlin and the Germans.” The two lectures first appeared in publication in 1922. They were then published again in 1936 in the form of a “Commemorative Volume,” put together by Ludwig von Pigenot with the title Hölderlin’s Legacy.
In his lecture on “Hölderlin’s Madness,” Norbert von Hellingrath says the following:
He who lives thus among the gods, his speech can no longer be understood by humans; for the first time in Germany, poetic language ventures forth so undisguised, wholly from its native ground, grown in native air, however much the Greek model too was necessary to give the poet courage to create something poetically comparable. For this reason too, the Germans may be excused for not printing these great hymns or even reading those that were published, instead merely amusing themselves over the “traces of madness” that they found therein, with that comforting pleasure that reassures the petit bourgeois when, with official approval, he is permitted to call crazy one who is so uncannily great.1
Rainer Maria Rilke was among those who heard the first lecture. An echo of this lecture is preserved in a letter that Rilke wrote to Norbert von Hellingrath’s grandmother the following day (February 28, 1915):
that Norbert’s grandly formulated and sympathetic character of speech was indescribably gripping and meaningful to me; in looking at this monstrous world so fearlessly and purely and thus making it for himself into a visage encountered daily, he places himself into the circle of the greatest existence, into a spiritual expansiveness in which he can encounter nothing but great things. Where is there such a young man by whom one could be so reassured? I thought this often; yesterday, however, I became so strongly convinced of it, that the hour, in regards to his words, presented itself to me of its own accord as one of those that I have spent in the proximity of wholly redeemed, enduringly superior, spiritual human beings. It is gripping to see how a solitary human being, in that most decisive sense in which Hölderlin was solitary, can, for such a heart as Norbert’s, become an educator, participant, and constant collaborator: so completely drawn in, so altogether integrated, dwelling together in such intimacy––and this from out of the remoteness of his ungraspable eternity.2
On December 14 of this year, 1941, it has been a quarter century since that day on which Norbert von Hellingrath died in battle as a field artillery observer on the front line at Verdun.
Through his work, Norbert von Hellingrath has been definitively admitted into Hölderlin’s realm. He requires no glorification. It is only we who require admonishment not to become blind to the silent radiance of this figure.
Let us now listen to Stefan George’s word commemorating his young friend:
NORBERT
Du eher mönch geneigt auf seinem buche
Empfandest abscheu vor dem kriegsgerät . . .
Doch einmal eingeschnürt im rauhen tuche
Hast angebotne schonung stolz verschmäht.
Du spätling schienst zu müd zum wilden tanze
Doch da dich hauch durchfuhr geheimer welt
Tratst du wie jeder stärkste vor die schanze
Und fielst in feuer erd und luft zerspellt.
You more monk bent over his book
Felt abhorrence at the war apparatus . . .
Yet once laced into that raw fabric
All offer of protection proudly spurned.
You lateling seemed too weary for wild dance
Yet as the breath of a secret world passed through you
You stepped like every strongest into the trenches
And fell exploded into fire earth and air.3
§19. Hölderlin’s de-rangement as entering the range of a different essential locale
Everything biographical and psychological is of no help to us in elucidating the poems because the contrary holds: the biographical can first receive its interpretation and be determined from out of the work. For this, however, we must come to know the work in all its essential forms. It is not only the elegies and the hymns that belong to the work from these years between 1800 and 1806, but also the equally necessary translations of Pindar and Sophocles. Common understanding certainly also has its own illuminating explanations immediately at the ready here. One says: as a consequence of his psychic disturbance, the real “productivity” of the poet also diminishes, and this is why he could then only “occupy” himself with the translation of other poets. Certainly a peculiar way of “occupying” himself, when we consider these “tragedies” of Sophocles, and when, at the same time, we come to know Hölderlin’s translation, its extraordinary character and its inner poetic necessity, and when, beyond this, we have an intimation of what it means to “translate” here.
