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

Heidegger’s interpretation of the Letter in the “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” course is governed by this insight into deficient excess together with his specific concern for the German “national.” Though Heidegger does not cite Hölderlin’s “Remarks to Antigone,” he interprets the Letter in terms of a passage that directly resonates with its basic structural framework in contrasting the “primary tendency” – here described by Hölderlin as a “weakness” (Schwäche) – that distinguishes the Greek and German styles of representation: “…our poetic art must be patriotic such that its materials are selected in accordance with our view of the world, and its representations patriotic, differing from Greek representations insofar as their primary tendency is to be able to grasp themselves [sich fassen] because their weakness lies therein; whereas, in contrast, the primary tendency in the modes of representation in our time is the ability to hit on [treffen] something, to have destiny, since the lack of fate, dusmoron, is our weakness.” Notably, however, and in a way that directly anticipates his own 1935 interpretation of Sophocles, Heidegger not only approaches the Letter through the terminology of this passage, he approaches this passage through Hölderlin’s early translation of the opening lines from the second choral ode of the Antigone in which Hölderlin translates the Greek word deinon with “gewältig” (violent). That is, Heidegger translates back into the Letter what Hölderlin’s translation and commentary on the Antigone enact as the German confrontation with the Greek foreign, which is, of course, informed by the Letter. In this terminological crossing over, the Greek endowment of the “fire from heaven” becomes for Heidegger “the having become struck by the violence of be-ing and “the passion for the overpowering,” while the Greek’s task is the “taming of the untameable in the struggle over the work, grasping, bringing-to-stand.” The “Western Junonian sobriety” first captured by Homer is thus here being conceived in terms that Heidegger subsequently takes up in the Introduction to Metaphysics as τέχνη (techne).

Pp. 261-2

Continued.  ¶ 4:46 AM