ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that what is obscure and incommunicable in Holderlin derives from the fact that his knowledge of the Greek tragedians was acquired unconventionally, on solitary paths, in isolation. The limited knowledge of Greek that prevented his translations from being "correct" in the everyday sense has yet opened many possibilities for the translator-poet. With all his failures to understand words and grammatical rules and his lack of experience in the routines of understanding, Holderlin was preserved in his innocence, as it were, from all the translators' routine that makes the usual translations of his time and of later times so correct and so insignificant. But there is also an understanding characteristic of genius, an anticipatory understanding, which proceeds from a bare minimum of given data directly to the center and, sensing the reality of a thing, grasps its essence. This was Holderlin's style of understanding.
