One thing that strikes me about Hölderlin as a translator, and about Francis Bacon as a painter, and for that matter about Joan of Arc as a soldier of God, is the high degree of self-consciousness that is present in their respective manipulations of catastrophe. Hölderlin had begun to be preoccupied with translating Sophokles in 1796 but did not publish Oedipus and Antigone until 1804. Judging his first versions “not living (lebendig) enough,” he subjected them to years of compulsive revision, forcing the texts from strange to more strange. Here is Hölderlinian scholar David Constantine’s description of this effort:

He warped the original to fit his own idiosyncratic understanding not only of it but also of his obligation in translating it …. Choosing always the more violent word, so that the texts are stitched through with the vocabulary of excess …. he was also voicing those forces in his own psychology which, very soon, would carry him over the edge. And in uttering them did he not aid and abet them? It is the old paradox: the better the poet says these things, the better he arms them against himself. So well put, are they not irresistible? (10)

Irresistible at least was the process of this violence. For it is remarkable that Hölderlin began at this time to revise also his own early work and he went about it the same way, that is, he would scrutinize finished poems for the “not living enough” parts then translate these into some other language, also German, that lay silent inside his own. As if he were moving along a line, ripping the lids off words and plunging his arms in, he met his madness coming the other way.

Yet it was not altogether a chance meeting. From early on Hölderlin had a theory of himself. This from a letter to his friend Neuffer in 1798, which begins with the sentence, “Livingness (lebendigkeit) in poetry is now what most preoccupies my mind,” then goes on to this lucid analysis of his own balance of being:

…. because I am more destructible than some other men, I must seek all the more to derive some advantage from what has a destructive effect on me … I must accept it in advance as indispensable material, without which my most inward being cannot ever entirely present itself. I must assimilate it, to arrange it … as shadows to my light … as subordinate tones among which the tone of my soul springs out all the more livingly.(11)

This from a letter to Hölderlin’s mother from his friend Sinclair in 1804:

I am not the only one—there are six or eight people besides me who have met Hölderlin and are convinced that what appears to be mental derangement is in fact nothing of the sort but is rather a manner of expressing himself which he has deliberately adopted for very cogent reasons.(12)

This from an 1804 review of his Sophokles translations:

What do you make of Hölderlin’s Sophokles? Is the man mad or does he just pretend or is his Sophokles a veiled satire on bad translators? (13)

Maybe Hölderlin was pretending to be mad the whole time, I don’t know. What fascinates me is to see his catastrophe, at whatever level of consciousness he chose it, as a method extracted from translation, a method organized by the rage against cliché. After all what else is one’s own language but a gigantic cacophonous cliché. Nothing has not been said before. The templates are set. Adam long ago named all the creatures. Reality is in chains. When Francis Bacon approaches a white canvas its empty surface is already filled with the whole history of painting up to that moment, it is a compaction of all the clichés of representation already extant in the painter’s world, in the painter’s head, in the probability of what can be done on this surface. Screens are in place making it hard to see anything but what one expects to see, hard to paint what isn’t already there. Bacon is not content to deflect or beguile cliché by some painterly trick, he wants to assassinate it right there on his canvas. So he solicits the interventions of chance. He makes what he calls “free marks” on the canvas, both at the beginning when it is white and later when it is partly painted or completely painted. He uses brushes, sponges, sticks, rags, his hand or just throws a can of paint at it. His intention is to disrupt its probability and to short-circuit his own control of the disruption. His product is a catastrophe, which he will then proceed to manipulate into an image that he can call real. Or he may just hang it up:

David Sylvester: You would never end a painting by suddenly throwing something at it. Or would you?

Francis Bacon: Oh yes. In that triptych on the shoulder of the figure being sick into the basin, there’s a whip of white paint that goes like that. Well I did that at the very last moment and I just left it.(14)

Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isn’t the simple fact of the matter that she was bored? Adam had just performed the primordial act of naming, had taken the first step towards imposing on the wide-open pointless meaningless directionless dementia of the real a set of clichés that no one would ever dislodge, or want to dislodge—they are our human history, our edifice of thought, our answer to chaos. Eve’s instinct was to bite this answer in half.

Most of us, given a choice between chaos and naming, between catastrophe and cliché, would choose naming. Most of us see this as a zero sum game—as if there were no third place to be: something without a name is commonly thought not to exist. And here is where we can discern the benevolence of translation. Translation is a practice, a strategy, or what Hölderlin calls “a salutary gymnastics of the mind,”(15) that does seem to give us a third place to be. In the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free. For Hölderlin, as for Joan of Arc, this is a religious apprehension and leads to gods. For Francis Bacon it leads to Rembrandt.

One of Francis Bacon’s favorite paintings is a self-portrait by Rembrandt. He mentions it in several interviews. What he says he likes about this portrait is that when you go close to it you notice the eyes have no sockets.(16) Let us place this explanation alongside a sentence of Hölderlin’s that haunts me and I can’t say quite why. On the right-hand margin of a page on which he had already drafted a poem, Hölderlin at a later date began to write an essay. It contains this strange remark:

Öfters hab’ich die Sprache, öfters hab’ich Gesang versucht, aber sie hörten dich nicht.

Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn’t hear you.(17)

Something about the way the pronouns in this sentence come face to face with themselves reminds me of Rembrandt’s eyes. Those socketless eyes are certainly not blind. They are engaged in a forceful looking, but it is not a look organized in the normal way. Seeing is going on but (is it possible that) seeing is entering Rembrandt’s eyes from the back. What his look sends forward, in our direction, is deep silence. Perhaps rather like the silence that followed Joan of Arc’s response to her judges when they asked her, “In what language do your voices speak to you?” and she answered: “Better language than yours.”

To sum up. Honestly, I am not very good at summing up. The best I can do is offer a final splatter. I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us. This residue, which does not exist—just to think of it refreshes me. To think of its position, how it shares its position with drenched layers of nothing, to think of its motion, how it can never stop moving because I am in motion with it, to think of its tone of voice, which is casual (in fact it forgets my existence almost immediately) but every so often betrays a sort of raw pity I don’t understand, to think of its shadow, which is cast by nothing and so has no death in it (or very little)—to think of these things is like a crack of light showing under the door of a room where I’ve been locked for years. In his tower overlooking the river Neckar, Hölderlin had a piano that he sometimes played so hard he broke the keys. But there were quiet days when he would just play and tilt back his head and sing. Those who heard said they could not tell, though they listened, what language it was.