“my Romantic letter i.e. e-mail. I.e. epistolary novel”: the “translit” of Hildebrand Pam Dick

 
In her audacious and accomplished 2009 debut Delinquent, transgressor extraordinaire Mina Pam Dick lovingly travestied the lingoes and conceptual frameworks of analytic philosophy, particularly the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, even as she demonstrated an adept’s awareness of the intricacies of identity and reference, the semantic slippages that such theory tries ceaselessly to contain. Here Hildebrand Pam Dick, who has pursued graduate work in both philosophy and painting at the University of Minnesota, turns her attention to an even more notoriously knotty denizen of the borderlands between philosophy and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin. This discussion of Dick’s “I Wear Long Hair,” an excerpt from the fourth part of ALP HAIR, an extended engagement with Holderlin’s prose poem novella Hyperion (1797–9), will draw out some of the strands in Hölderlin’s elusive thought and artistic practice that bear upon Dick’s poem, towards a view of Hölderlin’s work as a matrix out of which Dick’s writing emerges.
 
A further signal quality of Dick’s writing to date is its use of academic philosophy and neighboring disciplines not as the masterful, static enframing characteristic of much contemporary conceptual writing, but rather as a dynamic and reciprocal thematization of its own thematizations: her work continually reflects upon making a topic of philosophical discourse, while a central concern of that discourse, especially the instantiations that concern Dick, is the very question of the nature of representation and intentionality. The recalcitrance of the source, philosophy’s legendary reluctance to cede authority over its accounts of account-giving to poetry, gives rise to a conceptual scape of attunements and dissonances, enacting an ongoing play of identity and difference with a family resemblance to the self-theorizing translations of Jack Spicer and Erin Mouré or the heteronymity of Pessoa. Benjamin discerned the creation of the poetized (das Gedichtete) as the essential and characteristic effect of poetic activity, particularly visible in the work of Hölderlin; we might describe the fundamental concern of Dick’s writing as the investigation of poetization itself.
 
Dick’s characteristic, serious play with translation, philosophy and poetry, identity and difference, and heteronymity involves a constellation that almost circumscribes the name Hölderlin, enough so that her encounter with the German poet seems foreordained. Her self-dismantling, erotically-charged writing speaks in an undeniably 21^st century argot. But that quality is complicated by an untimeliness arising out of the complex transactions across temporal, not to say political, cultural, linguistic, and gender borders which animate “I Wear Long Hair.” For both Hölderlin and Dick, translation as a linguistic practice opens a space for the exploration of a larger, overlapping cluster of concerns.
 
Arguably, Hölderlin’s immersion in the question of translation was the crucial step that enabled the emergence of his sublimely paratactic late style. His versions of Sophocles and Pindar sought to convey the untranslatability of their Greek originals as resolutely as they brought forth what could be carried over from language to language. But, as Aris Fioretis has observed, Hölderlin’s translations may be most remarkable for the internal differentiation that they create within the German language itself: “His actual renditions of Sophocles offer acts of linguistic transferral based on a consideration not of the language of the original as much as that of the translation” (278). The concern, verging upon obsession, with similar matters in “I Wear Long Hair” is evidenced in a remarkable series of versions Dick offers of Hölderlin’s gnarled “Hälfte des Lebens,” (“Half of Life”), one of the last poems he completed before his 1805 nervous collapse. Dick first ventures a reasonably traditional translation, albeit one that, like many of Hölderlin’s own, hews close to the original word order. One crux of the translation concerns the German compound heilignüchterne, which Dick translates as “holy-sober”; she follows this translation with a long, tortuous meditation on the impossibility of getting that German twin word into English, as if the whole problem of splitting and doubling, whether in the form of duplicate versions, twinned languages, or the poles of subject and object, could be distilled into a single double lexical crisis. Then we are given seven different retranslations of “Hälfte des Lebens,” ranging from homophonic English-to-English reworkings to a punctuation-only instance. The effect of such efforts is a figuration of the ever-retreating enigma of the original; its central image of reflection accrues an unsettling gravity as the succession of repetitions suggests its potential for infinite, eternal recurrence.
 
Another particularly striking sequence in “I Wear Long Hair” opens with “Wrong Key/Grundton/Doppelgänger (A Night Night Song),” which uses semantic and homophonic translation, association, and free invention to create a rendition of a pair of Hölderlin poems, “The Blind Singer” as well as its later revision,¹ published as one of the poet’s nine “Nightsongs” and entitled “Chiron.”² Dick’s version fuses the two earlier poems. Her opening stanza simultaneously translates the first quatrains of both works:
 

 

Where are you, young licks! Doused, I’m more mussed,

Destroyed, decked-out suicide, where are you, licks?

