Hölderlin and Poetic Transport

This Humanities Special Issue aims to bring a broad range of current, international research on Friedrich Hölderlin to an Anglophone readership. The notion of "transport"-in the sense of crossing, transition, transfer, metaphor, translation-leads to some of the most significant issues found in Hölderlin's writings. To name just a few: the problem of poetic vision as transport, ecstasy; the poet's increasingly fraught task of mediating between the gods and the saeculum; cultural transfer (translatio studii) from the East to the West, from Greece to Hesperia; metaphor as both crossing (Übergang) and deviance/hybridicity; the nexus of poetics and philosophy; Hölderlin's idiosyncratic practice of translation and its crossing into his poetry; and the vexing question of how to edit his later manuscripts and convey them into print. And following the idea further, we can consider Hölderlin's texts themselves transported through translation, or through interpretation in other media, such as music and the visual arts. The twelve essays gathered in this volume offer windows into many aspects of this topic. They consider texts written by Hölderlin from the 1790's through the end of his life, including his philosophical writings, the poem written on the occasion of his grandmother's birthday (1798), Hyperion, the Empedokles project, his Sophocles translations, "Patmos," "Mnemosyne", and the tower poems. Essays on Peter Ruzicka's musical interpretation of "Mnemosyne" and Peter Brandes' "picture conversations" with the last portraits of Hölderlin offer new avenues for listening to and seeing the poet.