Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  This notion of the possible is central to Celan. It is the way by which one can begin to enter his conception of the poem, his vision of reality. For the seeming paradox of another of his statements—“Reality is not. It must be searched for and won”—can lead to confusion unless one has already understood the aspiration for the real that informs Celan’s poetry. Celan is not advocating a retreat into subjectivity or the construction of an imaginary universe. Rather, he is staking out the distance over which the poem must travel and defining the ambiguity of a world in which all values have been subverted.

  Speak—

  But keep yes and no unsplit,

  And give your say this meaning:

  give it the shade.

  Give it shade enough,

  give it as much

  as you know has been dealt out between

  midday and midday and midnight.

  Look around:

  look how it all leaps alive—

  where death is! Alive!

  He speaks truly who speaks the shade.

  (from “Speak, You Also,” translated by Michael Hamburger)

  In a public address delivered in the city of Bremen in 1958 after being awarded an important literary prize, Celan spoke of language as the one thing that had remained intact for him after the war, even though it had to pass through “the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.” “In this language,” Celan said—and by this he meant German, the language of the Nazis and the language of his poems—“I have tried to write poetry, in order to acquire a perspective of reality for myself.” He then compared the poem to a message in a bottle—thrown out to sea in the hope that it will one day wash up to land, “perhaps on the shore of the heart.” “Poems,” he continued, “even in this sense are under way: they are heading toward something. Toward what? Toward some open place that can be inhabited, toward a thou which can be addressed, perhaps toward a reality which can be addressed.”

  The poem, then, is not a transcription of an already known world, but a process of discovery, and the act of writing for Celan is one that demands personal risks. Celan did not write solely in order to express himself, but to orient himself within his own life and take his stand in the world, and it is this feeling of necessity that communicates itself to a reader. These poems are more than literary artifacts. They are a means of staying alive.

  In a 1946 essay on Van Gogh, Meyer Schapiro refers to the notion of realism in a way that could also apply to Celan. “I do not mean realism in the repugnant, narrow sense that it has acquired today,” Professor Schapiro writes, “… but rather the sentiment that external reality is an object of strong desire or need, as a possession and potential means of fulfillment of the striving human being, and is therefore the necessary ground of art.” Then, quoting a phrase from one of Van Gogh’s letters—“I’m terrified of getting away from the possible…”—he observes: “Struggling against the perspective that diminishes an individual object before his eyes, he renders it larger than life. The loading of the pigment is in part a reflex of this attitude, a frantic effort to preserve in the image of things their tangible matter and to create something equally solid and concrete on the canvas.”

  Celan, whose life and attitude toward his art closely parallel Van Gogh’s, used language in a way that is not unlike the way Van Gogh used paints, and their work is surprisingly similar in spirit.1 Neither Van Gogh’s stroke nor Celan’s syntax is strictly representational, for in the eyes of each the “objective” world is interlocked with his perception of it. There is no reality that can be posited without the simultaneous effort to penetrate it, and the work of art as an ongoing process bears witness to this desire. Just as Van Gogh’s painted objects acquire a concreteness “as real as reality,” Celan handles words as if they had the density of objects, and he endows them with a substantiality that enables them to become a part of the world, his world—and not simply its mirror.

  Celan’s poems resist straightforward exegesis. They are not linear progressions, moving from word to word, from point A to point B. Rather, they present themselves to a reader as intricate networks of semantic densities. Interlingual puns, oblique personal references, intentional misquotations, bizarre neologisms: these are the sinews that bind Celan’s poems together. It is not possible to keep up with him, to follow his drift at every step along the way. One is guided more by a sense of tone and intention than by textual scrutiny. Celan does not speak explicitly, but he never fails to make himself clear. There is nothing random in his work, no gratuitous elements to obscure the perception of the poem. One reads with one’s skin, as if by osmosis, unconsciously absorbing nuances, overtones, syntactical twists, which in themselves are as much the meaning of the poem as its analytic content. Celan’s method of composition is not unlike that of Joyce in Finnegans Wake. But if Joyce’s art was one of accumulation and expansion—a spiral whirling into infinity—Celan’s poetry is continually collapsing into itself, negating its very premises, again and again arriving at zero. We are in the world of the absurd, but we have been led there by a mind that refuses to acquiesce to it.

  Consider the following poem, “Largo,” one of Celan’s later poems—and a typical example of the difficulty a reader faces in tackling Celan.2 In Michael Hamburger’s translation it reads:

  You of the same mind, moor-wandering near one:

  more-than-

  death-

  sized we lie

  together, autumn

  crocuses, the timeless, teems

  under our breathing eyelids,

  the pair of blackbirds hangs

  beside us, under

  our whitely drifting

  companions up there, our

  meta-

  stases.

  The German text, however, reveals things that necessarily elude the grasp of translation:

  Gleichsinnige du, heidegängerisch Nahe:

  über-

  sterbens-

  gross liegen

  wir beieinander, die Zeit-

  lose wimmelt

  dir unter den atmenden Lidern,

  Das Amselpaar hängt

  neben uns, unter

  unsern gemeinsam droben mit-

  ziehenden weissen

  Meta-

  stasen.

