In an essay that remained unpublished at the time of his death, “Wrathful Translation: The Sophocles of Hölderlin,” Tom McCall returns to a subject that had attracted his attention early in his career: the encounter of German Romanticism with Greece.

In this essay, McCall focuses on those translations of Sophocles by Hölderlin which, as Walter Benjamin reminds us in "The Task of the Translator,” were considered “monstrous” in the nineteenth century (1.260).

Rather than discount this “monstrousness” and normalize it in the context of the critical and literary theory of the later twentieth-century, McCall examines this monstrous aspect as the effect of an unresolved problematic within Sophocles’ account of the tragic, a problematic subsequent literary history and criticism has sought to subdue, if not make disappear, through its “tragic” accounts of the history of tragedy. Relying on Hölderlin’s remarks to his translations of Sophocles, McCall takes another approach that pits Greek tragedy against its reception as it is embodied in the modern project of translation. This project (not to mention its evolving telos, a world literature) has demanded a transparency and accuracy which has had the result of denying the critical challenge of its source through what Mallarmé called “the false appearance of a present” (310). What McCall sets out to demonstrate is that within the practice of translation, on which the survival of literature as a cultural form has been increasingly dependent since Romanticism, there is a tension that possesses a crucial, critical potential.

For McCall, this critical function no longer depends on the old cliché of translation studies which states that any translation is predicated on the loss of the original—as if translation were an elegiac exercise always mourning an impossible task and as if solace could be found in the necessity of endlessly repeating this task.

Hölderlin’s emphasis on the “wrathfulness” of Oedipus defines the tragic experience according to an affective state that runs counter to the tradition in which tragedy has become the carrier of an ahistorical, human truth whose affirmation informs the task of cultural interpretation and its practice of translation. Against such a tradition, Hölderlin points to Oedipus’s wrath or anger (both translate Zorn) as the result of a desire for knowledge that cannot grasp what it seeks to attain. Instead, it experiences an “enormity” (das Ungeheure) that the hero cannot resolve or reconcile. McCall summarizes Hölderlin’s account of this irreconcilable enormity as follows: ‘As the human vehicle of this energy, Oedipus is driven mad, enraged in “the mad and frantic questing for a consciousness.” Driven by “wrathful curiosity (zornige Neugier) [. . .] the knowledge-desire (Wissen)” of Oedipus “provokes itself to know more than it can bear or grasp.” (16)’

By focusing on the force of this moment, McCall asserts Hölderlin’s resistance to the long shadow cast upon tragedy by the kind of formal, structural device that Aristotle introduces in the Poetics when he insists on katharsis as the crucial outcome of the tragedy. Indeed, Aristotle’s formalization of tragedy and its leading concept, katharsis, have become so embedded within the critical discussion of tragedy that one begins to suspect that what is at stake in this account of tragedy is a katharsis whose task is to prevent the infection of critical interpretation by the kind of emotional states (pity, fear, etc.) that this critical concept is called upon to purge from tragedy, and, by so doing, secure the pleasure of a mimetic and historically transmissible knowledge.

Hölderlin, by turning our attention away from such a katharsis and back to the tragic, refuses the role of this structuring concept as a means of re-establishing the link between knowledge and pleasure on which the origin of Aristotle’s mimetic account of tragedy rests.

For Hölderlin, the suffering of the tragic takes a different path, one that does not entertain the mediation and disappearance of sorrow through joy. Rather, this suffering follows what Hölderlin refers to in his remarks on Oedipus’s exchange with Kreon as a time that “tears apart.” Hölderlin writes (here cited in McCall’s stronger—Hölderlin-like one might say—translation): “the true [. . .] Spirit suffers in wrathful unmeasure (im zornigen Unmaas), which, in destruction-joy (zerstörungsfroh), only follows lacerating time” (der reissenden Zeit nur folgt)”.