But even if all this should still be closed off from us and we were to persist in believing that this translating is only an evasion and side occupation, then there is one thing that can teach us otherwise. That is the dedication that Hölderlin placed as a preface to his translations, which appeared in 1804 under the title The Tragedies of Sophocles (cf. V, 91):
To Princess Auguste von Homburg
You sent me encouragement some years ago with a gracious letter, and since then I have owed you a word in response. Since with us too a poet must do something else out of necessity or for pleasure, I have chosen this occupation because it is anchored in foreign, yet firm and historical laws. Apart from this, if there is time, I want to sing the parents of our princes and their seats and the angels of the holy fatherland.
Hölderlin.
We must recognize two things about this dedication: First, the plainspoken decisiveness that is communicated here; and second, the unassuming superiority that veils hidden grounds and abysses within a genuine simplicity.
“Apart from this, if there is time, I want to sing the parents of our princes and their seats and the angels of the holy fatherland”; thus, it is not the “gods,” but rather the “angels” that he wants to sing; it is not the fatherland as a present at hand political constellation that he belatedly wants to discuss with verse, but rather the “holy fatherland,” the fatherland grounded in the holy, that he wants to poetize; indeed not even just this, but rather “the angels of the holy fatherland.” It is not the princes that he wants to honor with verse, but rather their “parents,” which is to say, it is the ancestors of the princely that he wants to poetize and their “seats,” that is, the commencements of genuine sovereignty and power, in the sense that Hölderlin gives this word in his poem, “Nature and Art” (IV, 47):
. . . und aus den alten
Freuden ist jegliche Macht erwachsen.
. . . and from out of ancient
Joys has grown every power.
Much in the same way as the two letters to Böhlendorff, the dedication of the translations of Sophocles’ tragedies announces the inviolable and essential certainty in which the poet’s own poetic being stands. And yet this certainty remains separated by an abyss from the naïve fanaticism of a blind enthusiast.
Now is this dedication, is what is said here from out of an unfathomable plain-spokenness and solitary assuredness, deranged? Indeed––in the sense of a derangement through which the poet is now entering the range of a different time-space. This entering into the range of a different essential locale is, at the same time, an abandonment of the previous locale. Of this, and of this alone, does the line “But go now and greet . . .” speak.
§20. The “going” of the northeasterly. The “greeting” of the poet’s going with it
The northeasterly is addressed, the wind itself in its “blowing.” The wind blows in that, as we also say, it “goes.” The wind goes in its coming. “The northeasterly blows” means: it is arrival. “But go now” also means: go on and go away. Perhaps. Yet in the first instance it signifies: Blow, wind, and be. “But go now” does not mean: stop blowing. This “But go now” does not send the wind away. It lets the northeasterly “go.” The “going” is ambiguous: In going, the wind blows; in blowing, the wind remains. Addressing the wind holds it to its course, yet does not hold it up. This not holding it up lets the northeasterly be precisely the wind that it is. Holding it up, by contrast, would here be holding it still, destruction and loss. Everything that we force into mere subjection or into sheer pleasure for our sake, instead of releasing it into its own essence and letting it be elevated into the wealth of its essence, immediately withdraws from us and escapes forever.
“But go now” does not mean: abate and disappear, but rather: be the northeasterly, be “the most beloved.” This “But,” however, surely contains a clear contrast: Blow, wind, but go. Thus the line, “But go now and greet,” is indeed departure. Certainly. But departure is not always “taking leave.” Do we actually know what “departure” is? Do we even know what the “blowing” of the wind is, assuming that we do not simply mean the tangible movement of air? Blowing: a coming that goes, and, in going, comes. Departure is not mere release and empty remaining behind. Departure is also not a mere going away and vanishing.
The poet remains in the blowing wind in that he goes along with the going of the wind. Yet this going with the northeasterly is now indeed no longer the voyage. And yet the poet still remains with the wind. Going with the wind is now the greeting. Just as the blowing of the wind is a coming and going that reciprocally exceed one another, so the greeting is a remaining behind and yet a going with that reciprocally demand one another. To be sure, the greeting is sent with and sent along, and the greeting brings tidings from the one greeting. But the greeting is not a notification in which the one greeting gives a report of himself. To the extent that the one greeting speaks of himself at all, he says only that he wants nothing for himself, but rather turns over to the one being greeted all that is due to him.
