Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone

These texts are stitched through with the vocabulary of excess, of madness, rage…those forces in his own psychology which, very soon, would carry him over the edge-David Constantine. Friedrich Holderlin was one of Europe’s greatest poets. Acclaimed British poet and translator (Michaux, Jaccottet) David Constantine’s Selected Poems of Holderlin won him the 1997 European Poetry Translation. Now he has turns to Holderlin’s versions of Sophocles, seeking to create an equivalent English for these extraordinary German recreations of the classic Greek verse plays. Holderlin’s versions of these two plays came out in the spring of 1804 and were taken, by the learned, as conclusive proof of his insanity. Constantine has translated Holderlin’s translations, carrying as much of their strangeness as possible into English.