In this sentence, McCall’s attention falls upon the adverb, “only” in order to emphasize that the tragic figure is left with nothing but time to follow. McCall writes, “the hero literally ‘follows time’ by rejecting and renouncing all meanings, in such a way that consciousness and self-identity cannot be consolidated, a failure that is, precisely, the spirit of tragedy, the spirit of (the) time” (16). McCall’s identification of this moment of failure provides the basis for a literal relation to time on the condition of a rejection and renunciation of “all meanings.” It is as if time, as what tears apart, has completed its task, leaving behind an empty time that Oedipus can only follow now that the organization of time according to knowledge has met an impasse. Such a moment provides tragedy with a moment of culmination, which, in the later and Christian-influenced development of the genre, will be solidified into the demand that the tragic hero must die—until such a demand begins to border on farce with the arrival of the revenge tragedy and, later, the Baroque mourning-play. But, in a subsequent and more precise remark, McCall recognizes that neither the rejection nor renunciation of all meanings, in which this moment of culmination occurs, permits the separation of time from its “tearing apart.” Accordingly, the time which tears apart remains a time that has never really been separated from the “tearing” in which it appears. This is because such time is not an object of knowledge but the condition on which the representation of knowledge rests.

The rejection and renunciation of “all meanings” is therefore an act that must submit to this condition with the result that it must also be renewed constantly lest this rejection and renunciation of all meanings should be allowed to satisfy, albeit negatively, the desire it cannot fulfill.

McCall’s reading of Oedipus’s wrath and the time it follows is undertaken in order to isolate a critical-historical sequence, namely, the “constant collapsing—and intertwining—of symbol and allegory” (20). In doing so, his strong and violent translation of “reissenden Zeit” as “lacerating time” brings to the fore an undeveloped aspect of his reading of Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus”: an experience of time that occurs as affect.

In the context of Hölderlin’s remarks, this experience offers an understanding of time no longer confined to a succession—which Hölderlin associates with “lawful calculation”—that can be “repeated reliably.” This is precisely the lawful succession over which Aristotle’s katharsis would stand guard.

Against this succession, Hölderlin distinguishes a content that the “lawful calculation” cannot renounce or reject and that remains in a relation of balance to this calculation. It is through the inability to renounce this content that the tragic and the elegiac coincide. In what follows, I will take up this coincidence in order to question the history of a genre whose embedded traditional practices—namely a recourse to the pastoral and an experience of time as mourning or lamentation—have given rise to a generic pattern that also aims at the katharsis of emotion. If read according to this pattern, the elegy and its tradition does little more than conform to the Aristotelian account of tragedy; it allows a loss to generate the pleasure of mimetic knowledge by defining that loss according to the needs of the historical present and the future it demands (pleasure, mimesis, etc.). But, in recognizing this pattern in a genre that is older than tragedy, are we not also recognizing that what Aristotle has given to the tradition of understanding tragedy is itself an elegiac account that will reach its culmination in George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy? If so, then the critical success of the Aristotelian account of tragedy will have removed any other account of the suffering and the task of mourning within the elegiac.

Walter Benjamin’s study of the transformation of the tragic in his Origin of the German Tragic Drama draws attention to this removal of mourning when he remarks that “Aristotle’s Poetics is silent on mourning as the resonance of the tragic” (OGT 118; translation modified).

This resonance, Benjamin argues, occurs nowhere with more significance than in the German Baroque drama, where “mournfulness,” like Hölderlin’s “wrathful translation,” registers the “enormity” at the core of Athenian tragedy. McCall alludes to this resonance when, in a taxonomy of the emotional terms through which the western critical tradition has confronted its own embedded meanings, he refers to Benjamin’s account of modern tragic consciousness in the “mourning-plays” as “another modulation” in which “‘wrath’ is toned down into the less rabid but steadier Trauer (mourning) and melancholy.” If this modulation is followed according to Benjamin’s account of mourning as the resonance of the tragic, then tragedy is no longer conceivable as a singular moment determining the value of a cultural tradition, but is rather the intensification of what Hölderlin would understand as the counter-measure through which history is exposed to the “time that tears apart.” In this case, since the modulation between “wrath” and mourning becomes a matter of emotional intensity, the tragic “wrathful unmeasure” that requires critical and historical katharsis is still present in the act of mourning.

