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  In Derrida’s Memoires: For Paul de Man he quotes from ‘Mnemosyne’, a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin which he says was one of his dead friend’s favourites Reading this recently, I remembered that about five years ago I had tried to translate the same poem I searched my laptop for the file before dredging up an early version, in fragments, from an email It begins mid-sentence               When I wrote it I must have been twenty-two, living out of university and away from home for the first time                   My rooms were rented but not exactly a blur of sex, so that’s a lie (and not in the original) Hölderlin is coy about sex, the raunchiest he gets being ‘a longing to enter the unconfined’             I was working in a suburb in West London and could have done my journey—two trains, a short walk and a bus—in my sleep, which is probably why it took until the last few weeks there for me to notice anything Near my office, opposite St Anne’s Church, a bunch of flowers had been sellotaped to a lamppost Up close, the petals were colourless Underneath was a card with just an “x” on the inside, scrawled quickly and at an angle so that it could have either been a kiss or a cross                 Though named after ‘Mnemosyne’, the goddess of memory, Hölderlin’s poem is really about forgetting, or the failure to do so Death is never far from the surface and, in the last section, a flurry of classical references bring it into focus: Hölderlin says tenderly that Achilles ist mein, before adding he ‘died by a fig tree’ The poignancy here derives from the way he addresses Achilles as a lover or close friend and emphasises—as a lover might—not how but where he died             I thought that it was only later I had noticed the bunch of flowers, but this fragment suggests I might have recorded their existence at the time and simply absorbed them into the background haze of my commute                     Derrida argues against the kind of mourning that attempts to interiorise the lost object We should respect the ‘infinite