Paul
Celan was born in 1920 and died in 1970. The symmetry of these dates, arranged
around the end of the Second World War, seems cruelly freighted, as does the
fact that Celan chose to end his life on Hitler’s birthday. Celan – he gave
himself the name by inverting the order of the syllables of his original
surname, Antschel – grew up in Czernowitz, then part of Romania, now part of
Ukraine. During the war he worked in forced labour camps in Czernowitz, and was
released in 1944 when the Soviet army advanced into Romania. Both his parents
had also been sent to labour camps in 1942, along with all the other Jews in
Bukovina. His father died of typhus, his mother was killed because she was no
longer healthy enough to work. The German language, Celan often said, was his
mother’s tongue and the tongue of her murderers (‘Muttersprache und
Mördersprache’). Writing poetry in German was for him both an act of
remembrance and a rescue mission, as if a language could and could not be saved
from its historical contamination.
In his
memoir the French poet Jean Daive reports an intriguing conversation:
" Paul
Celan asks me:
– Have you thought of writing in
another language?
– No. Have you?
– Yes, sometimes, in French ... But
it’s not possible.
– Why?
He smiles."
Celan
lived in Bucharest for two years after the war ended, then in Vienna, moving in
1948 to Paris, which remained his home – or would have done if he had believed
in such a thing – until he died. ‘Heimat,’ he told Daive, ‘is an untranslatable
word. And does the concept even exist? It’s a human fabrication: an illusion.’
The dome
of Daive’s title is the foliage of Paris, especially of the area around the
École Normale, where Celan taught. The book, which appeared in French in 1996,
records conversations that are literary and philosophical rather than
confessional, and Daive writes of the ‘charm’ of Celan’s distance. But we get
quite a few glimpses of the agitations of Celan’s later life: a ‘failed
suicide’, an arrest leading to a period in a psychiatric hospital, the last
days of his marriage to Gisèle Lestrange, his death in the Seine.
Daive
was 25 when he met Celan, who was then 45, and both of them can be quite
sententious in their search for aphoristic wisdom (‘a poet is a pirate’; ‘the
world is a theorem that nobody wants to prove any more’). But there is a moment
when both men appreciate the comic mischief of chance. They are walking down
the boulevard Saint-Michel, and Celan has bought an issue of Die Zeit – he
likes to keep up with German culture. He doesn’t need all the sections of the
fat paper, though, and ‘feverishly’, Daive says, disposes of many of them as he
walks, keeping only the literary pages. These he puts in his pocket. The two
flâneurs take a bus to the place de l’Opéra, and as they step off the bus and
onto the pavement, Celan finds a complete copy of Die Zeit at his feet. ‘You
see’, he says, ‘this happens to me with everything, every day.’
There
are all kinds of ways of reading this little allegory. The powers that be don’t
like minimalism. Celan’s dream of getting rid of clutter, in life as in poetry,
is a lost cause. Or more optimistically, concision in poetry is fine but you
can’t expect the world to play along. Celan himself makes this point elsewhere
by adapting (in the wrong direction) Hamlet’s ironic remark about his father’s
funeral and his mother’s speedy wedding, the fact that ‘the funeral baked
meats/Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’. ‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio,’
he says. In Celan, this becomes ‘Counter-economy, Horatio.’
As his
career developed, Celan wrote shorter and shorter poems: brief lines, not many
stanzas. He saw himself, we’re told in Microliths, as ‘word-poor and perhaps
already irrevocably condemned to silence’. Longer pieces begin to seem strange
exceptions. Daive picks up a crucial move in this venture: ‘Absence of the
verb: the verb is absorbed into the energy of the composite noun.’ Verbs give
clues, over-arrange the story. They involve agents and effects, and who knows
if any of us are those or have those?
Microliths
gathers together Celan’s hitherto uncollected prose: aphorisms, drafts for
stories and plays, fragments of poetic theory, unsent letters, interviews.
There are wonderful allusive jokes here (‘There’s something rotten in the state
of D-Mark’), but there is also a sense of doom: ‘My Judaism: what I still
recognise among the ruins of my existence.’ Celan writes this phrase in French.
And there are subtle remarks that connect his poetry to what he imagines poetry
more generally to be.
" [Poetry
is] that which, striving for truth, wants to come into language.
I don’t,
in fact, write for the dead, but for the living – though of course for those
who know that the dead too exist.
In the
poem ... the said remains unsaid as long as the one who reads it will not let
it be said to him."
And most
intriguing, perhaps: ‘There is no word that, once said, does not carry with it
a figurative meaning; in the poem the words believe themselves not to carry
that meaning.’
There
are some interesting glosses too on Adorno’s famous claim that to write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric. One of the meanings of this much misunderstood
proposition is that it is barbaric to pretend to be civilised when everything
you do shows you are not. This is close to Celan’s suggestion that ‘he who
mythifies after Auschwitz is a murderer.’ Another meaning is that poetry is
answerable to history, and that to write poetry as if nothing had happened is
to cover up all kinds of horrors. Celan brings a curious wit and precision to
this argument, noting ‘the arrogance of the one who dares ... to poetically
describe Auschwitz from the nightingale – or lark – perspective’. He also
writes of what happens ‘where the lyrical I goes to the objects to caress them
with language’. There may be charm in such work, he says, but it will necessarily
‘lack ... the greatness of true downfalls’. He is not thinking specifically
about Auschwitz, but the connection is easily made. A great deal of lyric
poetry, especially of the civilised-barbaric kind, doesn’t know how to do
anything but caress. Pierre Joris quotes Celan as saying something similar in
relation to ‘euphony’ in poetry, ‘which more or less blithely continued to
sound alongside the greatest horrors’.
The
German language, like English, uses words as building blocks, but prefers to do
it without structural support. Without prepositions, for example. So
‘worldview’ (Weltanschauung) rather than a ‘view of the world’;
‘damagepleasure’ (Schadenfreude) rather than ‘pleasure in damage’. Yet even in
a language already devoted to this kind of construction, Celan invents a great
many new buildings. Riffling more or less at random through the early poems we
find übersternte, umsommert, nachtgewiegte, tagenthobene, Weltabwärts,
herznäher. Joris’s deft translations are: ‘starred-over’, ‘ensummered’, ‘night-cradled’,
‘day-removed’, ‘worlddownward’, ‘more heartnear’. Geoffrey Hill had a good time
with the title of Celan’s collection Atemwende, or Breathturn (1967). In The
Orchards of Syon (2002) he anglicises ‘breathturn’ into ‘turn of breath’. But
he also has ‘breath-hitch’, ‘catch-breath’, ‘breath-ply’, ‘breath-fetch’, and
‘breath-glitch’. As if he couldn’t stop the variants from piling up. Celan
would have liked the idea, and he wouldn’t have needed the hyphens. There are
pieces of verbs in Celan, we note, but they are all past participles; their
time of active service was yesterday.
Joris’s
translations of Celan’s collected later poetry, Breathturn into Timestead,
appeared in 2014, and separate volumes were published much earlier: he started
translating Celan in 1968. Now we have the collected earlier poems. Joris
speaks of the pleasure of going back to ‘these four books in their order of
composition’, and we may mention another pleasure: that of rereading the
complete poems in a flipped arrangement, the second half first. It is
astonishing how ‘late’ some of the earlier poems feel. This effect is enhanced
by Joris’s style as a translator. A poet himself, he is not afraid of
strangeness in diction. He doesn’t seek it out, but he knows when it sounds good.
He brings us very close to Celan at work, shows him leading the words along and
being led by them, as Celan himself describes the process.
We can
think of the poem ‘Heimkehr’ (‘Homecoming’), probably written in 1955, which
concentrates so firmly on its unmetaphorical snow that it is hard for us to
think of anything else. But then it’s hard too not to think of the several
different histories the snow invites us to imagine. What does snow have to do
with sleep? Who are the lost? Why are the separate hills some kind of home?
What loyalties does the flag represent? A note suggests the poem is in part an
improvisation on Kafka’s story of the same title.
Snowfall,
thicker and thicker,
dove-coloured,
like yesterday,
snowfall,
as if you were asleep even now.