In the elegy, Hölderlin’s “unmeasure” can be (and has been) easily displaced into an individual subject’s experience of loss, which can take the form of a death, an absent lover, or the effect of exile. But, what is out of measure is not such a loss; it belongs only to the past. What is out of measure is always so in the present, that is, in the time that elegy dwells on through mourning and lamentation. If the significance of this moment, what occurs within it, and its relation to “tearing-apart time” is to be approached, then close attention should be paid to the complete sentence in which Hölderlin introduces this understanding of time. Hölderlin writes: ‘Hence, later on, in the scene with Kreon, the wonderfully wrathful curiosity, because thought, ungovernable and loaded with tragic secrets, becomes insecure, and the true certain spirit suffers in wrathful unmeasure, suspicion, destruction-joy, only follows lacerating time. (“Remarks on Oedipus”; translation mine).

’ What is out of measure—that is, what not conform to the measured relation of reconciliation—is experienced in a combination, “destruction-joy.” This combination is not only outside the balance of opposed terms (joy/unhappiness), but it is also what follows a time defined by the power to “rip,” “tear,” and “rupture”—all senses of the verb from which the adjective “reiβend” is formed. The recognition of time as something that tears arises at the moment when thought becomes ungovernable and insecure—the moment when spirit suffers in “wrathful unmeasure.” “Destruction-joy” alone follows such a time. As such, it remains unpurgeable, since the joy that should follow from the catharsis of a destructive emotion also carries destruction with it. Here, destruction is not something that already mediates joy, as is the case in Aristotle’s Poetics. Furthermore, wrath is not synonymous with this destruction either; wrath arises because of the inseparability of destruction and joy in their unreconciled relation.

In his “Remarks on Oedipus,” Hölderlin refers to this tearing-apart as a wrath that boundlessly unites, on the one hand, natural force and, on the other, what is “most inward” in the human (gränzenlos die Naturmacht und des Menschen Innerstes im Zorn eins wird). In describing how this boundless uniting occurs, Hölderlin uses precisely the language of purification that has been used to translate Aristotle’s katharsis, but he does so with entirely different effect. Hölderlin writes: “boundless union purifies itself through boundless separation” (gränzenlose Eineswerden durch gränzenloses Scheiden sich reinigt) (FHA 16.257).

Unlike Aristotelian katharsis, this purification maintains each element of the joy-destruction pair in a balance. The Aristotelian purification asserts that the disturbing elements (those that contribute to unmeasure) can be overcome by union, that destruction can be transformed or “purified” by joy, that the emotions of pity, fear, etc., can be removed by the subsequent reassertion of the pleasure taken in mimetic knowledge.

Hölderlin’s account of a boundless union purified through boundless separation demands that the joy-destruction pair occurs as irreconcilable confrontation and that this confrontation is experienced in an emotional state that has no counter-resolution. Such irreconcilability confirms the extent to which this relation cannot be assimilated by its subject as an object of knowledge. To do so is to resolve tragic experience into a historical sequence whereby joy is removed from its temporal co-presence with destruction. Only through this removal can joy claim a historical time that is proper to itself (historical because this moment is defined only in relation to what is temporally separate from it). Hölderlin counters this kathartic separation by defining the relation of destruction and joy in terms of a purification that maintains rather than denies the tearing-apart of time embodied in the joy-destruction pair. In short, for Hölderlin, the tragic is what witnesses a present in which two forces are bound irreconcilably to one another in the same time. Separating these forces and maintaining their separation is the task of a history that seeks to produce an imitation of time in which both the present and its future find satisfaction in the irreversible pastness of the past. Such a past would be so irretrievably lost that it may always reappear in the present in the safe form of translations so much less wrathful than what they translate.

The preceding questions have surfaced in the reception of Adonais through the tendency to read Shelley’s elegy either as a failure or as an act of writing that the elegiac can barely survive. Of the first, the most exemplary is the judgment of W. H. Auden (who otherwise lauded the success of poets in writing elegies) that Adonais is “the only elegy I know of which seems to me a failure” (147). Auden’s measure of failure indicates that this elegy is a singular example in the genre (rather than the object of Auden’s repeated antipathy to Shelley). If the context in which Auden’s judgment is expressed provides any clue, what constitutes such a failure appears to be a mournfulness that exceeds its subject.

