BELLES LETTRES Oeuvre Poetique Complete (Classiques Favoris)

This bilingual work is the only complete edition of Holderlin's poetry, and surpasses anything that has been produced in France on the author. Even above the figure of Goethe, many today regard Holderlin (1770-1843) as the greatest German poet. But the difference is so great between these two works, which were contemporaneous, that the comparison is hardly useful except to underline the strength, influence, and place gradually acquired by Holderlin: the greatest. He came into the world at the same time as Bonaparte, Hegel, and Beethoven. His family's wishes destined him to become a pastor, which led him to the Stift of Tubingen, where he became friends with Schelling and Hegel. One matter preoccupied him: finding a word capable of expressing the totality. What will one day haunt Mallarme and bring him to the brink of madness is Holderlin's obsession and leads him there. Exhausting himself in a quest for the whole but which takes the tearing as its presupposition, the poet nevertheless forces himself to become the pin of this insoluble contradiction from which, like fragmentary traces, fall words that have never been heard. The great hymns as much as the short works vibrate with a mysterious serenity within the tearing of this man who, as if he were a god, strives to embody himself the suture of which the broken universe is incapable. Never had the soul of a thinker poetically grappling with the impossible absolute formulation of the Absolute resonated in this way. Digging into this impossibility until his personality collapsed, a few serious crises took away Holderlin's lucidity around the age of 35. He spent the remaining forty years of his life in a boarding school with a good man from Tubingen, in a small tower on the banks of the Neckar. Although he has not ceased to be admired by a few readers, Holderlin was still virtually unknown a century after his death. Barely a generation ago, in France, his name meant nothing to the general cultured public. Then, in 2005, Francois Garrigue's admirable edition appeared. Unlike the translations published until then, which took their ease with them, F. Garrigue is attentive to the slightest accents of Holderlin's rhythm and its most subtle intonations. Under the eyes of the original text, the work truly appears for the first time. This great book quickly went out of print but was never republished. Here it is again at last.