Poems and Fragments : Fourth Edition

Rating:
Summary: Hamburger's translations of Holderlin are essential
Review: Many might be familiar with Michael Hamburger's translations of Holderlin from the volume in the Penguin Classics series. Well, those poems were selected from this edition, which is truly and rightfully the mother lode of Holderlin verse in English. If you've also read selections of Holderlin translated by Richard Sieburth (in Princeton's Lockert Library series), David Constantine, or Christopher Middleton (in a volume published by Chicago UP, later excerpted in the Holderlin volume in the German Library), you'll want to supplement your reading with this mammoth, 800+ page, bilingual edition. This newest fourth edition will be Hamburger's last, as he himself states in the Preface, making this volume all the more important and essential as the final version of Holderlin by his one indispensable English translator.

In addition to this volume, I would recommend at least three other volumes of German verse translated by Michael Hamburger, who for the past half-century has been our pre-eminent translator of high German poetry:

Celan (ISBN 089255276X)
Rilke (ISBN 0856463531)
Goethe (ISBN 0856462748)

The Goethe volume in particular, titled "Roman Elegies and Other Poems," published by Anvil Press like this Holderlin volume, is a treasurable piece of work and makes the ideal introduction to Goethe's poetry--better even than the volume of Goethe's poetry in Princeton's 12-volume set of his collected works (to which, by the way, Michael Hamburger has contributed many outstanding translations--that set is life-enhancing, to say the least).

So if you care about Holderlin, or German poetry in translation, or major European poetry, Holderlin has come to be recognized as one of the great poets that the West has produced, and you must own this fourth edition of "Poems and Fragments." My own reading of it marked an epoch in my literary life--the poetry ***found*** me and spoke to me directly, on the deepest level. Much of the poetry describing Holderlin's youth has impressed me as deeply as Wordsworth's 1799, two-part version of "The Prelude"--a text that in my personal canon I consider sacred.

"To be alone
and without gods is death."

--Holderlin, "Poems and Fragments," p. 381