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Paul Celan’s interest in the work of Friedrich Hölderlin, both in its own right and as mediated through Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger, is well-documented. Indeed, fifty years ago, in his own fiftieth (and last) year, Celan marked a similar occasion to the one celebrated in this issue by reading his unpublished works in Stuttgart to commemorate Hölderlin’s 200th birthday: March 21st, 1970 (Böschenstein 68). On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Celan’s birth and the 250th anniversary of Hölderlin’s, I want to invert this direction of interpretation and draw on Celan to suggest a slight shift in understandings of Hölderlin. In particular, I use the contrast in Celan between music and conversation to sharpen our ears for a similar distinction in Hölderlin, one that reveals ambivalences in his ambitious poetics of song (Gesang) as uniting the divine, nature, and the human in doing so and hints at an enclave of particularly human speech, described perhaps most clearly as dialogue/conversation (Gespräch) but encompassing dialogue, speech (Reden) or speaking (sprechen). My argument proceeds in three stages: first, I explicate Celan’s dialogic poetics and their complex relation to art (Kunst) in the Meridian speech, linking the fraught term Kunst to Celan’s seemingly contradictory attitudes towards music. Next, I give an overview of the appearances of music and dialogue in Hölderlin and outline the relation of both to the topos of Gesang in his poems and essays. Finally, I turn to Hölderlin’s poems “Heimkunft” and “Andenken” to illuminate the tension between the divine praising in song and more human, finite, and modest modes of speech.1
Celan: “oft ist es ein verzweifeltes Gespräch”
Celan’s Meridian speech is an enormously complex interweaving of allusions, quotations, and intermediaries that, like the speeches of previous and subsequent prizewinners, engages extensively with the work of Georg Büchner. Celan establishes what appears to be a firm opposition between a negatively inflected art (Kunst) and a positively connoted poetry (Dichtung).2 The speech opens by introducing art (“die Kunst”) as “ein marionettenhaftes jambisch-fünffüßiges und— diese Eigenschaft ist auch, durch den Hinweis auf Pygmalion und sein Geschöpf, mythologisch belegt—kinderloses Wesen” (Celan III 187). Art...