Selected Poetry

including Hoelderlin's Sophocles

Friedrich Hoelderlin, David J. Constantine

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English

Bloodaxe Books Ltd
15 November 2018

Poetry; Poetry by individual poets

European Poetry Translation Prize Friedrich Hoelderlin was one of Europe's greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in these remarkable verse translations. This is a new expanded edition of Constantine's widely-praised Hoelderlin Selected Poems (1990/1996), containing many new translations as well as the whole of Hoelderlin's Sophocles (2001), in which he sought to create an equivalent English for Hoelderlin's extraordinary German recreations of the classic Greek verse plays. Constantine won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1997 for his translations of Hoelderlin. This new volume presents a substantial selection from the work of a poet who, writing around 1800, addresses us ever more urgently two centuries later. Hoelderlin translated all his writing life. Through translation he reached a poetic language of his own, so that much of his best poetry reads like a translation from elsewhere. He was intensely occupied with Sophocles in the winter of 1803-04. His versions of Oedipus Rex and Antigone (he worked at but never finished Oedipus at Colonus and Ajax) came out in the spring of 1804 and were taken, by the learned, as conclusive proof of his insanity. He was by then very near to mental collapse, but no one now would dismiss his work for that. He translated in a radical and idiosyncratic way, cleaving close to the Greek yet at the same time striving to interpret these ancient, foreign and - as he thought - sacred originals, and so bring them home into the modern day and age. Constantine has translated Hoelderlin's translations, carrying as much of their strangeness as possible into his English. The plays themselves need no introduction or apology. These double translations, links in literature from land to land and from age to age, demonstrate the vitality of ancient and modern poetic tradition. Carl Orff used Hoelderlin's texts for his operas Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), with the producers of recent DVDs of Orff's operas later choosing to use Constantine's texts for their English subtitles. 'Hoelderlin is a poet we can read with our own atrocious times in mind. He is a deeply religious poet whose fundamental tenet is absence and the threat of meaninglessness. He confronted hopelessness as few writers have, he was what Rilke called exposed ; but there is no poetry like his for the constant engendering of hope, for the expression, in the body and breath of poems, of the best and most passionate aspirations.' - David Constantine

By: Friedrich Hoelderlin, David J. Constantine
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: 3rd ed.
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 138mm,
ISBN: 9781780374017
ISBN 10: 1780374011
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 15 November 2018
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843) was one of Europe's greatest poets, and is notable for his translations of the works of Greek literary great, Sophocles. David Constantine is one of Britain's leading poets and translators. He lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. His other translations include Goethe's Faust for Penguin Classics, and co-translations of Brecht for Norton and Enzensberger for Bloodaxe. His own Collected Poems and two later collections Nine Fathom Deep and Elder are published by Bloodaxe. He lives in Oxford.

Reviews for Selected Poetry: including Hoelderlin's Sophocles

Constantine goes for an equivalence of spirit in a more familiar idiom. This is at once a bold and humble undertaking, and has produced poetry of a remarkable luminosity and intensity, written in rhythms and cadences which recreate, both in their extremities of grief and their urgent hope, the immediacy of the original. -- Karen Leeder * Oxford Poetry *