Far
layered whiteness.
Over it,
endless,
the
sledtracks of the lost.
Underneath,
salvaged,
bulging
up,
what
hurts the eyes so much,
hill
after hill,
invisible.
On each,
brought
home into its today,
an I
that slid into muteness:
wooden,
a stake.
There: a
feeling,
blown
over here by the icewind,
fastening
its dove-,
its
snow-coloured flagcloth.
The
books brought together in the new volume are Mohn und Gedächtnis/Poppy and
Memory (1952), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle/Threshold to Threshold (1955), Sprachgitter/Speechgrille
(1959), Die Niemandsrose/NoOnesRose (1963). The first of these includes most of
the poems Celan published in 1948, in a volume he later withdrew from
circulation because of its many misprints. It contained his most famous poem, ‘Deathfugue’,
first published in a journal in 1947. Much later, Celan said he was ‘far away’
from that poem, and insisted, whenever it was reprinted, on its being separated
from other works by a blank page before and after. In the same interview, in
1969, he also said that he ‘rarely’ read it in public any more. It’s worth
pausing over these comments, because we can respect his sense of things without
letting the extraordinary qualities of the poem escape us. No poet wants to be
known for only one poem when he has written so many others.
The
rhythm of the poem has the mood and movement of a ballad or a nursery rhyme, an
ironic lightness that contrasts powerfully with its horrific content.
Black
milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink
you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink
and we drink
we dig a
grave in the air there one lies at ease
Schwarze Milch
der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken
sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken
und trinken
wir schaufeln
ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
It seems
grotesquely comic to address the milk here. Why tell the milk it is being
drunk? Does it need to know? If it knows anything it probably knows about that
grave. There are interesting points of translation here. In Joris’s version,
above, the camp inmates call the milk ‘you’ throughout. In other translations
(by John Felstiner and Michael Hamburger, for example) and in the German text,
they start by calling the milk ‘it’ and then move to ‘you’. I like the (incorrect)
intimacy from the start, and confess that I had to look at several editions to
find out what is happening. I initially read the ‘it’ (sie) as a polite ‘you’
(Sie) – all it takes is a capital letter (which isn’t there). And of course if
you heard the poem without seeing a text, there would be no difference.
The poem
continues:
A man
lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he
writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he
writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles
his dogs to come
he
whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he
commands us play up for the dance
Ein Mann wohnt
im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt
wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es
und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt
uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz
This is
not so comic, and the equation of dogs and Jews is ugly, but the pace is still
jaunty. We move very quickly through various assertions and juxtapositions. The
placing of the fading light suggests we are somewhere to the east of Germany,
where Margarete presumably resides. In the next stanza the poem invokes another
woman, Shulamith, first heard of in The Song of Songs, and whose hair is
‘ashen’, not golden. She has no association with Goethe’s Faust or with German
fantasies of blonde beauty. Her later avatar would be just the woman the man
who writes is not thinking of – unless he remembers her as an inmate of the
camp.
The
German critic Hans Egon Holthusen saw what was ‘light’ about the style of the
poem, since he used that word, but went on to associate the effect with ‘a
dreamy surrealism already beyond language’, and an ability to ‘escape the
bloody chambers of horror of history and rise up into the ether of pure
poetry’. I would like to think that most readers feel exactly the opposite –
that the remorseless levity of the verse makes the bloody chambers of history
all too present – but who knows, and Celan himself certainly turned away from
such ironies.
It’s
helpful to listen to Celan read this poem (as we can on YouTube). He begins in
a rather dry manner, as if only impersonality could suit these lines, and gets
quite a way into the poem in this fashion. But well before he arrives at the
poem’s last iteration of the milk and the grave, the man with the snakes and
the two women, his voice has changed and slowed down, and there’s an anxiety, a
sort of secrecy in it, as if the text were not supposed to be heard from too
far away. He seems ready to break down when he says, for the third time in one
stanza, that death is a master from Deutschland. This is not dreamy surrealism:
he’s too human for the irony of his own text.
Celan
told the poet Ingeborg Bachmann that the poem was ‘a tombstone epigraph and a
tombstone ... My mother too has only this grave.’ In many modern cases, counter
to older traditions, graves in the earth are anonymous and collective, while
graves in the air are individual and named – that’s why it’s so ironic that the
poem should call a grave in the air the snakeman’s ‘gift’. There is a moving
continuation of this thought in the later poem ‘Cenotaph’, where Joris’s note
tells us that the two Greek words that make up the word for the memorial mean
‘empty’ and ‘tomb’. The poem says: ‘He who was supposed to lie here,
lies/nowhere.’ The German doesn’t have the interesting pun on ‘lies’.
It does
remind us, though, that lying nowhere, in ‘Deathfugue’, is lying at ease. ‘Da
liegt man nicht eng,’ literally, ‘one doesn’t lie in a narrow space.’ If one is
buried in the air, one has all the room absence and imagination can confer. And
eng, ‘narrow’, is the key word in what Joris calls a ‘rewriting’ of
‘Deathfugue’. This is a poem Daive translated into French; indeed he speaks of
working on it ‘side by side’ with Celan in a café. It is also fairly long, one
of the strange exceptions to what I said earlier about Celan’s poems getting
shorter with time. It is called ‘Engführung’, literally ‘narrow-leading’ or
‘leading in to the narrow’, and was written between July 1957 and November
1958. Celan chose the musical term stretto for the French translation and Joris
follows suit. The reference is to the subject of a fugue being repeated before
the first statement of it has finished; the poem notably offers almost no space
for irony or evasion.
Eight of
its nine sections are followed by a stutter of repetition (‘nowhere nowhere’,
‘came came’, ‘still the one still the one’, ‘covered it up covered it up’ and
so on), as if we can’t be relied on to remember what we have just read. The
last and most mysterious of the remarks on poetry I quoted from Microliths is
helpful here, the one about language being figurative as soon as it is spoken,
and the words of poems believing they can put a stop to this. Here the words
are ‘carried over’, übertragen, and the words imagine they are unübertragbar,
‘un-carry-over-able’.
They’re
not, but they can make the carrying difficult, and ‘Stretto’ does this very
well. It takes us into a place with an ‘unmistakeable track’. There is grass
there, ‘written asunder’, that is, presumably, split into too many words, or
into words with no syntax. ‘Stop reading,’ we are told, ‘look!’ And then, ‘Stop
looking – go!’ The place has no name but it is where ‘they’ lay. Or it isn’t.
‘They didn’t lie there.’ Years pass, hurricanes come and go. Were they
hurricanes, though? Celan writes twice of ‘particle flurries’, Partikelgestöber,
and of what ‘we’ read somewhere:
you
know
this, we
read it
in the book, it was
opinion.
We may
think of the camps again, and perhaps we need to. Joris reminds us that Celan’s
language in the poem comes close to that in his translation of Jean Cayrol’s
text for Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, a documentary about Auschwitz. But we
are missing one of the main events. Or I was, until I saw in the notes that
Celan is quoted several times as saying the poem is about ‘the ravages of the
atomic bomb’, about ‘atomic death’. ‘The book’ is where Democritus says:
‘Nothing exists except atoms and empty space, everything else is opinion.’
Celan insisted that he wrote this poem ‘for the sake of this opinion – of the
humans, and thus against all emptiness and atomisation’.
When we
read this, we see the waste land and its track differently. Only some kind of
vegetation has remained, ‘a sepal, a/thought of plant life’. And a stone. But
then the ‘stone’ turns out to be ‘hospitable’. It speaks, and ‘the world, a
thousandcrystal’, begins to assemble again. But what world is this?
In
owlflight, near
petrified
leprosy,
near
our fled
hands, in
the
latest fault lines,
above
the
bullet
trap on
the
ruined wall:
visible,
a-
gain:
the
furrows,
the
choirs,
back then, the
psalms.
Ho, ho-
sanna.
Michael
Hofmann, in a remarkable piece in this paper (23 May 1996), points us towards
Felstiner’s scary commentary on these lines. We recognise the reference to
‘Hosanna in excelsis’, but would we know without his help that ‘the Hebrew term
means ‘Save [us] please!’? Will we catch the echoes of a Nazi marching song
(‘Huzza, ho-ho’)?
