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Wenn aber die Himmlischen by Friedrich Hölderlin

Baharak Beizaei

Updated: Jan 13, 2024



But when the heavenly ones have

built the mountains,

it is quiet on earth.

And comely there standing,

with brows distinct,

it struck them where

daughterly, the god’s trembling ray,

h o l d s

the thunderer —

untender.

And the uproar above

is quenched and well-scented.


Where indwells the fire, besoothing, here and there, out-pours j o y -- the thunderer would leave awash in rage the half-forgotten of the heavens, were he not warned by the Wise One.


But now there blossoms

at the barren point

a wonderful great wanting

for there to be with-standing

ranges hanging into the sea,

Warmth Depth but the cool air of

Isles and half-islands:

for Grottoes embedded


fast in roses,

a glistening signpost


or it creates

another way too


Many an envious weed

sprout out, darkening flashing up,

swiftly, adoringly, then it teases,

the creative one, but they

understand it not. Wrathfully too

it grips and grows, as in flames,

in houses, it consumes, up-heaving,

heedlessly, and sparing

not the space, but the trail hides

vast-spreading, a fuming cloud,

un-ordained wilderness.


So it would seem godly.

A fearsome tensegrity of

of unwelcoming wreathes coils

around the garden,

eyeless ones, where the way out

could scarcely be divined

by a human with pure hands. He goes, destined,

and searches for what is necessary,

animal-like, indeed with arms

full of foreknowing would one be greeted there

by the goal, where

the shape of the heavenly

in-dwellers of a fence or sign

points their way.

Or it showers like fire itself

in the breasts of men,

for one needful of a bath.


And the father has

others with him still.

Then crossing the Alps

having to orient themselves by the eagle

lest it augur with the fury of ownmost sense,

the poet, in the flight of the bird,

around the throne of the god of joy,

dwelling and hiding the abyss

from him, like pale fire itself,

in rapturous times, there dawns,

on the brows of men,

a prophesying that would

yearn for the fear-loving,

the shades of hell


But her a pure destiny arrogated. Irrigating the land’s holy vessels for the cleanser, Heracles, who stays very clearly always, now still together with Caesar, but breath-bringing is the climb of the old god’s star-crowned sons along the unwayward flights, when the heavenly Feast

draws away from the mountains

at nighttime, and into the time of Pythagoras


In memory and living Philoctetes.






Who brings help to the father.

For it would be calming. But when

Driven in vain, it rouses her

to the earth and it takes away

of the heavenly

this sense, incendiary they

Return where,


Breathless they –


And for hate of

the expiation of God

it grows untimely.









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