by Paul Celan
The attention which the poem pays to all that it encounters, its more acute sense of detail, outline, structure, color, but also of the "tremors and hints" — all this is not, I think, achieved by an eye competing (or concurring) with ever more precise instruments, but, rather, by a kind of concentration mindful of all our dates.
"Attention," if you allow me a quote from Malebranche via Walter Benjamin's essay on Kafka, "attention is the natural prayer of the soul."
The poem becomes — under what conditions — the poem of a person who still perceives, still turns towards phenomena, addressing and questioning them. The poem becomes conversation — often desperate conversation.
Only the space of this conversation can establish what is addressed, can gather it into a "you" around the naming and speaking I. But this "you," comes about by dint of being named and addressed, brings its otherness into the present. Even in the here and now of the poem — and the poem has only this one, unique, momentary present — even in this immediacy and nearness, the otherness gives voice to what is most its own: its time.
Whenever we speak with things in this way we also dwell on the question of their where-from and where-to, an "open" question "without resolution," a question which points towards open, empty, free spaces — we have ventured far out.
The poem also searches for this place.
The poem ?
The poem with its images and tropes?
Ladies and gentlemen, what am I actually talking about when I speak from this position, in this direction, with these words about the poem, no, about the poem?
I am talking about a poem which does not exist!
The absolute poem — no, it certainly does not, cannot exist.
But in every real poem, even the least ambitious, there is this ineluctable question, this exorbitant claim.
Then what are images?
What has been, what can be perceived, again and again, and only here, only now. Hence the poem is the place where all tropes and metaphors want to be led ad absurdum.
And topological research?
Certainly. But in the light of what is still to be searched for: in a u-topian light.
And the human being? The physical creature?
In this light.
What questions! What claims!
It is time to retrace our steps.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have come to the end — I have come back to the beginning.
Elargissez I'artl This problem confronts us with its old and new uncanniness. I took it to Biichner, and think I found it in his work.
I even had an answer ready, I wanted to counter, to contradict, with a word against the grain, like Lucile's.
Enlarge art?
No. On the contrary, take art with you into your innermost narrowness. And set yourself free.
I have taken this route, even today, with you. It has been a circle.
Art (this includes Medusa's head, the mechanism, the automaton), art, the uncanny strangeness which is so hard to differentiate and perhaps is only one after all — art lives on.
Twice, with Lucile's "Long live the king" and when the sky opened as an abyss under Lenz, there seemed to occur an Atemwende, a turning of breath. Perhaps also while I was trying to head for that inhabitable distance which, finally, was visible only in the figure of Lucile. And once, by dint of attention to things and beings, we came close to a free, open space and, finally, close to Utopia.
Poetry, ladies and gentlemen: what an eternalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me, since I have come back to the beginning, to ask once more, briefly and from a different direction, the same question.
Ladies and gentlemen, several years ago I wrote a little quatrain:
Voices from the path through nettles:
Come to us on your hands.
Alone with your lamp,
Only your hand to read.
And a year ago, I commemorated a missed encounter in the Engadine valley by putting a little story on paper where I had a man "like Lenz" walk through the mountains.
Both times, I had written from a "20th of January," from my "loth of January."
I had .. . encountered myself.
Is it on such paths that poems take us when we think of them? And are these paths only detours, detours from you to you? But they are, among how many others, the paths on which language becomes voice. They are encounters, paths from a voice to a listening You, natural paths, outlines for existence perhaps, for projecting ourselves into the search for ourselves ... A kind of homecoming.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am coming to the end, I am coming, along with my acute accent, to the end of... Leonce and Lena.
And here, with the last two words of this work, I must be careful.
I must be careful not to misread, as Karl Emil Franzos did (my rediscovered fellow countryman Karl Emil Franzos) editor of that First Critical and Complete Edition ofGeorg Bilchner's Worlds and Posthumous Writings which was published eighty-one years ago by Sauerlander in Frankfurt am Main — I must be careful not to misread das Commode, "the comfort" we now need, as "the coming thing."
And yet: is Leonce and Lena not full of words which seem to smile through invisible quotation marks, which we should perhaps not call Gdnsefiisschen, or goose feet, but rather rabbit's ears, that is, something that listens, not without fear, for something beyond itself, beyond words?
From this point of "comfort," but also in the light of Utopia, let me now undertake a bit of topo-logical research. I shall search for the region from which hail Reinhold Lenz and Karl Emil Franzos whom I have met on my way here and in Biichner's work. I am also, since I am again at my point of departure, searching for my own place of origin.
I am looking for all this with my imprecise, because nervous, finger on a map — a child's map, I must admit.
None of these places can be found. They do not exist. But I know where they ought to exist, especially now, and ... I find something else.
Ladies and gentlemen, I find something which consoles me a bit for having walked this impossible road in your presence, this road of the impossible.
I find the connective which, like the poem, leads to encounters.
I find something as immaterial as language, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics: I find ... a meridian.
With you and Georg Biichner and the State of Hesse, I believe I have just touched it again.
Previous page:
Gisele Celan-Lestrange,
etching, no. i in the series
Schwarzmaut.
FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE
LETTER #1
TO GISELE CELAN-LESTRANGE
[Paris,] Monday [1. 7?.1952], ten a.m.
Maia, my love, I would like to be able to tell you how much I want all this to remain, to remain for us, to remain for us forever.
You see, coming toward you I have the impression of leaving a world, of hearing the doors slam behind me, door after door, for they are numerous, the doors of this world made of misunderstandings, of false clarities, of stammerings. Maybe there remain other doors for me, maybe I have not yet recrossed the whole expanse across which is spread out this network of signs which lead astray — but I am coming, do you hear me, I am coming closer, the rhythm — I feel it — is speeding up, the deceptive fires go out one after the other, the lying mouths close over their drool — no more words, no more noise, nothing now dodging my step —
I'll be there, next to you, in a moment, in a second that will inaugurate time
Paul
LETTER #2
TO GISELE CELAN-LESTRANGE
[Paris] This Monday [1.28.1952] — 5 p.m.
