This issue takes its inspiration from the writings on translation, tragedy and twentieth century literary theory in the work of the late Romanticist and comparatist Tom McCall, who died suddenly in January 2011. Three noted Romanticist and literary theorists, taking off from specific critical essays by McCall, explore the centrality of Greek tragedy as it emerges in Romantic writing (especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin), for philosophy, literature, and literary theory. Passing between the Greek and the German (notably in Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles), and between the literary and the philosophical, these papers offer new and original insights into the complex ways in which Romantic writing was bound to the translation and interpretation of Greek writing and the unique manner in which twentienth century literary theory emerged from the Romantic reflection on the relation between language and the emergence (and suspension) of thought.
Abstract
McCall’s essay proposes that Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles allegorize the process of their own translation. McCall focuses in particular on Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone, showing how Hölderlin’s rendering of the play turns the problem of the burial of the corpse into a figure for issues of textuality and meaning in the movement between Greek and German.
Abstract
This essay interprets Tom McCall’s “The Case of the Missing Body,” expanding on the implications of McCall’s suggestion that Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles allegorize the process of translation itself. I examine several key points, or figures, in McCall’s essay, including the problem of “contact” between the immaterial and the material, the problem of the “fatelessness” in the German relation to the Greek and the problem of the “unthinkable” at the heart of the translation process.
Abstract
McCall’s essay provides a summary and interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s early “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.” McCall argues that this essay provides an anti-aesthetic mode of reading that ties it to a tradition of “poetic calculation” (rather than “inspiration”). McCall shows how the notion of calculaton and “caesura” are bound up with Hölderlin’s own theoretical writing and poetic practice.
Abstract
This essay addresses the stakes and details of the idea and actuality of philology, broadly and narrowly understood, in its application especially to the work of Friedrich Hölderlin. Hölderlin presents an extreme challenge for philological understanding and the most compelling responses tend to be examples of "extreme philology" exemplified in the words of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Tom McCall. One particular focus is on the under-scrutinized concept of "das Gedichtete" that Benjamin (almost) invents to help make sense of what is going on in Hölderlin's poetry.
Abstract
McCall’s essay reflects on Hölderlin’s theory of translation as it relates both to translation and to a poetics. He renames this mode of translation “wrathful,” drawing on Hölderlin’s use of the word Zorn to describe (and translate) Oedipus’s wrathful quest for what is “more than consciousness can bear or grasp.” McCall argues that wrath signals the process of “disowning the signifier,” a process that takes placed (and is allegorized) in Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles and is linked to the “disarticulation of the symbolic core of tragedy.”
Abstract
This essay draws on Tom McCalls’ theory of “wrathful translation” in his McCall’s essay of that title and explores its significance through a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elegy “Adonais.” I argue that this poem puts into question the quest for sense as it draws upon a tradition of affects deeply bound up with the problem of their own translation.