Hyperion

7 x 4.2 x .43 in

Here, presented in its first English translation, is Friedrich Hölderlin's great novel, Hyperion. Cast in the form of letters from its eighteenth-century protagonist to a German friend, this book charts the course of a desperate search for fulfillment in action, in love, and in final contemplation; its story is one of human disillusion and human rebirth. In it the reader will encounter one of the most vivid of all literary landscapes--a landscape the author never saw but to which he dedicated all the resources of his art--the landscape of Greece, bathed in blazing sunlight, infused with remembered glory. Written in a prose whose remarkable rhythmic power deeply influenced Nietzsche, Hyperion represents a triumph of the poetic imagination and a projection of a vision of the human condition that has caused the figure of Hölderlin to loom ever larger in the contemporary literary consciousness. In the words of Alexander Gode-von Aesch: "If ever it seems a little 'absurd' that existentialism...has on its roster no name of a poet not hedged by excuses and qualifications, turn to Hölderlin."