Peter Sacks, who places Adonais at the limit of elegiac writing, is less restrained in describing such an excess when he writes that “Adonais marks an extremity that no later elegy would reach” (165). Both Auden and Sacks react to an “unmeasure” in Adonais. While this unmeasure is the clear sign of a failure for Auden, it is not so clear in the case of Sacks who, despite recognizing an extremity that threatens the genre, still allows Shelley to have accomplished many of the goals embedded in the elegiac tradition, including what is perhaps the most important of these goals: “[Shelley] has expressed and purged his anger” (165). The admission of “tragic” language here, as well as the vocabulary of Aristotle’s account of tragedy (purgation), indicates how much Sacks still retains the “lawful calculation” through which tragedy has been read despite the evidence of its texts, not to mention Hölderlin’s corrective which McCall brings to the fore in his account of the former’s “wrathful” translations. But if an inability to experience anything other than this “lawful calculation” is the result of Shelley’s elegy, even when it goes to the edge of its own ruin, then the affective moment that Hölderlin identifies as central to tragic experience and its account of time would also be removed. In the more exacting terms of Benjamin’s account of mourning, this pattern removes the intensification of intention in the elegy, which is not the same thing as the achievement of that intention or its near destruction. In both these cases, the temporal relation between the object of suffering and the language of mourning in which that suffering takes place would be obscured.

As a result of Earl Wasserman’s essays on this poem, this challenge became defined around his attempt to fold the Hebraic adonai within the always desired classical genealogy that elegy has demanded.

The challenge Wasserman first introduced just over fifty years ago remains a critical reference point, as a recent essay indicates by its enlisting of an extensive, associative philology in order to marginalize the Hebraic adonai. As a means of resolving this issue, such an associative philological account provides no more persuasive an argument than the absence of any evidence documenting Shelley’s knowledge of Hebrew.

What is at stake here is the desire to resolve the absence of any verifiable indirect—never mind direct—naming of its addressee, or, in other words, to return propriety to what appears in the form of a proper name. In this respect, the challenge embodied in the name Adonais functions in relation to Keats in the same way that adonai does in relation to Yahweh in the Hebrew Old Testament: both name what cannot appear in itself and certainly not in the time in which this naming occurs. In both cases, what is emphasized is the temporality of address, which is precisely the question that informs Shelley’s engagement with the elegiac across this poem, not just in its title. In contrast to this question, the dislodging of adonai, or even its appropriation in the name of evoking symbolic archetypes (as in Wasserman), become examples of a restrictive reading that is more confident than Shelley of how and where the elegiac can place its subject.

Before any ascribing of meaning to adonai, the presence of this word in Shelley’s title complicates the traditional use of a classical name in order to evoke a setting (above all, classical Greek pastoral) that promises a transmutation of the mournful task that defines the elegiac. In this respect, the name Adonais is not comparable to Milton’s substitution of an already-existing classical name, Lycidas, for his drowned friend, Edward King. Yet, already in Milton’s substitution it is possible to discern the task that the name Adonais exposes in the classically influenced elegiac tradition: translation, namely, the transposition of a subject into a name whose existence invokes the solace of an idealized world. Two senses of translation are involved in this task in its classical adoption: the prevailing modern use of this word which involves the task of finding one word for another across linguistic boundaries, and the etymological sense of a transfer from one location to another.

This second sense has figured prominently in the elegy as a means of invoking a literary setting and a place in which human life is no longer defined by the complications of its temporality. Such a sense gives the elegy its generic tendency to relocate death in a topography, a tendency that survives its classical models—as is the case with Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in which even the act of writing an elegy, never mind the subject it addresses, is translated into a very specific space. Within this tradition, the difference Shelley introduces in the name “Adonais” is to pose the central question that informs elegiac writing: how and where to locate the name this writing invokes so that it may translate what Benjamin calls “the empty mask of mourning” into a figure for an idealized object and, in so doing, transform the loss and mourning occasioned by this mask as if it were an object of satisfying contemplation.

The task Shelley faces in Adonais, as the opening line indicates, is one in which both mourning and translation are implicated: mourning because of the initial act of weeping expressed by Shelley; translation, since this line, except for one word, repeats the opening of Bion’s “Epitaph on Adonis”: “I weep for Adonais—he is dead!”

