Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism
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… But often as a firebrandarises conf(used)usion of tongues.1Close …… Oft aber wie ein Brandentstehet Sprachverw(irrt)irrung. …
In the midst of a fragment from his Homburger Folioheft (Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe 7: 377), a notebook that contains several late elegies and odes and even more notes for poems that would never be completed, Friedrich Hölderlin registers the confusion of tongues.2Close His words arise among fragments written in several languages: his sentence appears to be written in German; a nearby marginal note in Latin reads, “sphere of the ecclesia [orbis ecclesiae]” (7: 374); several pages earlier, he records a passage in ancient Greek from Pindar’s thirteenth Olympian ode, below the bilingual heading “Origin of Loyoté [Ursprung der Loyoté]” (7: 365). Thus, Hölderlin’s sentence stands out, apart from the draft of the poem to which it seems to belong, as though to state yet again what takes place so often in these pages. The passage, “Oft aber wie ein Brand/Entstehet Sprachverw(irrt)irrung,” might thus be considered the fragment of fragments at this late stage of Hölderlin’s writing between 1803 and 1807, when he would produce the last poems to be published in his lifetime, as well as his translations of Sophocles’s Oedipus and Antigone. But it is more than a manifestation of Hölderlin’s late writing praxis. The excess at issue here, as tongues grow confounded with others and language emerges as fire, also speaks to the issues of translation, the origins of language, and prophecy that would preoccupy Hölderlin and many of his contemporaries, including Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and G. W. F. Hegel. No sooner does language emerge than the problem of its plurality and translatablity begins. And even before there is any talk of language, fire—an element associated with ancient prophecy, Pentecost, and the ἐκπύρωσις of the Stoics—heralds its coming, and forebodes its end before it can even begin: “But often as a firebrand, arises confusion of tongues.”
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