The hurt waits, decks wrath,

Stammering night straightjackets my shimmer.

 

For comparison’s sake, here are the opening lines in German of “The Blind Singer,” along with a version by Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff:

 

Wo bist du, Jugendliches! das immer mich

Zur Stunde wekt des Morgens, wo bist du, Licht!

Das Herz ist wach, doch bannt und halt in

Heiligem Zauber die Nacht mich immer.

Where are you, young one, who would always

Wake me in the morning, where are you, light?

My heart is awake, but the night always

Holds and binds me in its holy magic.

(150–155)

 

And “Chiron,” again presented with the Hoover and Chernoff version:

 

Wo bist du, Nachdenkliches! das immer muß

Zur Seite gehn, zu Zeiten, wo bist du, Licht?

Wohl ist das Herz wach, doch mir zürnt, mich

Hemmt die erstaunende Nacht nun immer.

Where are you, thoughtful one, who now

Must move beside me, where are you, light?

The heart is awake but angry, always now

The astounding night confines me.

(157–161)

 

Dick’s idiosyncratic Englishing flips in the first line from a straight translation of “Wo bist du” to the aural approximation of “das immer muß,” from “Chiron”: “Doused, I’m more mussed.” And the line is bridged by the portmanteau semantic-homophonic “young licks” for “Jugendlicht,” now taking as its source “The Blind Singer.” As the poem proceeds, Dick happens upon the brilliant transpositions of “suicide” for the morgue lurking within “The Blind Singer”’s Morgen, as if German were anticipating English’s more familiar morning/mourning pun; the word simultaneously sonically picks up the Seite and Zeiten of “Chiron.” The halting rhythms of “doch bannt and halt in” may have suggested the substitution of “stammering” for halt—perhaps reinforced by the hint of hemming in Hemmt. Finally, in a rather uncanny bit of linguistic displacement, Zauber (magic), which gets no apparent literal translation in the final line, seems to reappear in the shimmer that emerges out of mich immer.

 
Wending its way through similar transformative defamiliarizations of the twin German originals, Dick’s “Night Night Song” opens up hidden correspondences between German and English; at the same time, it morphs Hölderlin’s mythopoesis into a hymn to teen angst and apotheosis: “To soft wild ones on the jungle gym,” “Teen rockers stomping in young light past a/Doorman w/gold braids.” Over against a shared topos of liminality, Dick’s writing marks its distance and difference from its source, exchanging centaurs and demigods for adolescence and transgendering. Hölderlin’s poems enact now-familiar Romantic journeys from youthful innocence to alienation to an uncertain but hoped-for reconciliation. Yet however much Dick’s reconfigurations tangle such threads, her process of translation nonetheless retains the thrust of Hölderlin’s poetry, through its embodiment of estranging intimacies and intimate estrangements.³
 
The issue of intimacy is indeed at the core of what Dick calls “transverse” or “translit”: translational, transgenre writing that embodies and performs “incestuous poetics (making out and off with sibling books).” If translation has traditionally been troped in terms of a natural filiation with a parent text from which it maintains an appropriate distance, Dick produces translit through “inappropriate contact” with sib texts, creating a hybrid writing that is simultaneously ostentatiously autonomous and derivative (Dick, “Re:”).⁴ In her work-in-progress METAPHYSICAL LICKS THE LP, which takes up the life and poetry of Georg Trakl and his sister Greta (a musician, and fellow addict and suicide), Dick overtly thematizes incest; in “I Wear Long Hair,” though we might note its attentiveness to Hölderlin’s marriage-breaching passion for his employer’s wife that fired Hyperion, incestuous poetics is more a method that audaciously brings every means of textual exchange to bear on the act of transliterary production. Yet, obviously, “I Wear Long Hair” does not simply violate the discretion of discrete works, versions, genres, languages, disciplines, logics, but commits these outrages through a concomitant displacement and hypertrophying of the author-function, on one hand frenetically multiplying authorial sibs and on the other shadowing Hölderlin with the alternate authorial persona “Hildebrand,” who is in turn trailed by all of that name/identity’s cognate mutations.
 
