Hölderlin, Friedrich / Martz (tr.) / Tillett (ed.): The Death of Empedocles

Tenement Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 30, 2025

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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 Martz’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 R. Martz—a nom de guerre—Tillett would record Martz’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—Martz 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. Martz’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 recitation 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.’

Martz’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 Martz decries. Hölderlin’s rendering of Empedocles is a realisation that its not the world which has fallen, but also the world to come; Martz’s reading is a foreboding fin de siècle text for the terms and conditions of the century that would follow; her now, and our present. A transcription of Martz’s recitation has been lightly edited for publication, but the language of her initial delivery remains unaltered and true to its initial record.