For Shelley to open his elegy with another’s words, Bion’s, in the place of his own, and to do so in an elegy that addresses its subject in the name of another, is already to affirm an aspect of the Hebrew use of adonai as the generalized issue from which Shelley’s elegy proceeds: the impropriety of a name that never had or no longer has a temporal subject. The effect of this issue is immediately present in the second line of Shelley’s poem as Shelley diverges from the repetition that occurs in Bion’s “Epitaph on Adonis.” Where Bion’s announcement of his own mourning is followed by the repeated antiphonal response “Fair Adonis is dead” made by the “Loves,” Shelley’s version takes a different turn. No antiphonal response is made to his mourning as a means of affirming that mourning. Instead, Shelley gives a command to mourn:

Already the task faced by this elegy can be discerned in its the opening declaration as “I weep” is interrupted in the second line when its verb is suspended subjectless and the subject, “I,” is replaced by the interjection “O” which stands in the place where the subject formerly stood (I weep / O, weep). The tenuous hold of a subject on this elegy is only increased by the imperative. To whom is it addressed? The subsequent lines provide some clarification when Shelley identifies a universalized “we” whose answer to the command, “weep,” are tears that remain ineffective:

though our tears

Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! (2-3)

From the very beginning of Shelley’s elegy, the task of mourning is not a facile unbinding or recovery of life from death; it is not, in this case, a project that aims at a successful figuration of death in a mask that the living demand to contemplate even if it operates under that imperative. This is why the empty “O” of the second line can be read in the place of the “I” from which elegy and the experience of loss proceeds and never more so than when it is falsely figured in a collective experience on whose behalf the poet claims to speak. This interjected “O” also has its own role to play in this elegy of displaced beginnings. Following immediately upon the word “dead” at the end of the first line, the second line which makes the command to weep begins with a letter that suggests there is something else displaced in this poem’s address to death, and like the title, Adonais, it is a matter of a letter. As observed above, the second word of the second line is again “weep” but the place of “I” in the first line is occupied by a letter which stands facing us with an emptiness that points to its failure to symbolize the death this elegy addresses. Absent from this “O” is the line that transforms it into theta (Θ) which, when used alone, stands for the Greek word for death, Θανατος (thanatos).

And, lest we miss the play of these letters, its least obvious one (the absent theta) is precisely what occurs at the beginning of the immediate following phrase (“though”) and the opening word of the next line (“Thaw”). Each begins with the letters by which theta is transliterated, thus forming a sequence at the beginning of the first three lines that runs “I [. . .] O [. . .] Th [Θ] [. . .]”: the subject’s address to death (“I weep for Adonis—he is dead”), the interruption of that address by an interjection and command that does not identify the subject to which it is addressed, then the obscured appearance of what has been displaced all along but to which the poem is bound: death. Death, which occasions the subject of this elegy, does not appear, but is separated and dispersed so that it unbinds the traditional pattern of elegy in a way that does not presume that it, its language, or its images, can be taken for granted. The fate of this latter element, the image, is forcefully present as a result of the “frost” that holds the head of Adonais in its bind in the form an unidentifiable figure, “head,” that not only remains torn apart from the tears it provokes, but also provides the sole bodily part in which the subject of the poem’s address is figured.

When such purification or catharsis is not possible, the question of who mourns and for what comes to the fore. It does so precisely because the elegy mourns for the scene it produces as if it were a past that could be reenacted or translated into another place, another time. Here, the full force of the name of Shelley’s elegy is felt but not simply for its challenge to the critical demand that has taken hold of genre: whence is it and why? What is at stake in this name, Adonais, is that it is more flower than “corse.”

To read Adonais as more “corse” than “flower” would be, according to Benjamin’s account of mourning, to remain unnamed since it is only from the name that mourning can arise (“To be named [. . .] remains perhaps always a presentiment of mourning”). To demand the body of Keats as the subject of this elegy’s name is to misunderstand that we mourn for the name that remains, for the name whose meaning is granted by the death of what it names in its act of naming. Such naming points to an experience of death in the only form that this experience can take: a presentiment of mourning. As another poet, this time one who takes the name of Adonis, writes in a poem addressing yet another unnamed poet, such a death is always preceded by a word, its name. It is for the name of such a word that we mourn and, as these lines by Adonis recognize, it is in the necessity of that mourning that the tragic remains, as long as we do not forget McCall’s admonition and mistake the painting for a mirror: