Translating Centaurs: Notes on Hölderlin’s ‘The Life-Giving’

In The Life-Giving, the last of the nine Pindar Fragments Hölderlin translated between 1803 and 1805, the myth of the Centaurs as wild, brutal creatures is transfigured into what appears to be a straightforward narrative of the movement of rivers, symbolizing the ritual foundation of culture and the emergence of civilization out of chaos. Such linearity, however, is called into question by the different ways in which the three parts of Hölderlin’s text are made to interact: title, translation and interpretation. In his commentary on the fragment, Hölderlin speaks of ‘the concept of the centaurs’ as something that can be fully grasped only as it emerges from ‘the spirit’ of a river and seeks to uncover the places in nature where ‘its image’ is to be found. This interweaving of concept and image, rather than representing a dialectical or evolutionary conception of history, is rooted in a radical understanding of translation as a complex self-reflexive process that ultimately redefines the materiality and the visuality of poetic writing.