ABSTRACT
For an elementary understanding of Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles, we must first shed some light on the many oddities and obscurities that along with much that is simple and beautiful the unprepared reader encounters, especially in the Antigone. These puzzling eccentricities do not derive from Sophocles’ original text. He, especially in contrast to his predecessor Aeschylus, speaks a Greek that is hard and clear, a language that does not avoid elevated colloquialisms and that, even where it rises to a bold pregnancy of expression (as above all in the choral odes), never lacks the brightness of the clear Greek daylight. What is obscure and incommunicable in Hölderlin derives from the fact that his knowledge of the Greek tragedians was acquired unconventionally, on solitary paths, in isolation. In this isolation, wherein lay the courage and the energy necessary for independence, Hölderlin won through to the most astounding insights into the nature of Greek tragedy; we will have more to say about this. But on the other hand, his isolation limited and restricted his basic work as translator, the comprehension and reproduction of the original Greek words in their precise original sense. This is so far-reaching that to speak of Hölderlin’s work as “translation” perhaps does as little justice to Sophocles as it does to the characteristics of Hölderlin’s achievement.
