Friedrich Hoelderlin was one of Europe's greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in these remarkable verse translations. This is a new expanded edition of Constantine's widely-praised Hoelderlin Selected Poems (1990/1996), containing many new translations as well as the whole of Hoelderlin's Sophocles (2001), in which he sought to create an equivalent English for Hoelderlin's extraordinary German recreations of the classic Greek verse plays. Constantine won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1997 for his translations of Hoelderlin. This new volume presents a substantial selection from the work of a poet who, writing around 1800, addresses us ever more urgently two centuries later. Hoelderlin translated all his writing life. Through translation he reached a poetic language of his own, so that much of his best poetry reads like a translation from elsewhere. He was intensely occupied with Sophocles in the winter of 1803-04. His versions of Oedipus Rex and Antigone (he worked at but never finished Oedipus at Colonus and Ajax) came out in the spring of 1804 and were taken, by the learned, as conclusive proof of his insanity. He was by then very near to mental collapse, but no one now would dismiss his work for that. He translated in a radical and idiosyncratic way, cleaving close to the Greek yet at the same time striving to interpret these ancient, foreign and - as he thought - sacred originals, and so bring them home into the modern day and age. Constantine has translated Hoelderlin's translations, carrying as much of their strangeness as possible into his English. The plays themselves need no introduction or apology. These double translations, links in literature from land to land and from age to age, demonstrate the vitality of ancient and modern poetic tradition. Carl Orff used Hoelderlin's texts for his operas Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), with the producers of recent DVDs of Orff's operas later choosing to use Constantine's texts for their English subtitles.

Despite his influence on such figures as Nietzsche, Rilke, Heidegger, and Celan, Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843) is only now being fully appreciated as perhaps the first great modern of European poetry. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, this annotated translation conveys the radical idiom and vision that continue to make him a contemporary. Richard Sieburth includes almost all Holderlin's late peoms in free rhythms from the years between 1801 and 1806, the period just prior to his hospitalization for insanity. Professor Sieburth's critical introduction discusses the poet's career, assesses his role as a link between classicism and romanticism, and explores Holderlin's ongoing importance to modern poetics and philosophy. Annotations explicate the individual poems, a number of which are translated into English for the first time.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is now recognized as one of Europe's supreme poets. Although he was scarcely known to his contemporaries and became deeply unstable in the latter part of his life, when he lived in virtual seclusion, he produced, writes Michael Hamburger, a poetic work 'rich in potentialities and possiblities for the "future ages" in which he placed his hope'. Hölderlin first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for Susette Gontard, the wife of a rich banker to whose children he was tutor. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of hymns exploring cosmology and history from mythological times to the discovery of America and his own era. The 'Canticles of Night', by contrast, include enigmatic fragments in an utterly unprecedented style which anticipates the Symbolists and Surrealists. Throughout his career, he struggled desperately to reconcile his faith in the power of nature, as embodied in the gods of ancient Greece, with conventional Christianity. In this superb bilingual selection, Hamburger has produced the definitive English version of a German literary giant.

The twenty-eight poems by Friedrich Hoelderlin presented here were most probably written during the last eleven years of his life from 1832 to 1843, after his bout of "madness". They present the following characteristics: their prosody is in iambic pentameters or hexameters, with feminine rhymes, their subject matter is impersonal contemplation. The importance in these poems of rhythm, and of sound more generally, brings to mind Hoelderlin's words, as reported by Bettina Von Arnim: "The laws of the mind are rhythmical. (...) As long as the poet is still looking for the metrical accent and is not carried forward by the rhythm, his poetry is without truth (...) what is poetry is the fact that the mind can only express itself in rhythms, that its language is rhythm". The goal of the translator has been to make this music "heard" as much as possible.

Friedrich Hoelderlin's Odes are built upon precise syllabic and rhythmic schemes, inspired by poetic forms originating from ancient Greece. In the hope of giving an idea of the music they produce, the present English translations strive to reproduce their metrics. They are speaking to us of a longing for the childhood of humankind, for Greece where the voice of the gods could still be heard, and of the danger lying in trying to find again that too powerful voice which is that of unmitigated reality, re-enchanted and therefore striking like lightning: "For they who lend us the fire of heaven, / The gods, with a holy pain endow us too". But it is in that danger that also lies salvation, however brief: "The savior I then hear in the night, I hear / Him kill, the liberator, and give life too".

One of Germany's greatest poets, Johann Christian Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843) was also a prose writer of intense feeling, intelligence and perception. This new translation of selected letters and essays traces the life and thoughts of this extraordinary writer. Hoelderlin's letters to friends and fellow writers such as Hegel, Schiller and Goethe describe his development as a poet, while those written to his family speak with great passion of his beliefs and aspirations, as well as revealing money worries and, finally, the tragic unravelling of his sanity. These works examine Hoelderlin's great preoccupations - the unity of existence, the relationship between art and nature and, above all, the spirit of the writer.