In spite
of these echoes, and the allusion to choirs, there is little verbal music in
the poem, not much rhyme or echo, no allusive play of words. There is what
there is (what is left), presented in language that is referential but not
metaphorical. It may be hard to hang on to this distinction, but at least we
can think of the grass, the plant, the wall, the temple and the star as
entities in their own right before they lapse into summary and symbolism.
Thoughts of Ruskin revive at this refusal of the pathetic fallacy; and Susan
Sontag’s arguments against metaphor find a friend.
This
poem is the last piece in a volume called Sprachgitter, and that name helps us
quite a bit, even if it does contain a metaphor. A Gitter is a grid or grating
or lattice or mesh; a street gutter, railings, a cooking grill, the bars of a
cage. It is what we see language through, or perhaps it simply is language.
Celan himself says that at this point in his career (it was 1957) ‘the
difficulty of all speaking (to one another) and at the same time the structure
of that speaking is what counts’.
Slanted,
in the iron socket
the
smouldering splinter.
By its
light-sense
You guess
the soul.
‘We are
strangers’, the short poem called ‘Sprachgitter’ asserts. We are ‘mouthfuls of
silence’ even when we speak, especially when we speak. But there is that light
between the bars, and there is that guess. If we start as modestly, as unfiguratively,
as possible, we may after all get somewhere, find some snowy connection between
ourselves and others.
Under
the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan
by Jean
Daive, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.
City
Lights, 186 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 0 87286 808 3
Microliths
They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose
by Paul
Celan, translated by Pierre Joris.
Contra
Mundum, 293 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 940625 36 2
Memory
Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry
by Paul
Celan, translated by Pierre Joris.
Farrar,
Straus, 549 pp., £32, November 2020, 978 0 374 29837 1
Is
poetry still possible? The question may strike us as impertinent: of course it
is still written. But in some sense it remains a real question what poetry can
do—and how it should be—at a time of suffering and hatred. The problem looms
large in discussions of poetry written after World War II, and it hangs
especially heavily over the legacy of Romanian-born, German-language poet Paul
Celan, among the most innovative poets of European modernism.
After
Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, no one else in the tradition of
German lyric poetry composed works of such evocative force, testing the limits
of language and courageously opening a new path in aesthetic experience. It was
Celan, most of all, who proved that to write poetry after Auschwitz is not only
possible but necessary: that it must take on the accumulating weight of modern
catastrophe and register something like shame for the fact of its existence.
Like Celan himself, modern poetry is a survivor—wounded, traumatized, haunted.
It can persist, but only if it turns against its own pretensions to
transcendent meaning and breaks with inherited ideals of beauty. In Celan’s
work this requirement yielded a new idiom, as enigmatic and rough-edged as the
world itself. And yet Celan seemed to know that the burden of responsibility
might prove too great, and that poetry might simply vanish. “The poem today,”
he observed in 1960, “shows a strong tendency towards silence.”
Celan
was born a century ago today into a German-speaking Jewish family in Romania,
and he died in France fifty years later—a few months shy of his fiftieth
birthday—when he threw himself into the Seine. Publishers have seized the
occasion of the double significance of 2020—centennial of his birth and
semicentennial of his death—to revisit Celan’s legacy and to produce new
English translations. In 2014 Luxembourg-American translator Pierre Joris
published Breathturn into Timestead, superb renderings in a bilingual edition
of the five volumes of Celan’s poetry originally published after 1963. This
year Joris completed his life-long encounter with the poet’s oeuvre by
publishing a companion work, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, which contains
the four volumes of Celan’s earlier poetry. Joris has also translated a
fascinating volume, Microliths They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose,
including the poet’s aphorisms and critical notes on literature. Beyond Celan’s
work we also have a new English translation of the memoir Under the Dome: Walks
with Paul Celan by Jean Daive, a French-language poet and close friend of
Celan’s during his final years. The outpouring of new volumes demands our
attention, but it also raises a question: Are we capable of reading his work?
Celan is
too often categorized as a “Jewish” poet, an epithet suggesting merely
parochial interest. His poetry certainly springs from the particular trauma of
modern European Jewry, but it has inspired writers well beyond the usual
circuits of modern Europe, reaching, for instance, the Martinican poet
Monchoachi and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. There is no escaping the
fact that European life at midcentury made Jewishness a matter of life or
death, and nearly all of Celan’s work reverberates with the memory of a
genocide that he typically left unnamed, preferring instead only an oblique
reference to “what happened.” But his nine volumes of poetry are not
transcripts of an identity or an event, nor can we confine them to a single
literary tradition. Their lexicon comes freighted with a bottomless supply of
references, from Martin Luther and Meister Eckhart to the Hebrew Bible and the
Kabbalah. We say the poems are written in German, but no native reader can
escape the sense that they are not of German. Even in the original Celan’s
poems feel as if they were written in another language—a mark of his
estrangement from the language of the Nazis, but also his inventiveness to go
on writing poetry in the wake of disaster.
The name
Paul Celan was itself a linguistic invention, the poet’s way of twisting his
birthname, Paul Antschel, into a pseudonym. (He used several pen names as a
young man.) An only child, he was born in Czernowitz (Cernăuți in Romanian).
The city lies in the region of Bukovina at the Eastern edge at what had been
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at Celan’s birth part of the Kingdom of Romania
and today part of Ukraine. Known at the time as little Vienna, Czernowitz was
celebrated for its cosmopolitan spirit—it was Romania’s third most populous
city—and its bustling mix of Jews, Romanians, Poles, Austrians, and Ukrainians
lived cheek by jowl in a babel of language and religions and cultures.
Celan’s
family spoke German—his mother, Fritzi, had a deep love for German literature
and insisted German be spoken at home—and he always considered German his Muttersprache.
But necessity combined with natural talent equipped him with an astonishing
multilingualism: he also spoke and read Romanian, Russian, French, Hebrew,
Yiddish, Portuguese, Italian, and English. Already in his twenties he was
making German translations of Shakespeare, Guillaume Apollinaire, and William
Butler Yeats, and later he would translate Emily Dickinson. He identified
strongly with Franz Kafka, another German-speaking Jew born into the twilight
of Austria-Hungary. Above all he adored Rilke, whose poems he could recite by
heart. And it was not only his literary imagination that brimmed over with
far-away material; in his political consciousness too he was cosmopolitan,
embracing socialism as a global cause. He read Pyotr Kropotkin and Karl Marx
and helped to raise funds for the anti-fascist struggle in Spain.
War came
in late 1939, and a year later Northern Bukovina, including Czernowitz, fell
under Soviet control. For a time the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—codifying
non-aggression between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union—meant that
Celan and his parents were relatively safe from the anti-Semitic policies then
spreading across the Third Reich and its allied countries (even as the Soviets
deported tens of thousands, mostly ethnic Romanians, to Siberia). But in 1941,
when the Nazis launched a massive attack on the Soviets and regained
Czernowitz, the town’s Great Synagogue was burned and Jews were made to wear
the yellow star. Celan was put to forced labor—much of the time he was
shoveling rocks—and one night his parents were deported to a camp at
Transnistria in German-occupied Ukraine. He received news that his father had
died from typhus, and, sometime in the winter of late 1942 or early 1943, he
was told by a relative who had escaped the camps that his mother, deemed unfit
for work, had been shot.
The
experience left a wound that would never heal, and it became an obsessive theme
in his work. It appears in his earliest and surely most famous poem,
“Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”), probably written late in 1944 or some time in 1945
after the liberation of the camps. The first version of the poem was published
in 1947 in Romanian translation as “Tangoul Mortii” (“Death Tango”), a name
that may be more suitable to its delirious rhythms and macabre imagery:
Black
milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink
you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink
and we drink
we dig a
grave in the air there one lies at ease . . .
The poem
bears all the marks of surrealism, as do most of the other poems in Celan’s
first collection, The Sand from the Urns, published in Vienna in 1948. A man
“plays with snakes,” and is transformed into an allegory: “Death is a master
from Deutschland.” But to speak of the poem as surrealist is to avoid the
unsettling fact that in the camps the surreal became real. Celan’s biographer
John Felstiner reminds us that an orchestra in Auschwitz actually performed
tangos, and at other camps the music played when prisoners were shot was
generically called a death tango. For the German version of the poem Celan
substituted for “tango” the more serious “fugue,” but the metaphor is not
entirely apt for a poem that keeps hammering away at the same terrifying
phrases with only minor variations, as if the reader were locked away with the
prisoners in an unending nightmare. The image of “black milk”—infusing life
with death, maternal nourishment with poison—is repeated three times; twice he
repeats the couplet that ends the poem: “your golden hair Margarete / your
ashen hair Shulamith.”
The
symbolism is almost too overt. Margarete is the quintessential heroine of
German literature, the eternal feminine from Goethe’s Faust, but she is also an
incarnation of the Lorelei who combs her golden hair in the dreamlike poem by
Heinrich Heine—one of the most anthologized poems in German. Shulamith is
Solomon’s “black but comely” lover in the Song of Songs, a daughter of Israel
magnified into a symbol for her entire tribe. Her dark hair is now “ashen,”
shadow to the “golden” light of German Romanticism and a cruel reminder of
“what happened.”
Though
“Deathfugue” is the best known work by Celan, it is also in some ways the least
characteristic. Celan never again indulged in the accessible rhythms and rhymes
that earned it acclaim as the poem of the Holocaust, its text memorized by
schoolchildren throughout Germany and set to music by several composers. Its
phrases even adorn paintings by Anselm Kiefer, the celebrated “rebel” of
postwar German art. This attention left Celan uneasy, and eventually he refused
to include the poem among the works he offered for public readings. It held a
more personal meaning that could not be exploited. Years later he told the poet
Ingeborg Bachmann, who had been his lover, that “Deathfugue” was “a tombstone
epigraph and a tombstone. . . . My mother too has only this grave.” The idea of
writing a “grave in the air” became a metaphor for his own poetic creation.
After
the war, Celan lived for a brief while in Bucharest and then moved to Vienna,
but he soon left for Paris, where he arrived in the summer of 1948 and would
spend the rest of his life, writing poetry (still in German) and eventually
securing for himself a post as a teacher of German language and literature at
the École Normale Supérieure. His first major collection was published in 1952
as Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory); it concludes with the enigmatic poem
“Count the Almonds.”
Count
the almonds,
count
what was bitter and kept you awake,
count me
among them:
I
searched for your eye, when you opened it and no one looked at you . . .
Celan’s
mother, it seems, had almond-shaped eyes. In the 1954 poem “Andenken,”
(“Remembrance”), Celan imagines a dialogue with Hölderlin (who had written a
poem with the same title), interlacing naturalistic scenery with a grim
reminder of “the dead one’s almond-eye.” Elsewhere the shape of an almond
reappears as candle flame and as Celan’s own figure of the eternal feminine he
had lost. This passage is from the 1953 poem “In Front of a Candle”:
Of
chased gold, just as you bade me, mother,
I shaped
the candlestick, from which
she
darkens up to me amidst
splintering
hours:
your
deadness’s daughter.
A
slender figure,
a slim,
almond-eyed shadow,
mouth
and sex,
danced
around by sleep creatures,
she
floats out of the gaping gold,
she
soars up
to the
peak of Now.
Celan
pays homage to the Sabbath—specifically to the ritual, traditionally performed
by a woman, of lighting the candle to mark the beginning of the day of rest.
The poem is at once pledge and monument. Like many survivors, Celan never
overcame a sense of personal guilt for his parents’ death, and he even figured
himself among the dead: “Make me bitter. / Count me among the almonds.” A poem
from 1954 is called “Cenotaph”—empty tomb—as if he recognized that his poems were
memorials in words.
Joris’s
latest set of translations, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, comprise nearly
200 poems Celan originally published between 1948 to 1963. Readers may find
them more congenial than his more famously difficult later work: they rely,
more or less, on usual conventions of syntax, and unlike much of the later
poetry, one usually feels confident one has grasped what they are about. But
the feeling is deceptive. Even these early poems are dense with poetic
allusion—biographical, literary, theological, and philosophical—that demands a
concordance all its own. As in the volume of later work, Joris has supplied a
massive apparatus of endnotes—filling nearly a third of the book—that help us
to hear the echoes, multilayered and multilingual, that resound through almost
every word. In this respect, at least, Celan is a distant cousin to James
Joyce; each poem can seem like a miniature Ulysses. But where Joyce makes each
sentence into joyful abundance, with Celan the density of reference only
plunges his lines further into darkness, and no explanations can undo the
enigma of his language.
By 1959,
when Celan published the collection Speechgrille (Languagemesh), he had already
begun to test the limits of established forms. The allusions reach a point of
opacity that has led many critics to call his work “hermetic.” The charge is
unfair, though it is true that Celan seems to have lost his trust in language,
and he was experimenting with a vertiginous poetic idiom, as if the bottom has
dropped out of the world. His language grows spare, inelegant, even harsh.
Every poem becomes a shipwreck, the aftermath of an explosion. Among the most
powerful is “Engführung.” Joris calls it “Stretto,” borrowing the musical
meaning of the German word, which designates a portion of a fugue when the
voices leap swiftly one after another, interlacing into a cascade of sound. But
the German particle “eng” also means “narrow,” and it recalls the line from
“Deathfugue” in which prisoners dig a grave in the air, where they will not lie
too narrowly—“nicht eng.” (Joris renders this more loosely as “there one lies
at ease.”) In his 1980 selection from Celan’s work, the British poet Michael
Hamburger translates the title as “The Straitening,” which loses as much as it
gains: it ignores the musical meaning of the word, though it helps us to hear
“straits” as “a narrow passage.”
The poem
is a meditation on memory and absence, returning us to regions marked by death.
The first word, “Verbracht,” can also mean “Deported.”
Displaced
into
the
terrain
with the
unmistakable track:
Grass,
written asunder. The stones, white,
with the
stalks’ shadows.
[. . .
.]
The
place where they lay, it has
a
name—it has
none.
They didn’t lie there.
The
English reader may hear an echo of “Grass,” Carl Sandburg’s poem on the memory
of war:
Pile the
bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel
them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover
all.
[. . . .]
Two
years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
Like
Sandburg’s travelers, Celan’s find themselves displaced into a landscape that
has lost its signposts. We see at least one sign of past horror—the “bullet
trap on the ruined wall.” But the gravesites are uncertain, and grass has
obscured the memorial stones. The poem can be read as a rejoinder to
“Deathfugue,” a farewell to its facile rhythms and its macabre imagery. Celan
has even shifted the temporality of his language. Where “Deathfugue” was
written in an eternal present, “Stretto” reflects on the irrecoverable past. He
probes memory for the wound that will not heal:
Years.
Years,
years, a finger
feels
down and up, feels
around:
seams,
palpable, here
they
gape wide open, here
it grew
together again—who
covered
it up?
The poem
is less a description of past events than a meditation on the work of time.
Graves in the air are now denied as false consolation:
. . . no
flight
shadows
no
plane
table, no
smokesoul
rises and plays along.
In
Hamburger’s translation, “smoke” (Rauch) and “soul” (Seele) are separated,
preferring English lucidity over German compression. Joris leaves the two
conjoined, a trace of German’s distinctive capacity to forge new meanings from
compound terms. (He often preserves such compounds but is not consistent in
this practice: just above, “Flugschatten” becomes “flight shadows.”) In an
essay on the poem, the Hungarian-born literary scholar Peter Szondi, a friend
of Celan who facilitated a great deal of critical engagement with his work,
observes that German compounds defy easy interpretation: one cannot always know
with certainty which term modifies the other. Does Flugschatten mean “flying
shadow” or “shadow of flight”? And does Rauchseele mean “a soul composed of
smoke” or “the soul or essence of the smoke”? Celan’s work offers all these
meanings.
