Le traduzioni da Hölderlin

This paper analyses four Friedrich Hölderlin’s fragments translated by Cristina Campo, that were originally included in letters to Remo Fasani and Gianfranco Draghi and later collected in La tigre assenza. For Campo, as for many poets and intellectuals of her time, Hölderlin represented a model of style and life. Campo had a profound knowledge of the German poet, whom she certainly read in Norbert von Hellingrath’s edition, like her contemporaries, as well as also probably using the new Stuttgarter Ausgabe. However, Campo never attempted to translate other Hölderlin’s poems, perhaps because she considered Leone Traverso’s translations—published in 1955 but circulating as typescript since the mid 1930s—unsurpassable. In the four fragments, some of which were undoubtedly translated from the original which she knew by heart, we can find themes that appear consistently in Campo’s prose: fairy tales; childhood; the value of the landscape; reflections on Greek tragedy. Like other poets of her generation, Campo read Hölderlin identifying herself with the unhappy poet who was considered insane by society and therefore abandoned to extreme solitude.