Poverty

Translator's Note: Martin Heidegger presented this essay on June 27, 1945 at a ceremony that ended a strange "summer semester" in Wildenstein Castle where a dozen professors and some 30 students from the University of Freiburg had fled to escape the allied bombing of that city. The war by then was more than a month and a half over. Heidegger and the other professors would soon face de-nazification proceedings in the French zone of an already partitioned Germany. His presentation of Poverty is based upon a maxim by Friedrich Hölderlin, his favorite poet, written more than a century earlier. I first read the essay in Italian when it was published last year in the excellent journal of writing and cultural engagement, MicroMega. It was translated from (icrman by Adriano Ardovino. Later in the year, in Venice, Italy, I translated the text from Adriano's translation, largely because the original German was not available to me. When I returned to San Francisco, I was able to secure the original text through the help of Nick Hoff, currently the most brilliant translator of Holderlin's poems, who also helped with some passages toward the completion of my translation, which then was read and checked by Jacqueline Heier, who is a native-born German. My thanks to both of them. The reader should note that when I write the word being, I refer to constellations of the German word Sein, but when I write the word Being, I am referring to the German word Seyn, which Heidegger began to use some years earlier to distinguish being or beings from the fundamental question he is concerned with. -Jack Hirschman

For a projected essay on the historical epochs of the Western world, Hölderlin writes the following guiding-saying: "To us, everything is concentrated on the spiritual; we have become poor in order to become rich."

These words are written in the period passing from the 18th to the 19th centuries. The opinion that Hölderlin utters with such words in accord with his own time is so obvious that it's preferable to avoid expressing it again. Hölderlin in fact says, "To us, everything is concentrated on the spiritual..." But does the "To us" in the saying refer only to the Germans? And does the "us"...