At a
writer’s conference in 1958, Celan explained that “Stretto” was written as a
response to the contemporary debate over German rearmament and what he called
“Atomtod,” atomic death. This is just one of the revelations of Joris’s
endnotes. But there is an irony to these decodings, since so much of Celan’s
work is concerned with the decay of signs and the breakup of stable references—with
resisting easy reference rather than supplying it. Especially in the later work
he composes not by exposition but compression: nouns assume a hard, rock-like
character, while the verbal phrases by which words are sewn into sentences are
simply torn apart. Consider the 1961 poem “Le Menhir,” whose title is borrowed
from a Breton name for the upright stones that date from the bronze age:
Increasing
stone-gray
Grayfigure,
eye-
less
you, stone-gaze, with which
earth
brought us forth, human,
on
dark-, on wild-rosemary-paths,
evenings,
in front of
you,
heaven’s abyss.
The
stark particularity of things stands out on an empty stage. Celan’s landscapes,
much like the scenes in Samuel Beckett’s plays, appear post-apocalyptic, void;
the marks of humanity of have been burned away. Although he felt drawn to
mystical and Kabbalistic imagery, Celan was not a man of faith. God, too, had
vanished in the ongoing catastrophe. In his 1961 poem, “Psalm,” we read, with
an idiosyncratic, forceful rendering of the German word Niemand, that “NoOne
kneads us again of earth and clay, / noOne conjures our dust. / Noone.”
Celan
won much praise in the fifties and sixties for his poetry as well as his many
translations. In 1955 he was invited to write the German text for the documentary
film Night and Fog by the French director Alain Resnais. The film shows grass
fields, and camps that have been closed. But the narrator offers scant
consolation: “And there is ourselves, we who look at these ruins and sincerely
believe that race-madness was buried in them forever, we who see this image
fading and act as if we had cause for hope again, as if we really believed that
it all belongs to only one time and only one country, we who overlook what’s
happening around us and do not hear that the scream never falls silent.” These
words are not really Celan’s, but they capture his own sense of ongoing
catastrophe, his refusal to accept the bland assurance that what had happened
would never occur again and was safely consigned to the past. His humanism is
lined with pessimism.
This
insight had a transformative effect on Celan’s understanding of poetic
possibility. In 1951 the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno had pronounced
that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric. But the famous dictum
has often been misinterpreted; in the very next sentence Adorno hastened to
explain that poetry had become “impossible” not because of the horrors of the
Holocaust but under the pressure of capitalist commodification. The very idea
of culture itself was being destroyed from within, he wrote, and with its
collapse went the promise of redemption through art. Like Adorno, Celan knew
that in the midst of ongoing horror the old values of lyricism and
transcendence could not persist. At some point in 1967 or 1968 Celan wrote down
a small observation that can now be found in Microliths. “No poem after
Auschwitz (Adorno),” he notes. “What concept of the ‘poem’ is being presented
here? The arrogance of the one who dares hypothetically-speculatively to contemplate
or poetically describe Auschwitz from the nightingale- or lark-perspective.”
Like
Adorno, then, Celan took to heart the idea that modern catastrophe would
require a form of art commensurate with its horrors. Poetry could still be
written, but it had to be as fissured and fractured as the world itself. Celan
introduces this thought in his lecture for the 1958 literary prize in Bremen,
insisting that poetic language must pass through “terrifying silence” and
through “the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” The same theme is
deepened and developed in “The Meridian,” Celan’s acceptance speech for the
1960 Georg Büchner Prize. The modern poem has “an awakened sense of ellipsis,”
he observed, and a “faster flow of syntax.” It turns away from the lyricism of
nightingales and descends into a darkened silence where it is “freighted with
world.”
Such
claims alert us to the deep affinities between Adorno and Celan. (Szondi had
even tried to arrange for them to meet.) Celan wrote a prose-piece, “Conversation
in the Mountains,” that imagines a curious dialogue between two characters,
“Jew-Klein” and “Jew-Gross,” casting himself as the first and Adorno as the
second. (He knew that Adorno was half-Catholic.) Adorno was so taken with
Celan’s work that he even entertained the possibility of devoting an essay to
the critical analysis of Celan’s “Stretto,” and in his Aesthetic Theory (1970)
he lavishes praise on Celan’s poems for achieving the impossible: “Permeated by
the shame of art in the face of suffering,” they turn language against language
and try “to speak of the most extreme horror through silence.” His poems become
seismographs of catastrophe, and through them we hear “the dead speaking of
stones and stars.”
By
external standards Celan’s life in France should have brought him some measure
of contentment. He married Gisèle Lestrange, a graphic artist. Though the
couple’s first son, François, died shortly after birth, their second, Eric,
would also become a poet. His post at the École Normale gave him financial
security, and over the years his work gained increasing fame. He traveled and
gave readings of his poems around Europe; the philosopher Martin Heidegger,
whose works inspired Celan despite his Nazi past, once said: “I know everything
of his.” In 1967 he gave a reading at the University of Freiburg with Heidegger
in attendance, and the next day the two met at the philosopher’s hillside
retreat. Celan recalls their meeting in the poem “Todtnauberg,” which begins by
intoning the names of forest plants. “Arnica,” the poem’s first word, refers to
an herb traditionally used to cure wounds.
But some
wounds would not heal. Awards and public acclaim did little to quiet Celan’s
inner demons, and he often fell into depression. A plagiarism charge brought by
the widow of the late poet Yvan Goll, though wholly unfounded, continued to
plague him, and he was consumed with the sense that critics, especially in
Germany were eager to deny that his work was truly his own. In 1965 he placed
himself in the hands of psychiatrists at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, a clinic on
the southern outskirts of Paris.
Celan
and his wife agreed that it would be best if they lived apart, and he moved to
a one-room apartment. He felt increasingly embattled and alone. The year he
began attending the clinic he struck up a friendship with Jean Daive, a French
poet from Belgium who was some twenty years younger than Celan and obviously
held him in high esteem. The two would often meet at the Place de la
Contrescarpe, a square not far from Celan’s flat and populated with cafés where
Celan would often burrow himself away to write. The poem “La Contrescarpe”
records his days there. Daive and Celan would wander the streets of Paris,
discussing poetry and remarking on their surroundings. Some twenty years after
Celan’s death, Daive composed a tribute to their friendship, Under the Dome,
first published in French in 1996 and then in English translation by Rosemarie
Waldrop in 2009, reprinted this year by City Lights with a superb introduction
by Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard. Its title refers to the canopy of chestnut
trees and paulownias that arch over the square.
The
book’s form aptly mirrors Celan’s own: it is composed in short fragments, its
style is hallucinatory and obsessive. Daive revisits the same scenes over and
over. He wrote the memoir on an island in the Cyclades overlooking the Aegean
sea, and the scenery only enhances the sense of elsewhere-and-long-ago: “In the
solitude of the island, the donkey’s presence sometimes rends the air. He cries,
he weeps, he brays. I hear him. And I hear within me a still living mass fall
into the sea, into the Seine.” We know from the beginning of the book that
Celan will eventually drown himself: all that happens is interlaced with the
sadness of the poet’s end. Every time the two men part Celan makes the same
excuse, that he cannot invite Daive into his flat because “the cleaning woman
did not come today.” Even this simple phrase assumes a quality of ritual and
mystery. At one point Celan asks if Daive might attempt a translation of
“Engführung,” though the young poet confesses (to the reader, but maybe not to
Celan) that he does not understand it at all. “Why this poem?” he silently
wonders. Daive feels honored, but also burdened, as if he has been asked to
decipher an “ars poetica for the end of time.” And though it is steeped in
melancholy, the memoir also shows Celan absorbed in the quiet happiness of his
work. Daive watches from a distance and leaves him undisturbed. On another
occasion Daive comes upon him at a café on the rue des Grands Augustins:
"I
surprise Paul on an impressive Provençal chair—a throne?—peeling a peach, with
the juice running all over him who is taken aback by this overabundance. I see
his hands encumbered, his lips the color of peach, his eyes laughing, knife and
fork crossed, his hazel eyes, the wrinkles on his forehead and embarrassment
like a sugar cube on the table."
Some of
these memories date from May 1968, when Paris was in the grips of rebellion.
