Friedrich Hölderlin, _Selected Poems and Fragments_, trans. Michael Hamburger

 A WHILE AGO, a friend whose recommendations always work for me recommended Giorgio Agamben's Hölderlin's Madness, which I promptly resolved to read--but, I told myself, I had better read some Hölderlin first. 

I am a reasonably well-read person. German literature is a gap for me, but I have read Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Rilke, Mann, Grass, and a handful of others. Still, I had never even thought about reading Hölderlin. He just does not come up in Anglo-American literary discussions, I guess. Turns out, though, that he is a heavyweight. In one of the chapters of Alain Badiou's Manifesto for Philosophy, he talks about the 19th and early 20th centuries as an era when "poetry assumed some of philosophy's functions," serving as "a locus of language wherein a proposition about being and about time is enacted." Badiou specifies seven names in defining this "age of poets": Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa, Mandelstam, Celan...and Hölderlin, the only one of this august company I had not read.

So, time to read Hölderlin. And in translation, unfortunately, since I know no German. Translation is always a leaky bucket, but you lose the most in poetry, I'd say. Hamburger's translations at least have a good reputation, and they turned out to be highly readable. This selection serves up 169 pages of translated Hölderlin facing 169 pages of Hölderlin in the original German, which seems a generous enough helping.

Hölderlin reminded me most of his English contemporaries and near-contemporaries, the Romantics, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge, due to a shared passion for the natural world, Shelley, due to a shared passion for classical Greece, and Keats, because he had no particular advantages of birth and suffered badly for love. But he reminded me most of the English Romantics due to his always swinging for the fences, to use a baseball metaphor. He's ambitious. He does indeed want to assume some of philosophy's functions, or perhaps religion's functions. He wants to galvanize the world, be (as Wordsworth hoped) its next prophet, be (as Shelley hoped) its unacknowledged legislator. 

That sort of thing is hard to sustain. Wordsworth and Coleridge ran out of gas, Shelley and Keats died young, Hölderlin lost his mind. But a man's reach should exceed his grasp, as Browning put it.

"I grew up in the arms of gods."