“But go now and greet.” This is renunciation of the voyage with the northeasterly as its wind, and yet is still a going with the wind. It is renunciation, but not the admission of an incapacity. It is departure. But departure is not end––it is perhaps sooner another commencement. The most beloved wind is not held on to. It is for this reason alone that what the wind brings, and the way in which it brings it, is also retained in the fullness of its essence. That is why the “But go now” speaks of a going with the northeasterly toward the southwest. The cardinal directions of the “sky” name the different “heavens,” which are determined by the heavenly. What is heavenly of the different heavens must have differentiated and separated itself. Yet the separation is of a unique kind. For the poet’s remaining behind under his heaven and in his most beloved wind is at the same time a going with it to that other stretch of the heavens. The going with, however, is greeting.
How often we greet, and with every good intention. What is more familiar to us than a greeting? What more is there for us to consider here? We could remain content with this familiar experience, were it not for the fact that the mystery of “remembrance” lies in this “But go now and greet,” and if this “remembrance” did not—far beyond personal “lived experience”—ground something that someday will demand of us an “other thinking.” For this reason, we must here know differently from usual what greeting is.
In the act of greeting we send a greeting. Greeting is, taken in this way, like the further passing along of tidings. Greeting and tidings present themselves as though they were something thinglike that can be passed along. However, the act of greeting does not consist in the transmission of a greeting thus conceived. The act of greeting is also not an announcing or notification. But the one greeting does, after all, announce himself in his greeting. However: the one greeting never reports something about himself in his greeting. To the extent that the one greeting necessarily tells of himself at all and in a certain respect, he says precisely that he wants nothing for himself, but rather turns everything toward that which is greeted, namely, all of that which is promised to that which is greeted in such greeting. This means all that is due to that which is greeted, as that which it is.
That which is due beforehand to any being is the essence from out of which it is what it is. The genuine greeting is an address that grants to that which is greeted the essential rank due to it, and thus comes to acknowledge the greeted from out of the nobility of its essence, through this acknowledgment letting it be what it is. The act of greeting is a letting be of things and of human beings. Here too there are levels of greeting, ranging from the hasty, conventional and empty, to the rarity of the genuine greeting, and to the uniqueness of this poetizing greeting.
The act of greeting is a reaching out to that which is greeted, a touching . . . that yet does not touch, a grasping that yet never needs to “grip” because it is at the same time a letting go (see p. 72). In this way, the act of greeting always remains a will to belong to that which is greeted, and yet never takes the form of currying favor or of a calculative counting on one another. In the genuine greeting there even lies concealed that mysterious stringency whereby, each time, those greeting one another are on each occasion directed into the remoteness of their own essence and its preservation; for everything essential is, by virtue of what is its own, in each case unconditionally remote from what is other. Yet it is this remoteness alone that also ensures the moments of transition from one to the other. Genuine greeting is one way of such transition. The simplest and yet at the same time most intimate greeting is that whereby that which is greeted itself first returns to its essence anew, appears as a commencing, and finds itself as though for the first time. Only if we think the greeting in such an essential manner may we have some intimation of how Hölderlin, by way of the northeasterly and its “going,” lets be greeted:
Die schöne Garonne,
Und die Gärten von Bourdeaux
Dort, wo am scharfen Ufer
Hingehet der Steg und in den Strom
Tief fällt der Bach, darüber aber
Hinschauet ein edel Paar
Von Eichen und Silberpappeln;
The beautiful Garonne,
And the gardens of Bordeaux
There, by the steep bank
Where the footbridge crosses and into the river
Deep falls the brook, yet over it
Keep watch a noble pair
Of oaks and silver poplars;
Who would here lapse into a clumsy and thoroughly inadequate manner of speaking? Who would here deform what is said so simply with additional paraphrases? We allow the greeted to stand on its own as it comes into view through the poetizing word. That which is said in the greeting does not, for its part, need our talking about it. We, by contrast, presumably do need a few hints. For this reason it is necessary to make this one remark, namely, that we should not mistake what is said for a “description” of something previously experienced. This is not a depiction of something actual; the “image” is too ill-defined for that. Much that could be described and that would serve to make a particular image complete is omitted. Or is it a result of this omission, that here, despite all indeterminacy, “the footbridge,” for example, crosses by the bank as though it were the footbridge in itself? And why the footbridge, precisely?
