jaccottet

Crossings is a gathering of essays whose preoccupations converge in the idea that the workings of poetry and trans-lation are closely related. This is especially true in the work of Hölderlin, in whose poems the kinship is coupled with a way of reading the world and an attentiveness to transitions of all kinds: what can come over to us from the past, and what will pass on from us to posterity? What are the consequences for poetry if the present moment is understood as a perpetual transition? Translation can be a means of testing this understanding, and poetry perhaps negotiates the crossing itself. Later writers like Philippe Jaccottet, who thought of the poet’s work as a work of translation, continue this line: the poem becomes a form of attention and, as such, a thing permeable to an elsewhere. Touching on bird-flight and sonnets, aqueducts and metamorphosis, what these readings have in common is a fidelity to the movement of particular poems.

Charlie Louth is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford.