Variations on Hölderlin

by Geoffery Hlibchuk

Variations on Hölderlin is informed by a particular etymology of the verb "to translate" to move the dead from one place to another. The corpse in question here belongs to Friedrich Hölderlin, the schizophrenic Romantic poet subsequently canonized by such figures as Nietzsche and Heidegger. But whereas these theorists all too often arrest his corpus in order to conduct their critical autopsies, the Variations resurrect Hölderlin to the modern day, where his schizophrenic obsessions with the gods are now updated through contemporary celestial phenomena: astronauts, radio transmissions and satellites provide a new context above, while the underground churns with the sounds of subways and cloud chambers. Caught between these two levels, Hölderlin's poetry is reconfigured not through an accurate reproduction of his work, but rather through the fluidity of variations: "I am not mad / chronology just made me look that way." The Variations remind us that poetry is, above all, an ongoing conversation between the dead and the living.

66 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fundamental significance of Hölderlin cannot be understood.

- Paul de Man

When Hölderlin became absorbed by Greek he dramatically expressed the anethesia of a person who is snatched up by a foreign language.

- Julia Kristeva

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin I


Ebb lightening remnant
and lulls the roses to non-inverted
to generate lanes where ashen children
sink knots into water:
the holy sober.

Hewn in mneumonic chrome
our bewilderments are now wounding
both sunshine and shade.

A heaven of undermined heat.

And so speechless and cold
that even in the wind
the weather still clatters.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin II


A city in Euphrates in the parachutist's eye
over coumns of forest that break a levelling desert.
But where to now?

Your crowns, because
you crossed the boundary of breath,
are taking off in heaven's hydrocarbons.
But here I sit under the clouds (each one
of which is countless) among
dying organ donors
on the deer's heath and
yet so strange that the
droning groans of these blessed ones
only now reach me.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin III


so still bright night
shines abruptly
before morning accelerates

the streams fall like lightning
the echo flexing

edges of silver
gleam in a helix of light

willingly or not
the fatherland
rises to meet you

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin IV

Holy pilots, you walk up

in photos of the sky

that clot this breeze

and deftly breach the shrines

where masonries play music

on heartstrings of consumption.

Safekeeping the sleeping air

they breathe without plain;

inhalation flourish continually

in them, weakly,

as in a small shale

where respiration

still takes place within

an asthma of eternal clearness.

A place to rest

isn't given to us

so suffering aviators

decline and blindly fall

from one hour to the next,

like water thrown

from cliff to cliff

year after year and then

down into the unknown.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin V


These cities and these streets
really are astonishing,
shining to the moors as a sister -
a doppelgänger for more darker omens -
running through the Rhines and rivulets.

From a tower
Arcadia radar pulses and sweeps through the valley
breeding carnations by searchlight
in the gentle encryption of crop-circles.


(They touch upon madness, but need to be deeply studied first
as we have learned much since this morning
for we are a conversation
indicating a convenant between ourselves and the other exists.)


And so regardless.

Tonight the earth hangs down to the lake,
drunk with the water
of its own origin:

an inebriated planet
orbiting around in its very own
terrarium of wishes.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin VI


Cool lightning falls through a hot night in thunder-still distance:
a gentle embrace of inclement static

in a televised geography

Drops of mourning have pooled for you
and are now apparent
in both sign and deed of the earth

Drifting through the thoughts of the common spirit
we are suddenly struck by the heavens
in the hazy fruit of a storm:

pure radiance in a burning radio

the raging electrine

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin VII


is drawn to the ground
as inclining toward the systematic
and the cylindrical insect drizzle.
is bordering on girded
as echolocale
is hurting now but will soon be ok
as spectral clutch of the aqueduct
as harmonized surface area.
is descending


(These songs of Ossian, reverberate, are true centaur songs and should not be mistaken for - or otherwise we hope - the Dioscurian rage.)

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin VIII


If I desired to be speech
I'd be.

Like dwelt and ordered, like names burnt into sand
by the tremulous rains of tomorrow
in which man is formed:
The Jerusalem orbits.

Strange are the numbers of words
but more strange are they themselves.

Hand me the cup
full of dark daylight
so that I may learn:

Like orphans, some of us can just almost walk
it's only now that our tutelage is lacking.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin X


Where are you now?

For I just saw
a young god
bathe his youthful
hair in the clouds.

But he's gone now to reinvent nations
which will honour him until
the fingers of someone else
entice him with a prettier music.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XI


As if painted into pain
the mind grows dark.

But there are lovelier pictures here in this valley.

And how beautifully it shines
as the landscape leads us on

at least until
the grey loams and lightning
reflects its thorns back into my heart.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XII


She entered, but
entered with an ethereal thunder
to this result: dreams
and the black-green weeds
at the bottom of an abandoned swimming pool.

There is a calm confusion in these
lucent empires of symmetry

Even here
her words, like dizzy serpents,
left before the dawn could blush,
letting clouds scatter and range
through chambers and commerce.

And just as she slid into the rustling air,
all were not yet assembled.
In November,
above her,
the low portent had somehow been touched.

And so her voice flowed on.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XIII, for Kenneth


As a window in heaven opens
as to track a storm by hand,
angels alight
to the crest of your silence.

WHere nightingales, stung by the sun, glisten into feather.

Before these heavenly ones were hit
they cultivated their breath and -
sensing that which was dearer to them -
imperceptibly moved closer to you.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XIV


You have the beauty of a butterfly
You have a wing that stirs my storm.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XV


With heavenly
Echoing quietly
With modulations calmly
The familiar sweetly
In order seemly
And down-shaded lightly
A different shines clarity
For now immeasurably
Like men young immortality
O you that benignly
Breathed coolness quietly


But O more darkly
And determines dreadfully
An overshadowed deadly
Fleets on heavenly
For sparingly
Probing deeply
More than only humanly
And powerful quietly
More tasks daily
That resolves the gently
Yet ultimately
Where beings heavenly
In hymns hospitality
Winds breathing lightly

Announce you already

A shape of the heavenly

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XVI


Across these fields I called upon you
to glide into evening
and siphon nightcaps and hyacinths
off a twilight

you
are
the
unbound. yet interceding

into something resembling a dawn.

All day I've stepped
on the most fragile of foliage just to close my eyes to you:

And the moon a sliver of hatchet
that cuts the chaos back into time.

Calendars asunder (!)

And you just as poised and as gorgeous as
all the syringes in Persia.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XVII


This field is empty, but on the hill of a far ground
the sky sparkles and the paths converge:
here nature almost appears as one, the winds feel
like new, with only brightness keeping self-reflexive.

The time of earth can be seen from the sky,
The entire day, under siege by bright night
when the teeming of the stars, thermosetting featherweights,
become as holy as human life and stretch out,
hemorrhaging enigmas
for all their curious earthworms.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XVIII


When down from heaven

we arrive

As if a shadow of forest falls here
in otherwise sun
as if a pint of blood
smuggled into vineyards
by birds thirsting after iron.
As if a soft twitch
of a cat in dreams.

But with a stir from the
meadowlands - the Rumble Interior -
the rest of us can now assemble.

When down from heaven

we arrive:

an angel breaking loose,

the tenterhooks of heartstroke.

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XIX


Nature:
your light is weak if all other flowers on earth
can't even cure

this one

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XX


There are mountain peaks scarcely breathing
through Evergreen corpses
soaked in a grey abscess of sun:
The stillborns float delicately
in this tranquil half-light.
But inveterate nature drives them far from safe-keeping
and into caves and drudges
where they may have a tighter hold
on all sighs and future darkness

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XXII


The canticles hence night
night hex hence tangles
draped walls hence rain
the rain is hence an ocean
the ocean hence is glowing
hold her and hence lines
like the Whine and hence the autumn
autumn hence the contrails
the atoms hence a sky

these lines of life as various (this means you)
I could have lived with you in another world

the begging hence gardens
an eerie hence the rabbits
deadlight hence Saturn (rising)
dark questions hence distance
as if a hypochondriac lurking in the netherworlds
in the archipelago of a land you'll never visit
in the chasm of a dream you had as a child
the people you no longer talk to but still think of
the Alps and hence the stars
and the trek at the end of your eyes

*

Variation on a Theme by Hölderlin XXVII


A dream and hence we drift
uplinked hence the shatter
the shuttles hence the crash
and slumber hence the drowse
when hollow hence we weep
the hills and hence the morning
a hope and hence tomorrow

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I work for a poet, and I don’t understand who Hölderlin is.