Martin Heidegger, _Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"_, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis

 THE THREE OR four people who regularly look at this blog may be growing weary of my returning to the topic of Heidegger. Sorry. The fever has not passed, unfortunately.

To resume: I love the way Heidegger talks about poetry; he seems to give it its full due. Take "The Origin of the Work of Art," for instance, or his insistence in this book (lectures for a course he gave in 1942) that poetic ideas are not simply philosophical ideas with a lot of frosting and bows. One does not subtract or scrape off the poetry to get the "real" idea. The idea is in the poetry, damn it.

However, I worry that Heidegger's thinking about poetry is fatally compromised by his support of Hitler and Nazism.

Heidegger has some insights here that left me slack-jawed in admiration. The main subject is Hölderlin's hymn to the River Ister (a.k.a. the Danube), and in Part I Heidegger describes a river as at the same time a locality and a journeying. Which struck me as profoundly true. The river is here before us, so it is a locality, but the water we see was upstream yesterday and will be downstream tomorrow, so the river is also an elsewhere. Similarly, the river is a now, while before us, but in its movement is also the past and the future. 

Part III declares that the poet is a river.  The poet is of the now--but also, if he or she is mindful of tradition, also a voice of the past and, in prophetic mode, a voice of the future. And the poet is of here--but also in his or her awareness of other traditions, perhaps also an elsewhere. Great idea, no? So the poet is a river--

--which means the poet is a demi-god, like the river. "Uh oh," you might think here. And then history gets married to the idea of locality and Heidegger starts suggesting  that the West is special, thanks to the Greeks, and the German are special too, since they come closest to grasping what the Greeks were about...and we are well past "uh oh" at that point.

Can we say poets are rivers and call it good, without saying they are demi-gods?

Part II, the longest section of the book at about 70 pages, is about the first choral ode in Sophocles' Antigone, and it too is astonishingly insightful, thankfully without raising so many red flags. A key point: the word deinon in the first line, most often translated "wonder," actually shades off into concepts like  anxiety and terror as well as awe--the frightful, powerful, and inhabitual is Heidegger's formula--so the chorus's claim that humankind has more deinon going on than anything else in the world is worth pondering, and ponder it Heidegger does. Part II is a neat demonstration that the poetic idea is not the pill under the sugar coating, but integral to the poetry itself.

Final note: German has a verb, dichten, which means "to compose" and is not quite the same as the word "to write." Rather than translate it as "writing poetry," McNeill and Davis render it as "poetize," which was odd at first but made sense, as it helps capture the act of discernment or framing that is part of writing poetry.