Celan was a committed anti-fascist, and he instinctively loathed
authoritarianism in all its forms. But he also possessed a keen sense of irony
that restrained him from the ideological passions of the time. Though he was an
early affiliate of Group 47, the collective of postwar German writers that
included Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Heinrich Böll, he did not
share their engagé temperament. He could never have written an overtly
political poem such as Enzensberger’s “Ode to Nobody,” with its litany of
modern horrors such as “slaughterhouses,” “refineries,” and “the carcinoma of
high finance.” Daive recalls a stroll he took with Celan during the student
demonstrations, past the Luxembourg gardens, where they saw the slogan: “We are
all German Jews.” Celan said nothing, but his face registered a mocking smile.
Celan also visited Israel and was received there as a long-absent son. He
responded with gratitude and, like many survivors, saw in Israel the
possibility of a Jewish life without fear. But unlike his father, Leo Antschel,
he could not fully identify with the Zionist cause and saw himself as a child
of the diaspora. Jews were not people of land; in his poems they were “die
Schwebenden,” the floating ones. After Israel declared independence in 1948, he
sent a letter to relatives who had settled there that he would take a different
path. “Perhaps I am one of the last,” he wrote, “who must live out to the end
the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe.”
“One of
the last”—it is a phrase that attaches to Celan in many ways. In 1970 he cast
himself into the Seine from the Pont Mirabeau, a bridge that Apollinaire had
eternalized in a poem on the eve of World War I. With Celan’s death it was the
entirety of modernism that seemed to have drowned. Celan completed the
tradition of literary experimentation that spanned the twentieth century in two
senses: he fulfilled it and also ended it, exhausting its possibilities and
leaving the world to its brokenness and indirection. Upon receiving the news of
his friend’s passing, Daive found that Paris had been reduced to “a web of
streets and pain.” The disorientation was not his alone. Celan ended his life
as Europe was losing economic and global power, its boundaries tested by its
own exclusions and its record of colonial violence.
Modernism’s
passing can be both celebrated and mourned, but especially in the Anglophone
world the difficulties of reading Celan have only increased with time, not
least because of a growing hostility to the very idea of aesthetic difficulty.
In his introduction to the volume of Celan’s later work, Pierre Joris remarks
on what he calls “the present episteme of American poetry,” according to which
poetic language should conform as much as possible to the cadences and syntax
of colloquial English. The translator, Joris warns, may feel compelled to bend
language Celan’s language toward the everyday, like an immigrant who adopts a
name that natives will find easier to pronounce. Celan knew that his poetry
would not be easily absorbed; he once characterized his work as a “message in a
bottle,” as if in the hope that at some point in the future it would meet with
more comprehending readership. In the winter of 1968 he had written a
clairvoyant poem that describes not only his work but the spirit of the times:
Unreadability
of this
world.
Everything doubles.
The
strong clocks
agree
with the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.
You,
wedged into your deepest,
climb
out of yourself
forever.
Celan
composed this poem at the Spaltstunde or “fissure-hour,” when he feared that
the world was growing as illegible as his own work. His fears were not
misplaced. Modernism had once been a program, a demand that the reader (or
auditor or spectator) rise to the challenges of the artwork instead of having
the artwork descend to one’s needs: we were asked to climb out of ourselves to
be equal to its claims. Rilke saw this injunction in the archaic image of
Apollo: “You must change your life.” To be sure, this demand may not be
especially modern at all. Plato thought of the experience of beauty as a metanoia,
a wrenching-free of the everyday and a turning toward the purity of the Forms.
With Celan this ideal is reversed and we are plunged back into worldly
suffering, but he did not surrender the deeper promise of an experience that
both shatters and transforms.
In this
respect Celan may have been wrong. Today things have not grown illegible; they
have grown too legible. They are laid out before us without the least hint that
they could be otherwise than they are. In this regime of total transparency not
only Celan but the entire canon of high modernism has begun to age; its
greatest works have acquired the patina of tradition, as if they were no more
our contemporaries than the paintings of the old masters. They gaze at us as if
through cracked varnish and have grown nearly mute. But when on the rarest of
occasions we succeed in hearing what they say, they still have the power to
leave us shattered, and to rouse us to possibility:
Threadsuns
above
the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high
thought
grasps
the light-tone: there are
still
songs to sing beyond
mankind.
Memory
Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry, A Bilingual Edition
Paul Celan,
translated by Pierre Joris, with commentary by Pierre Joris and Barbara
Wiedemann
Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, $45 (cloth)
Under
the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan
Jean
Daive, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, with an introduction by Robert Kaufman
and Philip Gerard
City
Lights, $15.95 (paper)
Microliths
They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose
Paul
Celan, translated by Pierre Joris
Contra
Mundum Press, $26 (paper)
Poet of
the Impossible: Paul Celan at 100. By Peter E. Gordon. Boston Review November 23, 2020.
Once,
while reading the poetry of Paul Celan, I had an experience I can describe only
as mystical. It was about twenty years ago, and I was working at a job that
required me to stay very late one or two nights a week. On one of those nights,
trying to keep myself awake, I started browsing in John Felstiner’s “Selected
Poems and Prose of Paul Celan.” My eye came to rest on an almost impossibly
brief poem:
Once,
I heard
him,
he was
washing the world,
unseen,
nightlong,
real.
One and
infinite,
annihilated,
they
I’d.
Light
was. Salvation.
In a
dream state or trance, I read the lines over and over, instilling them
permanently in my memory. It was as if the poem opened up and I entered into
it. I felt “him,” that presence, whoever he might be, “unseen” and yet “real.”
The poem features one of Celan’s signature neologisms. In German, it’s ichten,
which doesn’t look any more natural than the English but shows that we’re
dealing with a verb in the past tense, constructed from ich, the
first-person-singular pronoun—something like “they became I’s,” that is,
selves. The last line echoes Genesis: “Let there be light.” As I repeated the
poem, I suddenly understood it—more, I felt it—as a vision of a second
Creation, a coming of the Messiah, when those who have been annihilated (the
original is vernichtet, exterminated) might be reborn, through the cleansing of
the world.
From his
iconic “Deathfugue,” one of the first poems published about the Nazi camps and
now recognized as a benchmark of twentieth-century European poetry, to cryptic
later works such as the poem above, all of Celan’s poetry is elliptical,
ambiguous, resisting easy interpretation. Perhaps for this reason, it has been
singularly compelling to critics and translators, who often speak of Celan’s
work in quasi-religious terms. Felstiner said that, when he first encountered
the poems, he knew he’d have to immerse himself in them “before doing anything
else.” Pierre Joris, in the introduction to “Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech”
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his new translation of Celan’s first four
published books, writes that hearing Celan’s poetry read aloud, at the age of
fifteen, set him on a path that he followed for fifty years.
Celan,
like his poetry, eludes the usual terms of categorization. He was born Paul
Antschel in 1920 to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz (now
Chernivtsi). Until the fall of the Habsburg Empire, in 1918, the city had been
the capital of the province of Bukovina; now it was part of Romania. Before
Celan turned twenty, it would be annexed by the Soviet Union. Both of Celan’s
parents were murdered by the Nazis; he was imprisoned in labor camps. After the
war, he lived briefly in Bucharest and Vienna before settling in Paris. Though
he wrote almost exclusively in German, he cannot properly be called a German
poet: his loyalty was to the language, not the nation.
“Only
one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language,”
Celan once said. But that language, sullied by Nazi propaganda, hate speech,
and euphemism, was not immediately usable for poetry: “It had to go through its
own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand
darknesses of murderous speech.” Celan cleansed the language by breaking it
down, bringing it back to its roots, creating a radical strangeness in
expression and tone. Drawing on the vocabulary of such fields as botany,
ornithology, geology, and mineralogy, and on medieval or dialect words that had
fallen out of use, he invented a new form of German, reconceiving the language
for the world after Auschwitz. Adding to the linguistic layers, his later works
incorporate gibberish as well as foreign phrases. The commentaries accompanying
his poetry in the definitive German edition, some of which Joris includes in
his translation, run to hundreds of pages.
No
translation can ever encompass the multiplicity of meanings embedded in these
hybrid, polyglot, often arcane poems; the translator must choose an interpretation.
