Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's late hymns – his third and last lecture course on Hölderlin, given in the summer of 1942 and published in 1984 as volume 53 of the Gesamtausgabe – follow a path from and back to a commentary on Hölderlin's “Der Ister” by way of a long excursus on the Greek determination of man's essence in Sophocles's Antigone. This excursus to Greece – and hence Heidegger's entire interpretation of Hölderlin – turns, as always, on a translation from the Greek. Here it is the well-known second choral ode of Antigone, in particular one word in its opening, which Heidegger renders as follows:

and which Ralph Manheim in turn translates as: “There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness.” This opening is something of a riddle – why is it, how is it, that man is stranger than strange, more uncanny than the uncanny? – and the lines that follow could hardly be taken as an answer: man goes out on the sea and on land, masters the earth and the animals, teaches himself language and thought, cures illnesses, and yet comes to nothing, for he cannot escape death. Whatever the “answer” to the riddle of man, it has to do with what he can do and what he cannot do anything about, his living and his dying.