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In a comparative analysis of the original with the translation, this paper attempts to demonstrate the influence of Lucan's bellum civile on Hölderlin's poetic language and theory of cognition, over and above the contemporary, political interest of the text in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Although Hölderlin only translated verses 1-590 of the first book, it is there that Lucan uses poetic techniques which seem to have inspired the German poet. The most important of these is the linguistic and thematic development of the obscure; in its density, it may have represented to Hölderlin the ideal of the sublime. In particular, Lucan's light-metaphors seem to have left traces in Hölderlin's poetic œuvre. The interpretation focuses on a divination-scene which Lucan presents as an aesthetics of the terrifying, the radical breaking apart of gods, humankind and nature. In this cosmic chaos, the mediating function of the poet must be reconsidered: if he can no longer be a mediator, then the possibility of linguistic representation as a whole is called into question. A closer look at the last verses translated by Hölderlin shows the extent to which these doubts end in the aporia of speechlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]