This is always true, but it is particularly difficult with work as
fundamentally ambiguous as Celan’s. Joris imagines his translations as akin to
the medical diagrams that reproduce cross-sections of anatomy on plastic
overlays, allowing the student to leaf forward and backward to add or subtract
levels of detail. “All books of translations should be such palimpsests,” he
writes, with “layers upon layers of unstable, shifting, tentative,
other-languaged versions.”
Joris
has already translated Celan’s final five volumes of poetry in a collection
that he called “Breathturn Into Timestead” (2014), incorporating words from the
titles of the individual books. The appearance of “Memory Rose Into Threshold
Speech,” coinciding with the centennial of Celan’s birth, as well as with the
fiftieth anniversary of his death—he drowned himself in the Seine, one rainy
week in April—now brings into English all the poems, nearly six hundred, that
the poet collected during his lifetime, in the order in which he arranged them.
(The exception is Celan’s first collection, published in Vienna in 1948, which
printing errors forced him to withdraw; he used some of those poems in his next
book.) Not only are many poems available in English for the first time but
English readers also now have the opportunity to read Celan’s individual
collections in their entirety, as he intended them to be read. What Celan
demands of his reader, Joris has written, is “to weave the threads of the
individual poems into a text that is the cycle or book of poems. The poet gives
us the threads: we have to do the weaving—an invitation to a new kind of
reading.”
Celan
grew up with a multilingualism natural to a region where borders were erased
and redrawn like pencil lines. “It was a landscape where both people and books
lived,” he recalled. After a few years at a Hebrew grade school, he attended
Romanian high schools, studying Italian, Latin, and Greek, and immersing
himself in German literary classics. On November 9, 1938, the date now known as
Kristallnacht, he was on his way to France, where he intended to prepare for
medical studies. His train passed through Berlin as the pogrom was taking
place, and he later wrote of seeing smoke that “already belonged to tomorrow.”
After
Celan returned to Czernowitz for the summer, the outbreak of the Second World
War trapped him there. He enrolled in Romance studies at the local university,
which he was able to continue under Soviet occupation the following year. All
that came to an end on July 6, 1941, when German and Romanian Nazi troops
invaded. They burned the city’s Great Synagogue, murdering nearly seven hundred
Jews within three days and three thousand by the end of August. In October, a
ghetto was created for Jews who were allowed to remain temporarily, including
Celan and his parents. The rest were deported.
“What
the life of a Jew was during the war years, I need not mention,” Celan later
told a German magazine. (When asked about his camp experience, Celan would
respond with a single word, “Shovelling!”) His parents were deported during a
wave of roundups in June, 1942. It is unclear where Celan was on the night of
their arrest—possibly in a hideout where he had tried to persuade them to join
him, or with a friend—but, when he came home in the morning, they were gone.
His reprieve lasted only a few weeks: in July he was deported to a labor camp
in the south of Romania. A few months later, he learned of his father’s death.
His mother was shot the following winter. Snow and lead, symbols of her murder,
became a constant in his poetry.
“Deathfugue,”
with its unsettling, incantatory depiction of a concentration camp, was first
published in 1947, in a Bucharest literary magazine. One of the best-known
works of postwar German literature, it may have persuaded Theodor Adorno to
reconsider his famous pronouncement that writing poetry after Auschwitz was
“barbaric.” Felstiner called it “the ‘Guernica’ of postwar European
literature,” comparing its impact to Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” or
Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” The camp in the poem, left nameless, stands for all the
camps, the prisoners’ suffering depicted through the unforgettable image of
“black milk”:
Black
milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink
you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink
and we drink
we dig a
grave in the air there one lies at ease
In
phrases that circle back around in fugue-like patterns, the poem tells of a
commandant who orders the prisoners to work as the camp orchestra plays: “He
calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland / he calls
scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air.” The
only people named are Margarete—the commandant’s beloved, but also the heroine
of Goethe’s “Faust”—and Shulamit, a figure in the poem whose name stems from
the Song of Songs and whose “ashen hair” contrasts with Margarete’s golden
tresses. The only other proper noun is “Deutschland,” which many translators,
Joris included, have chosen to leave in the original. “Those two syllables grip
the rhythm better than ‘Germany,’ ” Felstiner explained.
Each of
his early poems, Celan wrote to an editor in 1946, was “accompanied by the
feeling that I’ve now written my last poem.” The work included an elegy in the
form of a Romanian folk song—“Aspen tree, your leaves gaze white into the dark.
/ My mother’s hair ne’er turned white”—and lyrics and prose poems in Romanian.
He also adopted the name Celan, an anagram of “Ancel,” the Romanian form of
Antschel. After two years working as a translator in Bucharest, he left Romania
and its language for good. “Only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s own
truth,” he told a friend who asked how he could still write in German after the
war. “In a foreign tongue the poet lies.”
Celan
liked to quote the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s description of a poem as
being like a message in a bottle, tossed into the ocean and washed up on the
dunes many years later. A wanderer happens upon it, opens it, and discovers
that it is addressed to its finder. Thus the reader becomes its “secret
addressee.”
Celan’s
poetry, particularly in the early volumes collected in “Memory Rose Into
Threshold Speech,” is written insistently in search of a listener. Some of
these poems can be read as responses to such writers as Kafka and Rilke, but
often the “you” to whom the poems speak has no clear identity, and could be the
reader, or the poet himself. More than a dozen of the poems in the book “Poppy
and Memory” (1952), including the well-known “Corona” and “Count the Almonds,”
address a lover, the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann. The relationship began in
Vienna in 1948 and continued for about a year via mail, then picked up again
for a few more years in the late fifties. The correspondence between the two
poets, published in an English translation by Wieland Hoban (Seagull), reveals
that they shared an almost spiritual connection that may have been overwhelming
to them both; passionate exchanges are followed by brief, stuttering lines or
even by years of silence.
The
Bachmann poems, deeply inflected by Surrealism, are among the most moving of
Celan’s early work. Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, the daughter of a
Nazi functionary who served in Hitler’s Army. She later recalled her teen-age
years reading forbidden authors—Baudelaire, Zweig, Marx—while listening for the
whine of bombers. The contrast between their backgrounds was a source of
torment for Celan. Many of the love poems contain images of violence, death, or
betrayal. “In the springs of your eyes / a hanged man strangles the rope,” he
writes in “Praise of Distance.” The metaphor in “Nightbeam” is equally macabre:
“The hair of my evening beloved burned most brightly: / to her I sent the
coffin made of the lightest wood.” In another, he addresses her as “reaperess.”
Bachmann answered some of the lines with echoes in a number of her most
important poems; after Celan’s suicide, she incorporated others into her novel
“Malina,” perhaps to memorialize their love.
Most of
Celan’s poems to Bachmann were written in her absence: in July, 1948, he went
to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life. Even in a new landscape,
memories of the war were inescapable. The Rue des Écoles, where he found his
first apartment, was the street where he had lived briefly in 1938 with an
uncle who perished at Auschwitz. During the next few years, he produced only a
handful of publishable poems each year, explaining to a fellow-writer,
“Sometimes it’s as if I were the prisoner of these poems . . . and sometimes
their jailer.” In 1952, he married Gisèle Lestrange, an artist from an
aristocratic background, to whom he dedicated his next collection, “Threshold
to Threshold” (1955); the cover of Joris’s book reproduces one of Lestrange’s
lithographs. The volume is haunted by the death of their first child, only a
few days old, in 1953. “A word—you know: / a corpse,” Celan wrote in “Pursed at
Night,” a poem that he read in public throughout his life. “Speaks true, who
speaks shadows,” he wrote in “Speak, You Too.”
The
poems in “Speechgrille” (1959) show Celan moving toward the radical starkness
that characterized the last decade of his work. There are sentence fragments,
one-word lines, compounds: “Crowswarmed wheatwave,” “Hearttime,” “worldblind,”
“hourwood.” But “Tenebrae,” the volume’s most effective poem, is one of the
simplest in syntax. Celan compared it to a Negro spiritual. It begins as a
response to Hölderlin’s hymn “Patmos,” which opens (in Richard Sieburth’s
translation):
Near and
hard to
grasp, the god.
