Winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize

Friedrich Holderlin was one of Europe's greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in these remarkable verse translations.

This is a new edition of Constantine's widely-praised Holderlin Selected Poems, containing several new translations, including one of the great elegy 'Bread and Wine'. Constantine won the European Poetry Translation Award in 1997 for this edition. The odes and hymns are more fully represented and there are further extracts, in an equivalent English, from Holderlin's extraordinary German versions of Sophocles. Notes on the poems have also been expanded. This new volume is a stimulating introduction to the work of a poet who, writing around 1800, addresses us ever more urgently two centuries later.

"Hˆlderlin is a poet we can read with our own atrocious times in mind. He is a deeply religious poet whose fundamental tenet is absence and the threat of meaninglessness. He confronted hopelessness as few writers have, he was what Rilke called 'exposed'; but there is no poetry like his for the constant engendering of hope, for the expression, in the body and breath of poems, of the best and most passionate aspirations."
David Constantine

"Constantine goes for an 'equivalence of spirit' in a more familiar idiom. This is at once a bold and humble undertaking, and has produced poetry of a remarkable luminosity and intensity, written in rhythms and cadences which recreate, both in their extremities of grief and their urgent hope, the immediacy of the original."
Karen Leeder, Oxford Poetry