This saying is not a describing only for the sake of describing. Nor is it some piecemeal weaving together of scraps of images and recollections. It is especially not an inability to compose (“bring together”) a unified image complete in its fullness and lawfulness. Rather, the saying––what is said and how it is said––is determined solely by the fact that this saying is an act of greeting, and this greeting itself remains attuned by a fundamental attunement that is as yet veiled from us. In this greeting and through it, that which is greeted first rises up into its own magnificence and simplicity. For this reason, everything here is not just said differently; rather, what is made manifest in the saying is different from those places where poetizing is still permitted to indulge in a certain type of “description.” Think of the fragment from the period of Hyperion that was not published until 1909 and, without a title, begins (II, 39):
Komm und siehe die Freude um uns;
Come and see the joy around us;
By contrast, in the poem “Remembrance,” everything is said almost sparingly and yet inexhaustibly, everything almost forcefully and yet intimately.
If that which is greeted was actually to have once been like this, then it is, after all, only through this greeting that it is raised up into its actuality. What was once actual with regard to that corner of the landscape named in the poem has presumably long since changed––and yet––how much everything remains, how preserved, despite the indefiniteness of the whole, everything comes to shine. The beautiful river, the gardens of the town, the footbridge that crosses the steep bank, the deep falling brook––are brought together in the rapture of a single embrace:
darüber aber
Hinschauet ein edel Paar
Von Eichen und Silberpappeln;
yet over it
Keep watch a noble pair
Of oaks and silver poplars;
Oaks and silver poplars watching over river and town and footbridge. Here again we can only ask once more: Who would now want to touch Hölderlin’s recollection and name what has been transfigured into this noble pair of trees and emerged into the pure illumination that their view presents? Here the act of greeting reaches into a realm in which “truth” and “poetizing,” that is, what is actual and what is “poetized,” can no longer be distinguished, because that which is poetized itself first lets the proper truth of what is true arise. The actual former landscape is now, by way of the greeting, poetized into this one that has been greeted. The greeted landscape, however, poetizes over beyond itself once more in the two trees into the transfigured and at the same time concealed site of a love that is no longer spoken, that has gone through a departure, and yet out of this departure still remains, an enduring love, over which the magnificent silence of these words lies. What they “think” has now been removed from everything biographical and taken back into the inceptual:
Geh aber nun und grüße . . .
But go now and greet . . .
Through the greeting, that which is greeted has first come into being. It now stands in the radiance of the poetizing word, stands and shines, so that the poet can henceforth think in the direction of what has now come into being, even though he is, after all, removed from it and must also concede this decisive remoteness, because it is precisely in this way that he remains mindful of that which once was and still now prevails in its essence:
Noch denket das mir wohl . . .
Still it thinks its way to me . . .
When is the “Still”? Now, when he greets, and in greeting addresses the northeasterly: “But go now . . .” This “now” and the “Still” refer to the same time, the time that we now already recognize more clearly as the time when the poet, having returned home from many foreign parts, remains back at the site of the origin.
This remaining back, however, is not like a being left behind and set aside. Remaining back is here not the lack of independence characteristic of some leftover that can no longer help itself and merely atrophies. Remaining back is an act of greeting, and the greeting radiates an intimacy that must come from a source of its own. What if this remaining back, instead of an uneventful being left hanging, were a going back, a going back to “the source” of the native homeland and to the inceptual that, in its thoughtful commemoration, is strong enough to sustain and to preserve what is inextinguishable in what once was and in the fiery spirit of the foreign?
