Selections

by Paul Celan

  4. For a detailed account of those years, see Displaced: Paul Celan in Wien, 19471949, edited by Peter Gossen and Marcus G. Patka (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001).

  Once settled in Paris, and despite the rather normal early difficulties, Celan began to make contact with the literary scene and soon met a good number of writers who were to stay important for him. Among them was the poet Yves Bonnefoy, who recalls Celan in those days:

  His gestures, above all in the first years after Vienna — at the time of the room in rue des Ecoles, of the cheap university restaurants, of the archaic typewriter with a Greek-temple peristyle, of destitution — had nonchalance, and his head had a graceful movement towards the shoulder: as if to accompany, for a stretch, along the summer streets after a lively night's conversation, the friend being left for a whole day.5

  It was Bonnefoy who introduced Celan, on the latter's insistence, to Yvan Goll in November 1949. This encounter would much later produce terrible results: festering throughout the fifties, the "Goll affair" — Claire Goll, the poet's widow, falsely accused Celan of plagiarism, and, shockingly, a range of German newspapers and reviews uncritically accepted and spread those false accusations — broke in 1960 and does indeed mark a traumatic turning point.6

  5. Yves Bonnefoy, "Paul Celan," in Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France, ed. Benjamin Hollander (San Francisco: ACTS 8/9, 1988): 12.

  Celan does not seem ever to have seriously thought about moving elsewhere and certainly not after meeting the French graphic artist Gisele Lestrange in fall 1951 and marrying her in late 1952.7 Celan became a naturalized French citizen in 1955, and it was as a French citizen and a Parisian literary personality that he spent the rest of his life, employed as a teacher of German language and literature at the Ecole Normale Superieure on the rue d'Ulm, summering from 1962 on in the little farmhouse the Celans bought in Normandy. His first child, Francois, died shortly after birth in 1953, but 1955 saw the birth of his son, Eric, with whom Celan would be very close. The last years saw a separation from his wife and son, and from 1967 to 1970 Celan lived alone in Paris. His 1969 trip to Israel clearly was not an attempt to leave France behind: he broke that trip off after two weeks to return precipitately to Paris.

  And yet to this day and despite the massiveness of the Sekundarliteratur around Celan, relatively little has been written about this relationship with his adopted country.8 German scholars tend to analyze Celan's work in the context of what one could describe as a nearly nationalistic "Germanistik" tradition, at best footnoting his relationship to France as a contingent aspect of his life and work. Two of the best-known and standard texts on German poetry after 1945 will serve as examples: while an essay by Klaus Weissenberger at least mentions that Celan lived in France most of his life, Otto Knorrich's otherwise fine essay does not give the slightest indication of the biogeographic complexity of Celan's life. Weissenberger's compilation has introductory chapters organized according to geographic principles (BRD, DDR, Austria, Switzerland). Joseph Strelka, who wrote the chapter on Austrian poetry, seems to include Celan implicitly but, again, essentially as an influence on Austrian poetry and without other biogeographic references, except for the mention of Celan's birthplace. Just as limiting, or error inducing, can be the often used categorial description of Celan as "Exil-Dichter": in exile indeed, but from where?

  6. For a full treatment of this affair, see Barbara Wiedemann, ed., Paul Celan — Die Goll-Affare (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000).

  7. For the relationship between Paul Celan and Gisele Celan-Lestrange, see the recently published correspondence in two volumes: Paul Celan, Gisele CelanLestrange, Comspondance, edited and with commentary by Bertrand Badiou, with assistance from Eric Celan (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001).

  8. The only serious attempt to date to assess the relation of Celan with France is issue 8/9 of ACTS (1988), edited by Benjamin Hollander and titled Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France. See also my essay "Celan and France" (on which I draw for the following pages), in Contretemps 2, May 2001. http://www.usyd.edu .au/contretemps/dir/contents.html.

