Jack Morson and Isabella Viega present their research on Romanticism

Jack Morson, 'On Translating Unfaithfully: Notes on a Misprision of Hölderlin' and Isabella Viega, 'Romantic Sibyl: S. T. Coleridge as Classical Prophetess'

Jack Morson, 'On Translating Unfaithfully: Notes on a Misprision of Hölderlin'
Although overshadowed by other Romantic poets during his lifetime, the German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin has enjoyed a singular reception among philosophers and philosophically-inclined literary critics. From Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Heidegger to Foucault and Agamben, the intricacy of his poetic and critical practices present an enigma that so many commentaries have attempted to unravel. This presentation - a condensed version of one of several chapters responding to Jacques Derrida's 'poetic thinking' - turns to the French writer Michel Deguy's meta-historical account of Hölderlin as a poet-thinker via the coda the latter writes to his poem 'Remembrance'. Working upstream from Deguy's translation of the concluding verse (2007) to Henri Corbin's translation of Heidegger's citation of the same verse during his lecture on 'Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry' (1938) to the verse itself (1801), we will find in this triptych of convictions, displacements and misprisions a perhaps baffling yet critically productive textual gesture: namely, that what in Deguy is ostensibly a mistranslation of the coda to 'Remembrance' is in fact a vehicle for returning the poetic inventiveness of Hölderlin to the matter of the poetic practice itself and thus re-evaluating the essential foundations of poetic thinking.

Isabella Viega, 'Romantic Sibyl: S. T. Coleridge as Classical Prophetess'

Before S. T. Coleridge published Sibylline Leaves (1817), the Sibyl predominantly symbolised female genius and creativity across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European cultures. Sibylline Leaves seems to mark a new Sibylline tradition which includes not only the female artist, but also the male poet-yet why did Coleridge create this new tradition by aligning himself with a classical prophetess, when other male prophet-figures were available to him?

This paper will consider what happens when Coleridge claims the female identity of the classical prophetess to authorise his career and influence his reception within English Romanticism in his first poetry collection, Sibylline Leaves (181 7). Through close readings, I will demonstrate how the Sibyl and Sibylline prophecy help Coleridge construct his uniquely gendered poetic identity and poetic voice, which destabilises the normative, masculine authority of the Romantic poet-prophet.

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