Concluding Julia Ireland on Hölderlin’s "Letter to Böhlendorff" and Heidegger's Greek translations, from "Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Eccentric Translation".

The Germans’ encounter with the Greek foreign is never just the encounter with the Greek foreign. Instead, it is always simultaneously the encounter with the Greeks’ own excessive appropriation of the “clarity of presentation” through which the Germans are transposed into differential relation with what is their own, and transposed into differential relation with what is their own only by exceeding the Greeks’ in what is the Greeks’ own. (Here it is worth noting that the German word for “surpass” in the Letter to Böhlendorff is “übertreffen,” suggesting that the Germans learn how to “hit the mark” (treffen) only by overshooting it.) It is first through the excess of the task that the German’s enter into the possibility of learning what is their own not just as foreign, but from the position of the foreign. This is what it means to be set over not just onto another shore, but onto the shore of an other.

This suggests an importantly different reading of Heidegger’s 1935 interpretation of the second choral ode from the Antigone in the Introduction to Metaphysics. While a number of scholars have called attention to the distinct pathos of that interpretation, Heidegger’s confrontation with Sophocles needs to be understood in terms of the surpassing of the Greek foreign through which the Germans are transposed into the task of their own as this becomes uniquely available in the “yes” to the tragic downgoing of the capacity to grasp. Here, particular emphasis must be given to Heidegger’s concluding provocation from the “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” course that “the violence of be-ing must once again become a real question for the capacity to grasp.” In other words, Heidegger is not engaged in what for some is simply a heightened version of a typically idiosyncratic approach to the Greeks (and in this case one complicated by his comments on the Greek polis [πόλις]). Instead, the excessive aspect of Heidegger’s self-confessed interpretive violence enacts the appropriation of the Greek foreign according to the terms laid out in the Letter to Böhlendorff. The act of translation, then, is not limited to Heidegger’s “actual” translation of the ode or even to his three-staged interpretive commentary on that translation, but is to be found in the quality of the tonal excess of that interpretive translation, which exactly culminates with the inability of τέχνη to overpower the overpowering.

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