Noch denket das mir wohl . . .
Still it thinks its way to me . . .
The poet does not say: still I think of it; he says the reverse: still it thinks its way to me. That which is greeted, in a thinking directed to the one who is greeting, inclines toward the latter. So mysterious is this greeting whose task is assigned to the northeasterly.
“Still it thinks its way to me . . .” is an interim word. It apparently interrupts the act of greeting and the tarrying alongside that which is greeted. In truth, however, it is like catching one’s breath amid the fullness of the simple that the greeting northeasterly blows toward the poet, even though this wind goes away from the poet. Yet this is one of the mysteries of “thoughtful remembrance” [An-denken], which we otherwise call “recollection” [Erinnerung]. Such thinking in the direction of . . . [Hindenken] goes away toward that which once was and abandons the present. Yet in this thinking toward . . . , that which once was comes in the opposite direction toward the one whose thinking is directed toward it. It does so, however, not simply now to remain standing as a kind of presence, namely, as the presence of that which has come to mind. If we entirely leave to that which is recollected its essence and nowhere disturb its prevailing, then we experience how that which is recollected does not at all come to a halt in its presence upon its return, so as here merely to be a substitute for the past as something that still comes to mind. That which is recollected itself arches over beyond our present and stands suddenly in the future. It comes toward us and is still somehow unfulfilled, a buried treasure, although, when reckoned as something past, we otherwise count it among what is finished and inalterable.
The thinking in the direction of . . . that greets, giving itself over to the wind and letting itself be carried away by it, suddenly comes to stand in the wind that blows counter to this wind. It is as though a river that runs off and spreads out into the ocean suddenly flowed backwards in the opposite direction, toward the source. The thinking toward . . . that greets thinks of that which is greeted. Yet this thinking of it and thoughtful remembrance does not lose itself in something past. Remembrance is more mysterious in its thinking. Indeed, perhaps “thinking” is properly always “thoughtful remembrance.” Perhaps thinking is something quite other in kind than that construct that “logic,” as the “doctrine of thinking,” informs us about. Yet it is from the proper essence of thinking that we may also first come to know the essence of “thoughts,” and that means, what “spirit” is.
For it is not enough, and remains vague and undecided, when we indeed enthusiastically affirm what is “spiritual” and yet remain at the level of recognizing the spiritual as the “immaterial.” For this in fact means only that we are measuring “spirit” in terms of material and ultimately conceiving it as a kind of “material,” but just as one “thin as air.” “Air,” wind? Does not this poem also show a connection between the “blowing of the wind” and “thinking”? Certainly. Yet the decisive question remains whether we conceive of thinking as a blowing, and blowing as a wind current, and the latter as a movement of air present before us, or whether we place such blowing, in its coming and going, carrying and bringing, into a relation to poetizing and thinking, and comprehend the wind and breath of air and thus “spirit” too from out of this relation. Perhaps every “spiritual” [spirituelle] and “pneumatic” conception of spirit [Geist] is very un-spirit-like, and for this reason especially susceptible to the semblance of the essence of spirit.
In the poet’s greeting, that which is greeted inclines thoughtfully toward him: “Still it thinks its way to me . . . ,” so that he must give thought to it itself, yet indeed can give thought to it only in the greeting.
The poet’s act of greeting is a “thinking”; the saying that greets, however, is a word of a poem, is a poetizing. What, then, if poetizing and thinking were the Same? But why then the different names? However things may stand, the attempt to “think” what is poetized in the poetizing is now already losing what initially impresses itself upon us and is inappropriate. Thinking is almost like a poetizing accompaniment.
“Still it thinks its way to me . . . .” This interim word does not interrupt the act of greeting, but first draws the entire intimacy of the greeting into the word and “brings” all that is greeted “together” into its unity: everything, namely, that was previously named.
und wie
Die breiten Gipfel neiget
Der Ulmwald, über die Mühl’,
Im Hofe aber wächset ein Feigenbaum.
