“And the Script Sounds”: Literary Hermeneutics and Imaginary Listening

Friedrich Hölderlin’s late hymns Patmos (first version) and Mnemosyne (early draft) create an intriguing tension between the “solid letter” that must be deciphered faithfully and the evocation of a “sounding script” that, together with an equally enigmatic “echo”, refuses direct hermeneutic understanding. At the point where the reader’s interpretive desire threatens to fail, musical settings like Peter Ruzicka’s MNEMOSYNE: Remembrance and Forgetting can be listened to as an attempt to actualize what Hölderlin’s original writing must leave unrealizable: the presence of real sound. In this audio-hermeneutic transfer, the act of listening opens up possibilities of the audible that are promised by the literary text without being actualized. The present essay interrogates this intermedial translatability between letter and sound by isolating a few selected passages from the facsimile reproduction of Hölderlin’s palimpsestic manuscript of multiple revisions, as provided by the Frankfurter Ausgabe. Mindful of the discontinuities and gaps in the original poems, my own analysis foregrounds its own fragmentary mode of reading Hölderlin’s poetry and listening to Ruzicka’s music.