Hölderlin and Poetic Transport

Dear Colleagues,

O Fittige gieb uns, treuesten Sinns
Hinüberzugehen und wiederzukehren.

                                    Hölderlin, Patmos

O pinions give us, with minds most faithful
To cross over and to return.

                                    (Transl. by Michael Hamburger)

This Humanities Special Issue on Friedrich Hölderlin offers a welcome opportunity to bring the current research on this singularly important German poet to a worldwide readership. With the hope of assembling a somewhat cohesive collection of essays, I have looked for a thread which both extends deeply into the rich complex of Hölderlin’s writings and which offers contributors sufficient leeway to explore a wide variety of approaches to these texts. The notion of “transport”—in the sense of crossing, transition, transfer, metaphor, translation—leads to some of the most significant issues found in Hölderlin’s writings. To name just a few: the problem of poetic vision as transport, ecstacy; the poet’s increasingly fraught task of mediating between the gods and the saeculum; cultural transfer (translatio studii) from East to West, from Greece to Hesperia; metaphor as both crossing (Übergang) and deviance/hybridicity; Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic practice of translation and its crossing into his poetry; the vexing, ideologically charged question of how to edit his later, palimpsestic manuscripts and convey them into print. Essays treating the translation of Hölderlin’s texts; the reception of his work by other poets and thinkers; the crossing of his work into other media (music, visual arts, theater, film), will also be welcome.

Prof. Dr. Priscilla Hayden-Roy
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.