  The figure that emerges is baffling: Celan is loudly proclaimed as one of the greatest if not the greatest "German poet" of the century (since Rilke, or Trakl, or George, depending on the given author's preferences), when in fact he was a naturalized French citizen of Jewish-Bukovinan descent who never lived on German soil, though he wrote (nearly) all his life in his mother's language, German. The correspondence with his wife shows that Celan was a superb writer in French, and had he decided to write at least some of his work in that language (or even translate his own work into French), no doubt the French could and most likely would have claimed him as one of their own — as they did, for example, with Samuel Beckett, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, and, more to the point, E. M. Cioran and Gherasim Luca. That he did not do this is of course essential but needs to be analyzed and contextualized within the complex relationships he entertained with his mother's tongue and his harsh, nearly hysterical strictures against poets attempting to write in a language other than the mother tongue. Celan, this most proficient multilingual poet, returned to this theme several times, the strongest formulation being reported by Ruth Lackner, to whom he said: "Only in the mother tongue can one speak one's own truth, in a foreign language the poet lies."9 Later, in 1961, he formulated the quandary again, as an answer to a questionnaire, "The Problem of the Bilingual," from the Flinker Bookshop in Paris:

  I do not believe there is such a thing as bilingual poetry. Double-talk, yes, this you may find among our various contemporary arts and acrobatics of the word, especially those who manage to establish themselves in blissful harmony with each fashion of consumer culture, being as polyglot as they are polychrome. Poetry is by necessity a unique instance of language. Hence never — forgive the truism, but poetry, like truth, goes all too often to the dogs — hence never what is double.10

  A word needs to be said here about Celan as translator, the activity he was perhaps most involved in besides his own writing, and one that should not be seen as secondary because it is an integral part of his poetics and of his oeuvre (if one subtracts a number of translations, mainly of novels, done for purely financial reasons). The complete edition of Celan's poetry translations takes up two volumes of the Collected Works (indicating that Celan translated the work of fortythree poets over the years); the first one of these consists of some four hundred pages of translations from the French. Looking at this work chronologically, it is clear that the young Celan was still very much under the sway of surrealism. The first poets he translated, probably still in the late forties, were Andre Breton, Aime Cesaire, Henri Pastoureau, and Benjamin Peret. (Eluard and Desnos would be added to this list in the late fifties.) Throughout the fifties, Celan's translations show a serious, not to say systematic, investigation of French poetry, reaching back to the fathers of modernism, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarme, Apollinaire, Valery (whose "Young Fate" — a poem Rilke thought untranslatable — he translated, he told a friend, so as to gain the right to be critical of that kind of art), and especially Rimbaud, whose Bateau Ivre Celan rendered magisterially into German. How the work of translation is at the same time an important "exercise" — and indeed more than an exercise — for honing his own poetics is made clear in Bernard Boschenstein's commentary on the Rimbaud translation:

  9. Chalfen, Paul Celan, 148.

  10. Paul Celan, Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet Press 1986), 23.

  Rimbaud's poem offered him a chance to creatively follow his inclination toward a strange and specialized vocabulary. He took note, with satisfaction, of finds such as Derweildie Tide table (meanwhile the tide raged) or siefahren nicht, die Klippet; die Koggen, die mich suchten (they don't set sail, the clippers, the cogs that sought me) for les moniteurs et les voiliers des Homes (the monitors and sailboats of the Hanses).11'

  Besides work by Rene Char and Henri Michaux, personal connections and his involve
ment with the magazine L'Ephemere led him to translate younger French poets such as Andre du Bouchet and Jean Daive during the sixties.

