Preorder ‡ Friedrich Hölderlin, Der Tod des Empedocles / The Death of Empedocles
£17.50
Tenement #22 / ISBN: 9978-1-917304-10-8
130pp [Approx.] / 140 x 216mm
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves
Forthcoming, 30.09.25
Translated from the German
by Rebecca Wright
Recorded & arranged
by Seth Tillett
This powerful poem, part Bardic chant and part street-corner rant, is delivered by Rebecca Wright with such sustained force, pedal to the metal, that it sounds as if she were practicing circular breathing techniques, like a saxophone player, even on the page.
Wright’s mistranslation (term of art) of Hölderlin gets to the heart of the matter: a human who wants to be like the gods but is brutally repressed by them. She sets her action today—meaning Summer 1984, forty-one years ago—when the ongoing dehumanisation of the city was only just beginning.
"There is something asleep there. Don’t think that it is dead."
Lucy Sante
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An improvised translation, a live recitation, a channelling and redirecting of Hölderlin's 'mourning play' as recorded on the roof of the Squat Theatre (New York City, NY), 1984.
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Do you hear that drunken crowd?
Yeah, they’re searching for him.
The spirit of that man is the match under their ass that’s in ‘em.
Like the fire inside of ‘em.
Like setting a match under somebody’s ass.
The reason that they’re cooking under there.
The cause.
It’s fine.
Like dried grass.
The sick dimension.
They’re entering the cuckoo dimension.
Like Jove’s blitz on the world.
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Der Tod des Empedocles / The Death of Empedocles is an unfinished theatrical play by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). A ‘mourning’ work in fragments, the philosopher-poet’s Empedocles exists in three versions, written from 1797 to 1800, the first of which being the most complete, the third version published in isolation in 1826, with all three iterations not appearing in one volume until 1846, three years after their author’s death. In all three cases, Hölderlin’ s Empedocles exists only in part.
A lifelong project that hinges on Hölderlin’s held resentment of his inability ‘to serve art and not actual existence’ (sic, see Stefan Zweig, The Trouble with the Daemon), his Empedocles retells the legend in which, to prove his divinity—and/or in dissatisfaction with worldly circumstance—the mythic philosopher would throw himself into the mouth of Mount Etna.
Recorded by Seth Tillett, the Tenement publication of Rebecca Wright’s translation of Hölderlin's Empedocles is a transcription that embraces the idea of play’s continued gestation. A compound of extant fragments spoken extempore by Wright—who has no knowledge of the German language—Tillett would record Wright’s live, improvised ‘transversion’ of Hölderlin’s text on the roof of New York City’s Squat Theatre at 23rd Street and 7th Avenue in three dawn sessions, 1984.
By following Hölderlin’s text in its narrative sequence—and translating instinctively with respect to acoustical, etymological and referential echoes between German and English—Wright exposes a new atmospheric layer of meaning which never-the-less carries over the central object of Hölderlin’s unfinished play.
The Death of Empedocles treats of the banishment of a charismatic philosopher-poet whose radical ideas threaten the ruling priesthood of his native city. Wright’s interpretation is rooted in her furious indignation at the physical and realtime eviction and gradual whitewashing of New York’s cultural avant-garde/guard by real estate speculators and their homunculi in the pseudo-liberal administration of Mayor Edward Koch, 1978 to 1989.
Across two reels of tape, her recication is a poem-play that compounds Hölderlin’s take on the mythic Empedocles as the ‘sworn enemy of narrowness.’ Here, Empedocles—from the fact of his creativity to the inevitability of his end—is taken as symptomatic of the ever-oppressive qualities of an ever-narrowing and ever-exclusive idea of a ‘city.’
Wright’s Empedocles is a caterwaul. A eulogy on the death knoll of time, a hymnal ode to the eradication of space and facilitation of urban claustrophobia, and a love letter to the idea of working and living ‘on the make.’ Here, we’ve an imagined gun levelled at the many and myriad ways in which the monetisation of a city’s sense of time and humour limits the mind’s horizon line and renders cosmopolitan banality as the slow, inevitable volcano of modern city-dwelling. Both plays are concerned with the internal exile of radical genius, its loss of articulation and eventual extinction by one’s being driven to the edge of madness by the very circumstances Wright decries.
Hölderlin’s rendering of Empedocles is a realisation that its not the world which has fallen, but also that of the world to come; Wright’s reading is a foreboding fin de siècle text for the terms and conditions of the century that would follow.
A transcription of Wright’s recitation has been lightly edited for publication, but the language of her initial delivery remains unaltered and true to its initial record.
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See here for a further word on this title.
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Stickered editions will carry a cover adornment; a photographic still excerpted from Seth Tillett's East Hamlet (1984), a recitation of Shakespeare’s tragedy as performed in the East Village, featuring Chris Parker as HAMLET / Arto Lindsay as LAERTES / Rebecca Wright as OPHELIA / and Richard Hell as POLONIUS, amongst others (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY / Object No., W27590 / Dept. of Film).
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FUTURE PREDICTION | Rebecca Wright—actress and dancer—performs psychic/sonic translation of Hölderlin's German [which she does not speak] text, The Death of Empedocles, 1983. Seth Tillett records it. It's point in time inseparable from her being freshly widowed and in the grips of the gut scraping agony of grief.
THIS PIECE IS DEDICATED TO IO
WHO INTO
THIS TURBULENT IGNITED
BREW
WAS BORN
R.W. aka R. Martz
MMXXV, with Love
Seth Tillett, born in New York City into a long line of fabric designers, is a scenographer, designer, dramatist and artist. Tillett has written, directed and performed in numerous theatre works—designed over sixty stages for opera, theatre and dance—and has composed music and sound works for the ballet, theatre and other public venues. Tillett's drawings have been exhibited in Germany, Switzerland, France and the United States of America. His textile designs have been collected by the Smithsonian Institution, and two of his films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Tillett lives and works in New York where he is currently creating and directing new works for film and theatre.