Selected Poetry

[including Hölderlin's Sophocles]

by Friedrich Hölderlin

Edited and translated by David Constantine

Published by: Bloodaxe Books

Imprint: Bloodaxe Books

416 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in

Paperback
9781780374017
Published: November 2018

$24.00

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Description
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Friedrich Hölderlin 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 Hölderlin Selected Poems (1990/1996), containing many new translations as well as the whole of Hölderlin's Sophocles (2001), in which he sought to create an equivalent English for Hölderlin's extraordinary German recreations of the classic Greek verse plays. Constantine won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1997 for his translations of Hölderlin. 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. Hölderlin 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 Hölderlin’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 Hölderlin’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.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was one of Europe's greatest poets, and is notable not only for his own idiosyncratic poetry but also for his translations into German of the works of the ancient Greek poet and dramatist 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.

David Constantine lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000. He was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. He was named winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2020, and presented with the award by HM the Queen in 2021. He has published eleven books of poetry, six translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include Collected Poems (2004), which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); Elder (2014); and Belongings (2020). His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his Selected Poems of Hölderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize, and his version of Hölderlin’s Sophocles, combined in his new expanded Hölderlin edition, Selected Poetry (2018); and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation, A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology, is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Other books include his translation of Goethe’s Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009) and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton, 2018). He has published six collections of short stories, and won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press). Four other short story collections are published by Comma Press. His story 'In Another Country' was adapted into 45 Years, a major film starring Tom Courtney and Charlotte Rampling.

Selected Poetry

[including Hölderlin's Sophocles]

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