Abstract

Tragedy and Translation: Tom McCall’s “Case of the Missing Body”

This essay interprets Tom McCall’s “The Case of the Missing Body,” expanding on the implications of McCall’s suggestion that Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles allegorize the process of translation itself. I examine several key points, or figures, in McCall’s essay, including the problem of “contact” between the immaterial and the material, the problem of the “fatelessness” in the German relation to the Greek and the problem of the “unthinkable” at the heart of the translation process.