Selected Poetry

Friedrich Hlderlin was one of Europes 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 Constantines widely-praised Hlderlin Selected Poems (1990/1996), containing many new translations as well as the whole of Hlderlin's Sophocles (2001), in which he sought to create an equivalent English for Hlderlin's extraordinary German recreations of the classic Greek verse plays. Constantine won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1997 for his translations of Hlderlin. 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. Hlderlin 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 Hlderlins 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 Hlderlins 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 Constantines texts for their English subtitles.