The very possibility of logical as well as subjective identity was certainly at issue for Hölderlin himself. In recent decades, the profound acuity with which in his youth he confronted the problematics of Kant’s Copernican revolution has become increasingly appreciated,⁵ and “I Wear Long Hair” refers repeatedly to the issues that led him ultimately to abandon philosophy as a conceptually articulated discourse in favor of poetic composition. Characteristically, Hölderlin’s philosophical production took the form of fragmentary, fugitive reflections rather than sustained argumentation; the most assiduously examined of his writings is a brief sketch (which only came to light in 1960) jotted on the flyleaf of an unidentified book, which has come to be known as “Judgment and Being” (“Urtheil und Seyn”). Here, Hölderlin appears to demolish the basis of Fichte’s subjective radicalization of Kant in a few observations, which also cast a skeptical eye upon the potential for any discursive account of the human conceptual apparatus to provide a satisfying specification of its own foundational possibility. Roughly, the problem for Fichte is that he seeks to ground his version of Kantian idealism on the certainty of the self-positing proposition, “I is I.” But, Hölderlin objects, the very propositional form here introduces a split in the subject: the grammatical subject “I” is not exactly identical to the “I” predicated of it. Fichte’s grounding principle can therefore never manifest the absolute identity that his theory claims for it. Dick alludes directly to such reflections when writing that “The problem is with reason, i.e. discursivity,” or “The question of what is below the I.” Further, Dick manifests I’s ungrounding through divagations of gender: she intensively and intricately transgenders Hölderlin’s text through feminization yet also continually destabilizes gender tout court as the controlling persona re-dissolves among fluid, promiscuous characters. And even as Hildebrand et al at times replace Hölderlin, this congery is also in conversation with Hölderlin, positing him now as the counterpart of Stanislaw Lem, now as an 18^th-century Holden Caulfield. Likewise, Dick exponentializes the semi-scandalous practice of literary heteronymy, which already corrodes the integrity of the social fiction of the author by repeatedly collapsing this putatively external guarantor with the main fictive persona in the text. (Note (again), for instance, that the author of Dick’s Delinquent is “Mina Pam Dick.”)
 
Equal parts parodic treatise on ordinary language and LiveJournal sprawl, “I Wear Long Hair” is also a tour de force of heteroglossia, another way in which it glances off of Hölderlin’s thought and practice. In his theory of the alternation of tone (“Wechsel der Töne”⁶ ), Hölderlin, in classical German fashion, discerns three fundamental tonalities in poetic composition—the ideal, the naïve, and the heroic—but what’s distinctive about his account is that the patterns of alternation or the modulation among tones, rather than the tones themselves, define genres for him. This discovery, that traditional genres comprise patterns of alternation, inspires the creation of new poetic forms foregrounding that very activity of alternation, forms that would thereby incorporate the entire system of poetic genre and simultaneously constitute a reflection upon the nature of genre itself. Hölderlin indeed constructed an astonishing set of so-called “Poetological Tables,” charts that lay out in combinatorial fashion potential sequences of tones: “id. na. her. id. / naiv her. id.,” “naiv her. id. na./ her. id. na.,” and so on. Dick, who cannot have missed the resemblance between the permutations of Hölderlin’s tables and the truth tables of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, refers explicitly early on to the issue of tone, not just in the opening confession that “I can’t quit thinking tone,” (a statement worthy of “Urtheil und Seyn” in the way that it both unifies and splits its “thinking”), but also in the somewhat goth translingual pun of “die tone.” Later, this motif resurfaces when Dick alludes in the title of the poem quoted above and in surrounding commentary to the oppositional play of Grundton and Kunstcharacter, the former referring in Hölderlin’s thought to a generative tonality which can only be manifested via implication in the form of the latter, its opposite number. More fundamentally still, “I Wear Long Hair” draws upon and extends Hölderlinian ideas about the alternation of tone as it veers from the chatty to the formidably intellectual to the urgently confessional.
 
For Hölderlin, the method of alternation of tones was one way in which aesthetic production could evoke that unitary Being which necessarily eluded conceptual articulation. Indeed, Hölderlin’s means to this telos was a violent yoking together of disparate materials. “Hölderlin’s mature language approaches madness,” Adorno writes; “it is a series of disruptive actions against both the spoken language and the elevated style of German classicisism. . . . [His] method cannot escape antinomies, and in fact, it itself, as an assassination attempt on the harmonious work, springs from the work’s antinomian nature” (138–139). Resolutely unsystematic, the similarly hyper-charged, theatrical fissures in Dick’s writing figure and extend her poetry’s radical commitment to the multiplicity of being, and to the poetic generation of ever more ways of being multiple, being trans-.