College of Arts and Letters Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2015.06.07 Author Martin Heidegger Hölderlin's Hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine" Published: June 04, 2015 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine", William McNeill and Julia Ireland (trs.), Indiana University Press, 2014, 289pp., $50.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780253014214. Reviewed by Richard Polt, Xavier University Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin are central to his later thought, but the difficulties of both the poetry and the thought make it a great challenge to translate these texts. One of Heidegger’s three lecture courses on the theme, dating from 1942, appeared in English in 1996 as Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” This collaborative translation enriched the understanding of Heidegger in English-speaking countries and led to an unexpected appropriation, David Barison and Daniel Ross’s 2004 documentary The Ister. Now the same pair of translators, William McNeill and Julia Ireland, have given us the 1934-35 lecture course on “Germania” and “The Rhine.” Their version, including a clear and concise introduction and useful glossaries, attains both accuracy and clarity, rarely faltering in its choice of words. We can now look forward to their translation of the 1941-42 course on Hölderlin’s “Andenken” (“Remembrance”), which is currently in progress. 1 Heidegger’s goal is to think about Hölderlin’s poetry without reducing it to prose or pseudophilosophy (5). To this end, he casts aside various clichéd theories of poetry, including psychological interpretations and the notions of symbolism and expression (26-28). Instead, he tries to inhabit the language and mood of the poem, catching on to its “overarching resonance” and “fundamental attunement,” in order finally to find its “metaphysical locale,” the relation to being in which Hölderlin dwells (18). This is a crucial task if great poetry is not just a flimsy aesthetic diversion but language at its most intense and genuine; the poet’s mission is to found a people’s relation to being by withstanding the divine lightning and bringing it into words (30-31, 33, 90, 227). “Germania” pictures Germany as a maiden whom a divine messenger charges to “give counsel” to “kings and peoples” (16). The poem takes place in the absence of the ancient gods, for whom the poet longs without pretending to revive them, and in anticipation of a fresh destiny for Germany. Heidegger painstakingly elucidates the attunement that is at work here, characterizing it as “holy mourning in readied distress” (97). As he had insisted in Being and Time, such attunements are not just subjective overlays, but primordially open a world and its meaning (81). From “Germania” Heidegger shifts to “The Rhine,” where Hölderlin’s aim is to limn “the beyng of the demigods” (223). (The archaic spelling “beyng” translates Heidegger’s less archaic Seyn, a spelling still used by Hölderlin.) Demigods, existing between gods and humans, are riven and unified by an “intimacy,” or harmony of opposites. There are similarities here to Heraclitus and Hegel (111-118), but according to Heidegger, Hölderlin develops an understanding of “beyng” all his own that stands outside the metaphysical tradition and points to the possible new “commencement” (Anfang) of a history that will decide the arrival or flight of the divine (1, 128-9, 201, 244). Heidegger sums up the beyng of the demigods in a diagram (223)