  In the first line, heidegängerisch is an inescapable allusion to Heidegger—whose thinking was in many ways close to Celan’s, but who, as a pro-Nazi, stood on the side of the murderers. Celan visited Heidegger in the sixties, and although it is not known what they said to each other, one can assume that they discussed Heidegger’s position during the war. The reference to Heidegger in the poem is underscored by the use of some of the central words from his philosophical writings: Nahe, Zeit, etc. This is Celan’s way: he does not mention anything directly, but weaves his meanings into the fabric of the language, creating a space for the invisible, in the same way that thought accompanies us as we move through a landscape.

  Further along, in the third stanza, there are the two blackbirds (stock figures in fairy tales, who speak in riddles and bring bad tidings). In the German one reads Amsel—which echoes the sound of Celan’s own name, Anczel. At the same time, there is an evocation of Günter Grass’s novel Dog Years, which chronicles the love-hate relationship between a Jew and a Nazi during the war. The Jewish character in the story is named Amsel, and throughout the book—to quote George Steiner again—“there is a deadly pastiche of the metaphysical jargon of Heidegger.”

  Toward the end of the poem, the presence of “our whitely drifting / companions up there” is a reference to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust: the smoke of the bodies burned in crematoria. From early poems such as “Todesfugue” (“he gives us a grave in the air”) to later poems such as “Largo,” the Jewish dead in Celan’s work inhabit the air, are the very substance we are condemned to breathe: souls turned into smoke, into dust, into nothing at all—“our / meta-/ stases.”

  Celan’s preoccupation with the Holocaust goes beyond me
re history, however. It is the primal moment, the first cause and last effect of an entire cosmology. Celan is essentially a religious poet, and although he speaks with the voice of one forsaken by God, he never abandons the struggle to make sense of what has no sense, to come to grips with his own Jewishness. Negation, blasphemy, and irony take the place of devotion; the forms of righteousness are mimicked; Biblical phrases are turned around, subverted, made to speak against themselves. But in so doing, Celan draws nearer to the source of his despair, the absence that lives in the heart of all things. Much has been said about Celan’s “negative theology.” It is most fully expressed in the opening stanzas of “Psalm”:

  No One kneads us anew from earth and clay,

  no one addresses our dust.

  No One.

  Laudeamus te, No One.

  For your sake would we

  bloom forth:

  unto

  You.

  Nothing

  were we, and are we and

  will be, all abloom:

  this Nothing’s, this

  no-man’s-rose.

  (translated by Katharine Washburn)

  In the last decade of his life, Celan gradually refined his work to a point where he began to enter new and uncharted territory. The long lines and ample breath of the early poems give way to an elliptical, almost panting style in which words are broken up into their component syllables, unorthodox word-clusters are invented, and the reductionist natural vocabulary of the first books is inundated by references to science, technology, and political events. These short, usually untitled poems move along by lightning-quick flashes of intuition, and their message, as Michael Hamburger aptly puts it, “is at once more urgent and more reticent.” One feels both a shrinking and an expansion in them, as if, by traveling to the inmost recesses of himself, Celan had somehow vanished, joining with the greater forces beyond him—and at the same time sinking more deeply into his isolation.

  Thread-suns

  over the gray-black wasteland.

  A tree-

  high thought

  strikes the note of light: there are

  still songs to sing beyond

  mankind.

  (translated by Joachim Neugroschel)

  In poems such as this one, Celan has set the stakes so high that he must surpass himself in order to keep even with himself—and push his life into the void in order to cling to his identity. It is an impossible struggle, doomed from the start to disaster. For poetry cannot save the soul or retrieve a lost world. It simply asserts the given. In the end, it seems, Celan’s desolation became too great to be borne, as if, in some sense, the world were no longer there for him. And when nothing was left, there could be no more words.

  You were my death:

  you I could hold

  when all fell away from me.

  (translated by Michael Hamburger)

  1975

  Innocence and Memory

  From his earliest important poems, written in the trenches of the First World War, to the last poems of his old age, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s work is a long record of confrontations with death. Cryptic in utterance, narrow in rage, and built on an imagery that is drawn exclusively from the natural world, Ungaretti’s poetry nevertheless manages to avoid the predictable, and in spite of the limitations of his manner, he leaves an impression of almost boundless energy and invention. No word in Ungaretti’s work is ever used lightly—“When I find/in this my silence/a word/it is dug into my life/like an abyss”—and the strength of his poetry comes precisely from this restraint. For a man who wrote for more than fifty years, Ungaretti published remarkably little before he died in 1970, and his collected poems amount to no more than a couple of hundred pages. Like Mallarmé before him (though in ways that are very different), Ungaretti’s poetic source is silence, and in one form or another, all his work is an expression of the inexhaustible difficulty of expression itself. Reading him, one feels that he has only grudgingly allowed his words to appear on the page, that even the strongest words are in constant danger of annihilation.

  Born in 1888, Ungaretti belonged to a celebrated generation of modern writers that included Pound, Joyce, Kafka, Trakl, and Pessoa. Like theirs, his importance is measured not only by his own achievement but by its effect on the history of the literature of his language. Before Ungaretti, there was no modern Italian poetry. When his first book, Il porto sepolto (The Buried Port), appeared in 1916 in an edition of eighty copies, it seemed to have dropped from the sky, to be without precedent. These short, fragmented poems, at times hardly more ample than notes or inscriptions, announced a definitive break with the late-nineteenth-century conventions that still dominated Italian poetry. The horrible realities of the war demanded a new kind of expression, and for Ungaretti, who at that time was just finishing his poetic apprenticeship, the front was a training ground that taught the futility of all compromise.

  Watch

  Cima Quattro, December 23, 1915

  One whole night

  thrust down beside

  a slaughtered comrade

  his snarling

  mouth

  turned to the full moon

  the bloating

  of his hands

  entering

  my silence

  I have written

  letters full of love

  Never have I held

  so

  fast to life1

  If the brevity and hardness of his first poems seemed violent in comparison to most Italian poetry of the period, Ungaretti was no poetic rebel, and his work showed none of the spirit of self-conscious sabotage that characterized the Futurists and other avant-garde groups. His break with the past was not a renunciation of literary tradition, but a way of affirming his connection with a more distant and vital past than the one represented by his immediate predecessors. He simply cleared the ground that lay between him and what he felt to be his true sources, and like all original artists, he created his own tradition. In later years, this led him to extensive critical work, as well as translations of numerous foreign poets, including Góngora, Shakespeare, Racine, Blake, and Mallarmé.

  Ungaretti’s need to invent this poetic past for himself can perhaps be attributed to the unusual circumstances of his early life. By the twin accidents of his birthplace and the nature of his education, he was freed from many of the constraints of a pure Italian upbringing, and though he came from old Tuscan peasant stock, he did not set foot in Italy until he was twenty-four. His father, originally from Lucca, had emigrated to Egypt to work on the construction of the Suez Canal, and by the time of Ungaretti’s birth he had become the proprietor of a bakery in the Arab quarter of Moharrem Bay in Alexandria. Ungaretti attended French schools, and his first real encounter with Europe took place a year before the war, in Paris, where he met Picasso, Braque, De Chirico, Max Jacob, and became close friends with Apollinaire. (In 1918, transferred to Paris at the time of the Armistice, he arrived at Apollinaire’s house with the latter’s favorite Italian cigars just moments after his death.) Apart from serving in the Italian army, Ungaretti did not live in Italy until 1921—long after he had found his direction as a poet. Ungaretti was a cultural hybrid, and elements of his varied past are continually mixed into his work. Nowhere is this more concisely expressed than in “I fiumi” (“The Rivers”) (1916), a long poem that concludes:

  I have gone over

  the seasons

  of my life

  These are

  my rivers

  This is the Serchio

  from whose waters have drawn

  perhaps two thousand years

  of my farming people

  and my father and my mother

  This is the Nile

  that saw me

  born and growing

  burning with unknowing

  on its broad plains

  This is the Seine

  and in its troubled flow

  I was remingled and remade

  and
came to know myself

  These are my rivers

  counted in the Isonzo

  This is my nostalgia

  as it appears

  in each river

  now it is night

  now my life seems to me

  a corolla

  of shadows

  In early poems such as this one, Ungaretti manages to capture the past in the shape of an eternal present. Time exists, not as duration so much as accumulation, a gathering of discrete moments that can be revived and made to emerge in the nearness of the present. Innocence and Memory—the title given to the French edition of Ungaretti’s essays—are the two contradictory aspirations embedded in his poetry, and all his work can be seen as a constant effort to renew the self without destroying its past. What concerns Ungaretti most is the search for spiritual self-definition, a way of discovering his own essence beyond the grip of time. It is a drama played out between the forces of permanence and impermanence, and its basic fact is human mortality. As in the war poem “Watch,” the sense of life for Ungaretti is experienced most fully in confronting death, and in a commentary on another of his poems, he describes this process as “… the knowing of being out of non-being, being out of the null, Pascalian knowing of being out of the null. Horrid consciousness.”

  If this poetry can be described as basically religious in nature, the sensibility that informs the poems is never monkish, and denial of the flesh is never offered as a solution to spiritual problems. It is, in fact, the conflict between the spiritual and the physical that sustains the poems and gives them their life. Ungaretti is a man of contradictions, a “man of pain,” as he calls himself in one of his poems, but also a man of great passions and desires, who at times seems locked in “the glare of promiscuity,” and who is able to write of “… the mare of your loins/Plunging you in agony/Into my singing arms.” His obsession with death, therefore, does not derive from morbid self-pity or a search for other-worldliness, but from an almost savage will to live, and Ungaretti’s robust sensuality, his firm adherence to the world of physical things, makes his poems tense with conflict between the irreconcilable powers of love and vanity.