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This text makes available an English translation of Martin Heidegger’s first lecture course on Hölderlin’s poetry, devoted to an interpretation of the hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine.” Delivered in Freiburg in the winter semester of 1934–35, this course marks Heidegger’s first sustained engagement with Hölderlin’s poetizing, and is particularly important for understanding the works of Heidegger that follow in the mid- to late 1930s and beyond. Key works such as the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), and the Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (1936–38) receive essential illumination from the first Hölderlin course, as does the 1936 essay “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry.” Prominent themes of the lecture course include not only the turn to language and poetic dwelling, as well as an engagement with the Hölderlinian themes of the Earth and of the flight of the gods, but also issues of politics and national identity. The scope and significance of the course are thus by no means limited to Heidegger’s encounter with a poet.

The lecture course on “Germania” and “The Rhine” was the first of three major lecture courses that Heidegger devoted to Hölderlin, the other two being a course on the hymn “Remembrance,” delivered in winter semester 1941–42, and a course on “The Ister” directly following in summer semester 1942.¹ In addition, Heidegger published a collection of essays entitled Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, a volume that originally appeared in 1944. Its current, expanded edition contains essays written between 1936 and 1968.² The course on “Germania” and “The Rhine” was first published in 1980 as volume 39 of the Gesamtausgabe or Complete Edition of Heidegger’s works, and subsequently in a second, slightly revised edition in 1989. A third, unaltered edition was published in 1999. The translation presented here takes into account the minor revisions of the second edition.

Translating Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin is especially challenging, given the fact that his interpretations themselves constitute a unique and original “translation” of Hölderlin, an emergent and ongoing dialogue of the thinker with the poet. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretations placed certain constraints on the translation of Hölderlin’s poetry and prose, frequently requiring a somewhat more literal rendition of the German than might otherwise be ventured. In our attempts to render Hölderlin’s work into English in a manner befitting Heidegger’s readings, we have consulted and greatly benefited from the existing translations of Hölderlin by Michael Hamburger, adopting or adapting certain of his solutions on occasion.³ Also of great assistance has been the French translation of Heidegger’s lecture course by François Fédier and Julien Hervier.⁴

Of the particular translation difficulties posed by Heidegger’s text, two merit special attention at the outset. First is the use of the German Seyn, an archaic form of Sein (“being”) that was used by Hölderlin and that Heidegger appropriates to mark a non-metaphysical sense of being.⁵ Fortunately, English also preserves a parallel archaic form of being in the word beyng. Thus, in the present volume we have rendered Seyn as beyng and Sein as being throughout; the few instances of das Seyende we have rendered as beyngs, retaining beings for das Seiende. A second and greater challenge is posed by Hölderlin’s use of the word Innigkeit and the associated adjective or adverb innig, a central and key term of Hölderlin’s thinking and poetizing. There appears little choice but to translate this word as “intimacy,” which Innigkeit typically conveys in everyday German, and this is, for the most part, the solution we have opted for in the present translation.⁶ But it needs to be underscored that for Hölderlin this word is not meant to convey an interiority of feeling, nor indeed a form of human relationship at all, but rather a certain tension and intensity within beyng itself. For Heidegger’s own discussion of Hölderlinian Innigkeit, see especially §10 of the present volume.

Throughout the lecture course, Heidegger’s focus is on the essence of poetic Sagen, a word that we have rendered as both “saying” and “telling,” depending on context. According to Heidegger, understanding Hölderlin’s poetry entails the task of mitsagen, which we have translated as the task of “following the telling” of the poetry. The word “poetry” generally translates the German Dichtung, which has also been rendered on occasion as “poetic work,” but for the most part as “poetizing,” since Heidegger’s attentiveness is to the inner movement and flow of the poetic telling. It should be kept in mind that Dichtung in ordinary usage refers not simply to the narrow sense of the poetic, of poetry as poesy (Poësie), but to literature and the composition of literary works quite generally. See §4(b) for Heidegger’s discussion of this.

Since the term Dasein, referring to the being of humans, has a rigorously defined and by now well-known meaning in the early Heidegger, we have for the most part followed convention and left it untranslated. In those places where it appears to convey a more general sense of “existence,” we have indicated the German in brackets. Consistent with our translation of the “Ister” course, the word “people” translates das Volk, a term that has a specific political resonance in the Third Reich, yet also a broader spectrum of meaning that extends back to Hölderlin’s poetry and beyond.

Finally, it should be noted that the noun Bestimmung, which we have rendered as “vocation,” implies “determination” in the sense of that to which something is by its essence or nature determined or “called.” For Heidegger, such Bestimmung is fundamentally related to the Stimme, the “voice,” and to the Stimmung, the “attunement” of Hölderlin’s poetic telling. See especially §8 for details.

References to Hölderlin are to the von Hellingrath edition used by Heidegger. Translators’ notes are indicated in square brackets and provided at the end of the volume. Regarding the use of single versus double quotation marks, see the Editor’s Epilogue. A German–English and English–German Glossary indicating the translation of key terms are also provided.

The translators would like to thank David Farrell Krell and Mathias Warnes for their assistance and helpful suggestions regarding earlier versions of the translation. We are especially grateful to Ian Alexander Moore of DePaul University for his thorough review of the entire manuscript, which resulted in many improvements, and to Lara Mehling of Whitman College for her suggestions on an early draft of Part One of the lecture course. The translators thank our readers Charles Bambach and Christopher Fynsk for their careful review of the manuscript and helpful suggestions. We are further grateful to Andrew Mitchell for his input on the translation. William McNeill would like to thank DePaul University for a University Research Council grant that funded the review of the translation, as well as the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences for a summer research grant that enabled completion of the translation. Julia Ireland would like to thank Whitman College for the Louis B. Perry Summer Research Grant, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a summer research grant that enabled her to review Heidegger’s original manuscripts at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar, Germany. We owe special thanks to our copy-editor, Dawn McIlvain Stahl, for her careful work on a difficult manuscript. Last, and not least, we are grateful to Senior Sponsoring Editor Dee Mortensen and to our project manager/editor, Michelle Sybert, at Indiana University Press for their enduring patience with what has been a longer than anticipated project.

1. The three lecture courses are published as Gesamtausgabe Bd. 39. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980; Bd. 52. Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken,” Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982; and Bd. 53. Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984. An English translation of the third lecture course has been published as Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. For an overview of the three lecture courses, see William McNeill, “The Hölderlin Lectures,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, edited by François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 223–35.

2. See Gesamtausgabe Bd. 4. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1936–1968), Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981. Translated as Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry by Keith Hoeller, Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2000.

3. Hamburger’s translations have appeared in a number of different editions. Those we have consulted are: Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980; and Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments, Penguin Classics Edition, London: Penguin Books, 1998.

4. Les hymnes de Hölderlin: La Germanie et Le Rhin. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1988.

5. Nevertheless, as the German editor notes, it appears that Heidegger was not always consistent in his marking of this distinction. See the Editor’s Epilogue for details.

6. For an exception, see the passage from Hölderlin’s essay “On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit” in §8, where it seemed more appropriate to render innig as “collected.”