La Grecia di Hölderlin: paradigma e punto di fuga. Una dialettica costitutiva per la critica del presente nella Germania di fine Settecento

At the core of this research project lies the function of Greece – both ancient and modern – in the work of Friedrich Hölderlin, examined within the theoretical framework of the Spatial Turn (Soja, 1989) and the Topographical Turn (Hallet & Neumann, 2009). These critical shifts have underscored the role of literature in the construction of symbolic and affective spaces (topophilia). The thesis regards space – and Greece in particular – not as a mere background, but as a structuring dimension of Hölderlin’s poetic and philosophical thought. The research aims to demonstrate the hypothesis that Greece assumes a double function, both symbolic and structural: on the one hand, it serves as an ideal model, a paradigmatic historical and cultural space for a possible (re)construction of a harmonious and interconnected German community; on the other, it represents a site of disconnection and escape, a mirror of the unresolved tension between political-social aspiration and the tragic awareness of failure. In this sense, the topography of Greece reveals itself not only as a mythical-poetic projection, but also as a critical device for rethinking modern European space as a field of ruins to be reconstructed. At the same time, Hölderlin’s passion for Greece carries something tragically escapist, bound to the awareness of the dramatic imperfection inherent in this work of reconstruction. The working hypothesis intertwines questions central to contemporary cultural studies – space, dissonance, hybridity, identity – with key motifs of Hölderlin-Forschung, connected to the tension between classical heritage and modern crisis, between poetic project and historical fragmentation. To approach this complexity in a structured way, the research adopts a theoretical and methodological framework articulated around two fundamental concepts: cultural topography and linguistic topography. By cultural topography is meant the map of references, images, myths, and geo-historical coordinates (Greece, Asia, Germany, the Mediterranean) that structure Hölderlin’s worldview and aesthetic-literary production: an imaginary and at the same time critical space where Greek antiquity and German modernity encounter one another dynamically. The first part thus outlines Hölderlin’s cultural topography, in which the psychogeographical implications of lived places and the aesthetic-poetic figurations of imaginary spaces trace an oscillating movement produced by two contrasting drives: one toward the ‘resolution of dissonances’ – realized within interspaces, spaces of totality, and islands; the other toward the disenchantment of an irretrievable classical past – articulated in ‘spaces of disconnection’, that is, in Non-lieux and in the dimension of the Open. By linguistic topography is meant, instead, the map of poetic and formal operations that Hölderlin performs upon the German language, putting it under tension toward linguistic otherness – the ancient Greek language – to dislocate the syntactic, semantic, and phonetic order of German, thus inaugurating a tragic mode of writing. The second part therefore investigates the lexicon, syntax, and semantics elaborated by Hölderlin in his translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, through which the central hypothesis of this section is tested: translation, for Hölderlin, constitutes an escapist moment of disruption of order, opening a line of flight from the self toward the foreign – yet a flight implicitly motivated by the need to reconstruct his own linguistic and cultural identity. Alongside this analysis, the study of Hölderlin’s translation is developed not only as a work of rewriting but also as a rereading of Greek tragedy: Antigone and Creon, figures of classical mythology, thus become Hesperian characters in their tragic destinies. The research stands at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, cultural geography, and translation theory, offering an approach still little explored within Hölderlin studies. One of the most fascinating paradoxes of Hölderlin’s writing lies in the fact that whenever he sings of his homeland, he simultaneously evokes an elsewhere: Greece is an inner landscape, a space of reconstruction, and a vanishing point. This elsewhere is never the mere outcome of Romantic Sehnsucht: it is also the vantage point from which to think the present critically, to speak another language, and to reinvent one’s own. In this sense, Hölderlin’s Greece emerges as a field of forces between what is one’s own and what is foreign, between what has been and what might yet be. In his wandering life and in his writing that continually translates and is translated, Hölderlin embodies a radical figure of modernity: poet, wanderer, translator, and stranger in his own homeland.