  If he also translated a range of poets from English (twenty-one Shakespearean sonnets and ten poems by Emily Dickinson representing the bulk of that work), Italian (a dozen poems by Guiseppe Ungaretti), Portuguese (Fernando Pessoa, with the help of Edouard Roditi), Romanian (Gellu Naum and Tudoor Argezi, most notably) and Hebrew (David Rokeah), it is Celan's work from Russian that is most important. He had learned Russian as a student in Czernowitz and always felt strong affinities with that language. In 1957 he turned again toward Russian and started gathering a good library of modern Russian literature, especially poetry. He translated Alexander Blok's masterpiece, "The Twelve," a volume of poems by Sergey Yesenin, and work by Velimir Khlebnikov and Yevgeni Yevtushenko. But the poet he certainly felt closest to in terms of his own poetics was Osip Mandelstam, in whom he saw a double of himself— a persecuted Jewish poet with socialist leanings, sent into exile, who died in the gulag near Vladivostok in 1938. A poet of whom one could say — as of Celan too — that, in Antonin Artaud's words for van Gogh, he was "suicided by society." Celan dedicated his 1963 volume, Die Niemandsrose, to Mandelstam. His identification with the Russian poet was such that in several letters to friends he described himself as "Pawel Lwowitsch Tselan/Russkij poet in partibus nemetskich infidelium/s'ist nur ein Jud" — Paul Celan/Russian poet in the lands of German infidels/'tis only a Jew.

  11. Bernard Boschenstein, "Paul Celan and French Poetry" (translated from the German by Joel Golb), in Translating Tradition, 182.

  And yet despite the evident multiculturalism and multilingualism, throughout his life Celan saw himself as part of "German" literature, wanted his work to be a visible presence in that country, wanted it to have an impact on German letters. But this desire is more ambiguous than has been suggested so far, and may be closer to the love/strife dynamic I described earlier. The pathos, mentioned by people close to him in France, of Celan, day after day, on a bench in Paris going through the German papers to find out if there was mention of him but also afraid that this mention might be negative, worried that someone somewhere was preparing an attack on him, is not the nostalgic pathos of the expatriate, happy for any scrap of news in the old language from the old country, but that of a deeply wounded man, hoping that the strategies of his solitary struggle are paying off.

  The same worries and fear were even more apparent on those occasions when Celan would leave Paris to travel to Germany for readings, as he did on many occasions from 1952 on. The fear of and profound mistrust in Germany, even after the defeat of the Third Reich, has often been read (and all too easily dismissed) as misplaced and ungrounded, and thus as nothing more than paranoia and a symptom of the incipient psychic disorder that was to darken his later years. That Celan was extremely sensitive to even the slightest whiff of antiSemitism is indeed true — and should be seen as a positive attribute rather than dismissed as paranoia, that is, delusion. In his case, I would submit, William Burroughs's dictum that "a paranoid is a man who knows the facts" holds true. Celan knew whereof he was speaking when he called the new Germany an "Angstlandschaft," a landscape of fear.12 Here is how Wolfgang Emmerich describes the situation in Germany during those years, a description that leaves no doubt that Celan's perceptions were not unfounded:

  Right after the foundation [of the new German state] in 1949 a law exempting Nazi criminals from punishment was enacted, and in 1950 the denazification program set up by the Allied forces was terminated. In 1951 thousands of "state workers" — judges, public prosecutors, policemen, army officers, teachers, professors — were allowed by

  12. See Theo Buck, Muttersprache, Mordersprache, Celan-Studien I (Aachen: Rimbaud, 1993), 159. (Cited by Wolfgang Emmerich.)

  law to reintegrate public service. Consequently the legal system, the administration and education were tilted for another two decades towards assuaging and repressing the Nazi past. . .. Worse happened: the reemergence and rise of the NS elites who had taken part in the preparation of mass crimes[,] .. . hundreds of men who had for example been Gestapo heads and commando leaders. To begin with they joined together socially, in the main undisturbed by the justice system, as "circles," "regulars" or "clubs," until many of them managed to regain posts of responsibility in the economy and the legal system. Besides this opportunism, there came provocation: In 1960 already the police recorded over 600 cases of swastika and slogan graffiti, mainly on synagogues.13