An Feiertagen gehn
Die braunen Frauen daselbst
Auf seidnen Boden,
Zur Märzenzeit,
Wenn gleich ist Nacht und Tag,
Und über langsamen Stegen,
Von goldenen Träumen schwer,
Einwiegende Lüfte ziehen.
and how
The spread of tree tops, the elm forest
Bows over the mill,
But in the courtyard grows a fig tree.
On holidays go
The brown women thereat
On silken ground,
In March time,
When night and day are equal,
And over slow footbridges,
Heavy with golden dreams,
Lulling breezes draw.
That which comes thoughtfully toward the poet from what has been greeted is now gathered with respect to the day’s work and stead of human dwelling, which are shaded and protected from the all too harsh light and from the storm that tears through the broad tree tops of the forest:
und wie
Die breiten Gipfel neiget
Der Ulmwald, über die Mühl’,
and how
The spread of tree tops, the elm forest
Bows over the mill,
We know from a late fragment, “German Song” (IV, 244), that Hölderlin there, and elsewhere too, speaks of the rustling elm in whose shade “the German poet” finds protection. A tree of the homeland casts its shade over the mill. Yet why the mill? Why is it distinctive among the steads of human care? The mill prepares the grain and serves the preparation of bread. In the period of the hymns, the magnificent elegy “Bread and Wine” is conceived in 1801 (IV, 119–125). Of this elegy, von Hellingrath notes: “It (the poem) will always remain the best foundation for penetrating into the world of Hölderlin’s thought.” The conclusion of the eighth strophe of this elegy reads (lines 137ff.):
Brod ist der Erde Frucht, doch ist’s vom Lichte geseegnet,
Und vom donnernden Gott kommet die Freude des Weins.
Darum denken wir auch dabei der Himmlischen, die sonst
Da gewesen und die kehren in richtiger Zeit,
Darum singen sie auch mit Ernst die Sänger den Weingott,
Und nicht eitel erdacht tönet dem Alten das Lob.
Bread is the fruit of the Earth, yet by the light is it blessed,
And from the thundering God comes the joy of wine.
Wherefore we think the heavenly too in this, who once
Were there and who return when the time is right,
Wherefore they, the singers, in earnest sing the wine god too,
And not vainly conceived rings praise to the ancient one.
It is by no means because it also happens to crop up among the things that can be described in the vicinity and catches the poet’s descriptive eye that the shaded mill is named here, but rather because the poet is commemorating the Earth and its fruits and those things that are of the Earth’s provenance. (Cf. “The Wanderer,” IV, 104, line 59: “Far off swishes the ever busy mill . . .”)
Im Hofe aber wächset ein Feigenbaum.
But in the courtyard grows a fig tree.
The “But” seems to insert an overly stark contrast where we would scarcely think to look for such a thing. For why should mill, elm forest, and fig tree not belong harmoniously and uniformly together? This “But . . . a fig tree,” however, following after the shaded “mill,” reminds us specifically and once again that now the southern land being greeted and its fruit greet in turn. Elm forest and mill are also, and perhaps in the future, destined to this poet alone as his environment, the familiar companions of an abode in which the German poet nurtures his essence. Yet because the greeting comes from the ground of this poet’s essence, this greeting is not some fleeting bringing to mind of something previously experienced that just happens to occur to him in passing. This greeting now belongs to the poetic being of this poet. For this reason, the one who greets must also beckon toward the wealth belonging to the essence of that which is greeted. The ground must extend into a realm where the intimacy of that which is to be decided, and can be decided only poetically, is safeguarded as though in a shrine. This is why the greeting blows and goes not only in the direction of land, to town and river, to brook and forest, and to the stead of human work, but to human beings themselves.
1 Norbert von Hellingrath, Hölderlin-Vermächtnis, with an introduction by Ludwig von Pigenot, second edition (Munich, 1944), 161–62.
2 Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe 1914–1921 (Leipzig, 1937), 37–38.
3 Stefan George, Das neue Reich (Berlin, 1928), 117.