Many interpretations of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” (“Remembrance”) have taken for granted that the hymn’s last verse might have been a paraphrasis and creative translation of Pindar’s ode Pythian 3. In the philological scholarship of the poem, it was Günter Zuntz who took notice of the analogical semblance to shed light on “Andenken” final verse as something more than mere imitation: “Never, however – unlike Pindar who does so frequently – does Hölderlin begins a hymn with a praise of the Muse, which would be an imitation, but not an analogy…the “Andeken” conclusion, “Yet what remains, the poets found” – corresponds almost verbatim to Pindar’s Pythian 3 final verse…” [1]. If we reread Pindar’s Pythian 3 from Race translation (Loeb, 1997, 263), we encounter the following verse: “Excellence endures in glorious songs for a long time. But few can win them easily”. If on Hölderlin’s side we encounter the “remnant” of the sayable in language, in Pindar’s ode we are presented with the endurance of a “glorious song” of the festivity that is carried out in struggle and forward in time. 

Ignoring the common place interpretation that assumes that Hölderlin’s concluding verse is a distortion of the translation from the Greek, Zuntz goes to note that the pindaric remnant in Hölderlin’s hymn effectively “constitutes in essence an analogy – not an imitation; it rises from the affinity of spirit not from an act of self-effacement” [2]. This analogical relation with the past, and thus the memory of Antiquity speaks directly to the modality of the improper that is common to the hermeneutical debate on the poem. All things considered, and following Zuntz’s hermeneutics, we could say that the pindaric intrusion in the concluding verse is a way in which the poet is enacting the harmonious poetic creation as it finds external resonance in tradition. As Hölderlin notes in his difficult note “On the mode  of proceeding of the poetic spirit” (“Die Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes”): “Put yourself through free choice in harmonious opposition with an outer sphere, just as you in yourself are in harmonious opposition, by nature, but unrecognizably, as long you remain in yourself” [3]. The solicitation of the irreducible distance from the creation is always the preparatory transitional space of poetic cohabitation that rejects a notion of life consolidated in modern representation. 

In this sense, the poetic spirit in Höderlin is a keeper of the analogia of the incurable separation between the language and gods; this means that remembrance is only possible because there is an abyss cured by the song. And here the maximum proximity between the German poet with Pindar comes to the forefront, as the distance that separates him from the inaccessible world of the Greek means that one cannot longer proceed from myth, but rather from the “remnant” of the festivity of the song that seeks the harmonious through expropriation with nonbeing. What “remains”, via analogia, is the flowing of the song as “capacity for the solitary school for the world” in postmythic historical time [4]. The poet does not “remember” what the substantive essence of the song as if the past is a reservoir of retrievable expenses; rather, what remains is the possibility of what must be said “amid the many things that remain to be borne in the long time and to be said in song” [5].  The song is a prelogical meandering that overflows reality because it is persistently remembered. 

And yet, this is a song without ideal form, because after the tragic age of the titans “we lack song that loosens the mind” as Hölderlin notes [6]. This poetic tension conquers and frees itself from the world at the risk of absolute loss. The analogia musicae retains the highest of the divine in suspended disbelief, which according to Hölderlin occurs “at a moment when man forgets both himself and the God, and in a sacred manner, turns himself around like a traitor” [7]. Here we are already at a distance from Pindar’s verbal testimony for Hieron and glorious fame, since what “remains” is the pure event of the song that transfigures presence so that “the memory of the heavenly ones does not die out” [8]. 

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Notes 

1. Günther Zuntz. Über Hölderlins Pindar-Übersetzung (Thiele & Schwarz, 1928), 75.

2. Ibid., 76.

3. Friedrich Höderlin. “When the poet is once in command of the spirit…”, Essays and Letters (Penguin Books, 2009), 290.

4. Ibid., “Pindar Fragments”, 334. 

5. Martin Heidegger. Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” (Indiana University Press, 2018), 165. 

6. Friedrich Höderlin. “The Titans”, in Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Books, 1998), 283. 

7. Friedrich Höderlin. “Notes on the Oedipus”, in Essays and Letters (Penguin Books, 2009), 324.

8. Ibid., 324.