  Celan had indeed actual, factual reason to be worried. That the new Germany had not shed some of the old blindness he also knew from personal experience. His first reading trip to Germany in 1952 had been under the aegis of Gruppe 47, an association of young German writers, which had invited him on the recommendation of his friends Milo Dor and Ingeborg Bachman to their reunion in Niendorf. Although none of the group were old Nazis, most of them had spent some years of their youth as German soldiers, and their easygoing fraternity-like camaraderie, based on shared wartime memories and experiences, must have felt very alien to the young Jew from the Bukovina. Celan, in the quiet and meditative manner that would be the hallmark of all his readings, read "Death Fugue" — to very mixed reactions. He later described the event to his friend Hermann Lenz in the following words: "Oh well, those soccer players. ... So then someone said to me: The poems you read struck me as quite unpleasant. On top of it, you read them with the voice of Goebbels."14 Celan felt just as put out by the positive critical reception of the early work, especially that of "Death Fugue"; thus, for example, did the poet and critic Hans Egon Holthusen — who had been an enthusiastic member of the SS before the fall of the Reich — claim in his essay "Five Young German Poets" (published in the very highly regarded and influential magazine Der Merf,ur) that Celan's poem "escapes the bloody horror chamber of history" to "rise to the ethereal domain of pure poetry," via a "dreamy," "surreal" and "transcendent" language. This negation of the content of the poem was not a singular aberrance but happened with regularity throughout the fifties and sixties. When the by now world-famous poem was printed in German school anthologies, the accompanying suggestions for class discussion exclusively queried the poem's formal aspects — avoiding any discussion of its explicit content. And yet Celan would return again and again to read his work in Germany in those quick forays I spoke of above. In 1967, for example, he read in Freiburg im Brisgau and then went to visit the philosopher Martin Heidegger (who admired Celan's work and had been at the reading) to ask him, as the poem written on that occasion has it, " for a hope, today/for a thinker's/word/to come,/ in the heart," that is, for some explanation or apology for the philosopher's involvement with the Nazi regime, or for his total and deafening silence concerning the Shoah in the years after the war. On that occasion too, no explanation, no apology was forthcoming — only an inability on the philosopher's part to understand the sharply critical poem Celan wrote about the aborted meeting and sent him a few months later (see p. 122).

  13. Emmerich, Paul Celan, 106.

  14. Hermann Lenz, "Erinnerungen an Paul Celan," in Paul Celan, edited by Werner Hamacher and Winfried Menninghaus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988X316.

  A wounded and psychically exhausted Celan would return to Paris from these various expeditions into Germany. There is little doubt that life in the French capital was far more livable, though not exactly easy either for Celan, whose cultural background, that specific mixture of Mitteleuropa and Ostjudentum, did not fit perfectly with Gallic modes of being. In a letter to Edith Silberman he described Paris as "leider, ein sehr, sehr hartes Pflaster" (unhappily a very, very hard place).15 The poet Yves Bonnefoy, in the memoir of Celan, relates the following incident:

  I can still hear Paul Celan saying to me one afternoon, when we got together to talk about Romanesque architecture and painting, you (meaning French or Western poets) are at home inside your reference points and language. But I'm outside.16

  Bonnefoy sees this stateme
nt as expressing Celan's condition as a "jew with an unpronounceable name in wartime Europe (and after), a Germanophone in Paris," believing that "doubtlessly the most harshly felt form of his exile was that as a Jew, i.e., inhabited by a founding word from the other, moving outward from I to thou, he had to live in the essential impersonality of the Western languages, which only conceive incarnation in terms of paradox and on the basis of a borrowed book."17 Celan's exile is absolute: he is, to use a French phrase, "un mort en sursis." To blame his chosen place of residence for this fact will not do. To consider France as the least painful place for this man to "live out" the undue supplement that he considered his own life after the Holocaust and his mother's death seems closer to the truth. Paris, then, for Celan, was a place to be used as an outpost from which to keep one watchful eye (a northeasterly meridian) on Germany and one mourning eye (a southeasterly meridian) on the deathscape of his homeland.

  15. Edith Silberman, "Erinnerungen an Paul Celan," in Argumentum e Silentio: International Paul Celan Symposium 1984 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, I 987), 441.

  16. Bonnefoy, "Paul Celan," 12.