Yet
where danger lies,
grows
that which saves.
There is
no salvation in Celan’s poem, which reverses Hölderlin’s trope. It is the
speakers—the inmates of a death camp—who are near to God: “We are near, Lord, /
near and graspable.” Their bodies are “clawed into each other,” “windbent.”
There is no mistaking the anger in their voices. “Pray, Lord, / pray to us, /
we are near,” the chorus continues, blasphemously. The trough from which they
drink is filled with blood. “It cast its image into our eyes, Lord. / Eyes and
mouth gape, so open and empty, Lord.” The poem ends on a couplet, whether
threatening or mournful, that reverses the first: “Pray, Lord. / We are near.”
A more searing indictment of God’s absence during the Holocaust—a topic of much
analysis by theologians in the decades since—can hardly be imagined.
Celan’s
turn to a different kind of poetics was triggered in part by the mixed response
to his work in Germany, where he travelled regularly to give readings. Though
he was welcomed by the public—his audiences often requested “Deathfugue”—much
of the critical reaction ranged from uncomprehending to outright anti-Semitic.
Hans Egon Holthusen, a former S.S. officer who became a critic for a German
literary magazine, called the poem a Surrealist fantasia and said that it
“could escape the bloody chamber of horrors and rise up into the ether of pure
poetry,” which appalled Celan: “Deathfugue” was all too grounded in the real
world, intended not to escape or transcend the horrors but to actualize them.
At a reading held at the University of Bonn, someone left an anti-Semitic
cartoon on his lectern. Reviewing “Speechgrille” for a Berlin newspaper,
another critic wrote that Celan’s “store of metaphors is not won from reality
nor serves it,” and compared his Holocaust poems to “exercises on music paper.”
To a friend from his Bucharest days, Celan joked, “Now and again they invite me
to Germany for readings. Even the anti-Semites have discovered me.” But the
critics’ words tormented him. “I experience a few slights every day,
plentifully served, on every street corner,” he wrote to Bachmann.
Poetry
in German “can no longer speak the language which many willing ears seem to
expect,” Celan wrote in 1958. “Its language has become more sober, more
factual. It distrusts ‘beauty.’ It tries to be truthful. . . . Reality is not
simply there, it must be searched and won.” The poems he wrote in the next few
years, collected in “The NoOnesRose” (1963), are dense with foreign words,
technical terms, archaisms, literary and religious allusions, snatches from
songs, and proper names: Petrarch, Mandelstam, the Kabbalist Rabbi Löw,
Siberia, Kraków, Petropolis. In his commentary, Joris records Celan’s “reading
traces” in material ranging from the Odyssey to Gershom Scholem’s essays on
Jewish mysticism.
The
French writer Jean Daive, who was close to Celan in his last years—and whose
memoir about him, “Under the Dome” (City Lights), has just appeared in English,
translated by Rosmarie Waldrop—remembers him reading “the newspapers, all of
them, technical and scientific works, posters, catalogues, dictionaries and
philosophy.” Other people’s conversations, words overheard in shops or in the
street, all found their way into his poetry. He would sometimes compose poems
while walking and dictate them to his wife from a public phone booth. “A poet
is a pirate,” he told Daive.
“Zürich,
Hotel Zum Storchen,” dedicated to the German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs,
commemorates their first meeting, in 1960, after they had been corresponding
for a number of years. Celan travelled to Zurich to meet Sachs, who lived in
Sweden; she had received a German literary prize, but refused to stay in the
country overnight. They spoke, Celan writes, of “the Too Much . . . the Too
Little . . . Jewishness,” of something he calls simply “that”:
There
was talk of your God, I spoke
against
him, I
let the
heart I had
hope:
for
his
highest, his death-rattled, his
contending
word—
Celan
told Sachs that he hoped “to be able to blaspheme and quarrel to the end.” In
response, she said, “We just don’t know what counts”—a line that Celan
fragmented at the end of his poem. “We / just don’t know, you know, / we / just
don’t know, / what / counts.”
In
contrast to “Tenebrae,” which angrily addresses a God who is presumed to exist,
the theological poems in “The NoOnesRose” insist on God’s absence. “Psalm”
opens,“NoOne kneads us again of earth and clay, / noOne conjures our dust. /
Noone.” It continues:
Praised
be thou, NoOne . . .
A
Nothing
we were,
we are, we will
remain,
flowering:
the
Nothing-, the
NoOnesRose.
If there
is no God, then what is mankind, theoretically, as he is, created in God’s
image? The poem’s image of humanity as a flower echoes the blood of “Tenebrae”:
“the corona red / from the scarlet-word, that we sang / above, O above / the
thorn.”
Some
critics have seen the fractured syntax of Celan’s later poems as emblematic of
his progressively more fragile mental state. In the late fifties, he became
increasingly paranoid after a groundless plagiarism charge, first levelled
against him in 1953, resurfaced. In his final years, he was repeatedly
hospitalized for psychiatric illness, sometimes for months at a time. “No more
need for walls, no more need for barbed wire as in the concentration camps. The
incarceration is chemical,” he told Daive, who visited him in the hospital.
Daive’s memoir sensitively conjures a portrait of a man tormented by both his
mind and his medical treatment but who nonetheless remained a generous friend
and a poet for whom writing was a matter of life and death. “He loves words,” Daive
writes, recalling the two of them working together on translations in Celan’s
apartment. “He erases them as if they should bleed.”
Reading
Celan’s poems in their totality makes it possible to see just how frequently
his key words and themes recur: roses and other plants; prayer and blasphemy;
the word, or name, NoOne. (I give it here in Joris’s formulation, although
Celan used the more conventional structure Niemand, without the capital letter
in the middle.) As Joris writes, Celan intended his poems to be read in cycles
rather than one at a time, so that the reader could pick up on the patterns.
But he did not intend for four books to be read together in a single volume.
The poems, in their sheer number and difficulty, threaten to overwhelm, with
the chorus drowning out the distinct impact of any particular poem.
Joris,
whose language sometimes tends toward lit-crit jargon, acknowledges that his
primary goal as translator was “to get as much of the complexity and
multiperspectivity of Celan’s work into American English as possible,” not to
create elegant, readable versions. “Any translation that makes a poem sound
more accessible than (or even as accessible as) it is in the original will be
flawed,” he warns. This is certainly true, but I wish that Joris had made more
of an effort to reproduce the rhythm and music of Celan’s verse in the
original, rather than focussing so single-mindedly on meaning and texture. When
the poems are read aloud in German, their cadence is inescapable. Joris’s
translation may succeed in getting close to what Celan actually meant, but
something of the experience of reading the poetry is lost in his sometimes
workaday renderings.
Still,
Joris’s extensive commentary is a gift to English readers who want to deepen
their understanding of Celan’s work. Much of the later poetry is unintelligible
without some knowledge of the circumstances under which Celan wrote and of the
allusions he made. In one famous example, images in the late poem “You Lie Amid
a Great Listening” have been identified as referring to the murders of the
German revolutionaries Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and to the execution
of the conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The philosopher
Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that the poem’s content was decipherable by any
reader with a sufficient background in German culture and that, in any event,
the background information was secondary to the poem. J. M. Coetzee, in his
essay “Paul Celan and His Translators,” counters that readers can judge the
significance of that information only if they know what it is, and wonders if
it is “possible to respond to poetry like Celan’s, even to translate it,
without fully understanding it.”
Celan, I
think, would have said that it is. He was annoyed by critics who called his
work hermetic, urging them to simply “keep reading, understanding comes of
itself.” He called poems “gifts—gifts to the attentive,” and quoted the
seventeenth-century philosopher Nicolas Malebranche: “Attention is the natural
prayer of the soul.” Both poetry and prayer use words and phrases, singly or in
repetition, to draw us out of ourselves and toward a different kind of
perception. Flipping from the poems to the notes and back again, I wondered if
all the information amounted to a distraction. The best way to approach Celan’s
poetry may be, in Daive’s words, as a “vibration of sense used as energy”—a
phenomenon that surpasses mere comprehension.
How Paul
Celan Reconceived Language for a Post-Holocaust World. By Ruth Franklin. The New Yorker, November 16, 2020
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