Wege II, Anselm Kiefer's work on German idealism.
Hölderlin is the fourth character from the left at the bottom of the table.ALBUM ONLINE
2020 marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), the great German poet.
On the occasion of the anniversary, the philosopher and biographer Rüdiger Safranski published in Germany the work that now appears in Spanish.
It does not come alone, it coincides with the reissue of Peter Härtling's novel on the life of the poet, with a selection of philosophical letters, and with an enlightening essay by Javier Adrada de la Torre that analyzes Luis Cernuda's translation of some of Hölderlin's poems .
Safranski is the author of praised biographies, of Schopenhauer, Heidegger or Goethe;
This time he presents a book that lacks the passion of his early works and that seems to have been written with reluctance, only on the occasion of the centenary;
nothing new brings about Hölderlin.
In Spain we have other biographies of the poet: Helena Cortés is the author of La vida en verso (Hiperión, 2014), a “poetic biography”, very pleasant to read and well documented;
Antonio Pau published
Hölderlin
in 2008
.
The ray wrapped in song
(Trotta).
They do not envy that of Safranski.
This one refers sparingly the known facts of the character's life, without going into depth;
Nor does he delve into his psychology;
and it gives the impression that it seems superfluous or it causes boredom to narrate what others have already told in detail.
The life of the melancholic Hölderlin, exalted and tender, gives a lot of narrative play for a good biographer.
This is how Härtling saw it, who in 1976 published
Hölderlin.
A novel
;
actually, a biography with some fictionalized passages.
If we forget the number of small errors in this edition of Piel de Zapa (which the one by Montesinos recovers in 1986), the "novel" constitutes a magnificent approach to the figure of Hölderlin.
It is a dense and exhaustive story that also vivifies the characters that surrounded the poet and the places where he lived;
Above all, he aptly reveals Hölderlin's character: a concentrated and clever child, an attractive and vigorous young man, fiery and spontaneous, extremely sensitive, and gifted with an exceptional talent for poetry and thought.
His early years, until dementia attacked him in his thirties, were spent among friends, loves, studies, and poems;
and the rest of his life he was cloistered in a house with a round tower in Tübingen, on the banks of the Neckar, surviving like a harmless madman, pounding on the piano and giving cryptic poems to visitors.
Härtling avoids going into those years of reclusion and focuses on those of lucidity;
Safranski does address them and goes something beyond them by reminding us of the "discoverers" of the poet, the German romantics or, later, Nietzsche and Heidegger, who adored him.
He was peaceful, but revolutionary in spirit, and was one of the founders of German idealism with Hegel and Schelling
Before becoming hopelessly ill, Hölderlin had a bittersweet life.
From a wealthy family, fatherless at an early age, his mother insisted that he study as a parish priest, against his will;
he put off taking care of a parish and made a living as a private tutor.
Intelligent and studious, passionate about letters, he met outstanding figures of German culture, Schiller or Goethe (who hardly paid any attention to him).
He maintained a great friendship with the philosophers Hegel and Schelling, comrades at the Tübingen seminary (together they went to theologians and at the same time lost faith in the traditional God).
Together they founded the philosophical movement of German idealism and were moved by the French Revolution.
Hölderlin was a peaceful man, but he was a revolutionary in spirit and, like so many young people of his time, he harbored the idea that, hand in hand with more honest and wise leaders, a definitive epoch of equality, fraternity and freedom would arrive for humanity. .
He dreamed of governments of men with heads, no despots, thugs and brains.
He was disillusioned with the bloodthirsty cruelty of the Revolution, although he consoled himself by thinking that traitors to great ideas succumb, but that they remain and that one day they will be reality.
He lived through a time full of changes and contradictions.
As a visionary, in his elegiac hymns he warned of the crisis of the modern age: a time of transition that has lost the gods and the consciousness of the sacred, in which man is on a pilgrimage towards nothingness or towards a new rebirth. .
Hölderlin called it "the time of destitution", the one in which the old gods have disappeared and those to come, if any, have not yet arrived.
Although he saw greater depth in poetry than in philosophy, so tied to concepts, he studied philosophy with passion, for example, Kant.
Helena Cortés and Arturo Leyte published in 1990 their translation of the
complete Correspondence
of Hölderlin (Hyperion).
From that volume, now out of print, they extract some letters in which the poet deals with philosophy.
It is a delight to read these emotional and frank missives, in which he explains some philosophical questions in his own way.
As for his emotional life, the beautiful Hölderlin easily fell in love with women and men (his friend Sinclair), but was unhappy.
He fell in love with a woman he could not marry: Susette Gontard, mother of a child of whom he was a tutor.
The only way to possess it was literary: he idealized it in the figure of Diotima, Hyperion's beloved, the hero of the homonymous novel, a prose work by Hölderlin and which is one of the most beautiful of Germanic letters.
The impossible love, the freedom never achieved, the republic that never arrives, the inconsistent existence, all this perhaps contributed to the advent of the disease that deprived him of the lucidity that did illuminate his verses, such as these translated by the Sevillian Cernuda in 1935, aided by the German philosopher Jean Gebser: “But it is not given to us / truce in any place;
/ disappear, fall / resigned men / blindly, from hour to hour, like water / from a rock thrown / to another rock, through the years / in the uncertain, downwards ”.
This is the human condition according to Hölderlin: without gods to pamper them, without supports, fragile, human beings are left with only the abyss of existence.
'Hölderlin or the divine fire of poetry'
Rüdiger Safranski
Translation by Raúl Gabás
Tusquets, 2021
332 pages.
21 euros
Look for it in your bookstore
'Hölderlin.
A novel'
Peter Härtling
Translation by Thomas Kauf
Zapa Skin, 2020
514 pages.
24 euros
Look for it in your bookstore
'Philosophical Letters from Hölderlin'
Edition of Helena Cortés and Arturo Leyte
Preliminary study: The philosopher who did not want to be.
The Office, 2020
200 pages.
20 euros
Look for it in your bookstore
'Luis Cernuda and Friedrich Hölderlin: translation, poetry and representation'
Javier Adrada de la Torre
Prologue by Antonio Colinas
Comares, 2021. 146 pages.
16 euros
Look for it in your bookstore
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