Hölderlin's major translation of Pindar, created around 1800/1801, is considered one of the most challenging texts in 18th/19th century German literature; nevertheless, its significance for Hölderlin's later work on one hand and for philosophical translation theory on the other is undisputed. Hölderlin's translation crafts a liminal, threshold language where, to use Walter Benjamin's words, two languages touch in the formation of meaning. Felix Christen demonstrates through precise, text-driven investigations into word order and syntax how the translation from Greek to German—following the Greek original word for word—does not clearly distinguish between the languages. Both Greek and German are mutually foreign, guest and host; they are connected by a term found in Pindar that encompasses these meanings: xenos. The self-referentiality, which is constitutive of poetic language, takes on a new meaning here: a direction towards the other, the text to be translated, which hides in the autos of self-referentiality and allows for a reflection on the process, the course of translation. In this sense, Hölderlin's translation is transcendental-poetic, as it, following Schlegel's demand for poetry, presents itself and thus its implicit poetics becomes a theory of translation. The reading of such a translation is itself not without context; it understands interpretation as a continuation of translation, as reading that finds no end and, traversing poetry and being foreign to it, breaks off. An early theoretical statement on translation in a letter to Neuffer, where Hölderlin expresses the concern that a language "which has lived too long in foreign service" "will never again be the free, pure expression of our spirit shaped by nothing but the inner," sets a boundary that crossing it becomes the utmost task.