Maia, my loved one, here I am writing to you, as I had promised you — how could I not write to you — I write to you to tell you that you don't stop being present, close by, that you accompany me everywhere I go, that this world is you, you alone, and that beca
use of that it is larger, that it has found, thanks to you, a new dimension, a new coordinate, the one I could no longer bring myself to grant it, that it is no longer that implacable solitude that forced me at each moment to sack what rose in front of me, to hound myself— for I wanted to be just and spare no one! —that everything changes, changes, changes under your gaze —
My darling, I will call you a bit later, at seven, when I come out of my class, but I will not cease to think about you while waiting to call you — I worry always, less than yesterday of course, and even less than the day before yesterday, but I always worry like I have never worried about anybody — but you know that, no need to tell you —
What I have loved so far, I have loved in order to be able to love you
Paul
LETTER #3
TO ERICH EINHORN
Erich Einhorn was a close childhood friend with whom Celan had lost touch in 7947, when the former escaped Czernowitz with the retreating Soviet troops. In 1962 Celan was given Einhorn's Moscow address — the latter lived and worked there as a translator — by a common friend, and an intense if short-lived correspondence (fifteen letters in all) ensued. This is Celan's response to Einhorn'sfirst letter.
My dear Erich,
Many thanks for your letter!
I hope very much that the eye operation your mother had to undergo was successful. Give her my best wishes — I wish to see her again too in the not all too distant future.
I have just sent you my books: the volumes of my own poetry, two translations from the French (Rimbaud and Valery), two from the Russian — one of them I also sent, together with "Sprachgitter" to Nadezhda Yakovlevna —, my speech upon being given the Biichner Prize.
From the things I have put down on paper you will certainly be able to see where my life and my thoughts are. (I have never written a line that was not connected to my existence — I am, you see, a realist, in my own manner.)
I'll send you the Fischer-Dieskau records with pleasure — just give me a bit of time. Russian poetry, even recent work, is not difficult to find here, but of course I would be very thankful to you if you were to draw my attention to this or that new publication. — Nice that we both are translators — you see, there actually are no distances. If only I could count Tanja and Gustav among my readers!
My work at the Ecole Normale Superieure (45 rue d'Ulm, Paris 5) is experiencing an interruption, as I, like my boy, am on school holidays. We will go to the countryside for a few days, in Normandy, to a small place between Nonancourt and Damville, where it is quiet and where there are simple, real people, among them an old sheepherder from Huesca, a Spaniard displaced here with the Republican fugitives.— Recently, when we were in Damville, they showed the movie Normandie-Njemen. One stays at home.
I will be able to work for myself again, a new volume of poems, Die Niemandsrose [The Noonesrose], will no doubt come out next spring. Each week I'll return to Paris to check the mail — above all for news from the Soviet Union. — And now do let me tell you how much pleasure it gives me to be able to write to you and yours, to be able to wait for an answer — an answer from Moscow.
From the depth of my heart, all the best!
Your Paul
LETTER # 4
TO ERICH EINHORN
Moisville by Nonancourt (Eure), 10 August 1962
Dear Erich,
I hope that my books have reached you meanwhile — I sent you everything you had asked for — except for the translation of Alexander Blok's Twelve of which I don't have a copy anymore (but you did say that it was available in the Moscow libraries — which pleases me a lot).
Some of what I sent you, my Darmstadt speech for example, will most likely not correspond to your taste and ideas, I have only sent them along because, with all its unanswered questions, it documents how lonely man can be in a capitalist society. You are right when you say that in West Germany they have not forgiven me for writing a poem about the German extermination camps — the "Todesfuge." What I have reaped from this — and similar — poems, is a long story. The literature prizes I was given shouldn't fool you: they are, finally, only the alibi of those who, in the shadow of such alibis, continue with other, more contemporary means, what they had started, and continued, under Hitler.
In my latest book of poems (Sprachgitter [Speech-Grille]) you'll find a poem called "Engfiihrung" ["Stretto"] which evokes the devastation caused by the atom bomb. At a central place stands, as fragment, this sentence by Democritus: "There exists nothing except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." I don't need to underline that the poem was written because of that opinion — for the sake of the human, thus against all emptiness and atomizing.
How happy it would make me if you wanted to translate one or the other piece I hardly need to tell you.
How is your mother? and your wife and little Marina? And where do you spend your holidays?
We will be in Normandy until the middle of September. And hope to be able to spend our next summer holidays in the Soviet Union.
The records you sent me are beautiful. Please tell Samuel Marshak that I truly venerate his work.
We greet you warmly!
Paul
I would be very thankful if, as you suggested, you would from time to time draw my attention to books by the new young Soviet poets, — and please also tell me where I went wrong in my translations.
LETTER #5
TO RENE CHAR
Draft of an unsent letter concerning the Gall affair.
78 rue de Longchamp Paris, 22 March 1962
Dear Rene Char,
Thank you for your so true letter. Thank you for shaking my hand —
I shake yours.
What is happening to me, excuse me for speaking of it again, is, believe me, rather unique in its genre. Poetry, as you well know, does not exist without the poet, without its person — without the person —, and, you see, the hoodlums, those of the right as well as those of the "left," have managed to get together in order to annihilate me. I can no longer publish — in that area too, they knew how to isolate me. You — they exile you into the land of the above, but your true country remains for you. Concerning myself, I am redistributed, and then they have fun lapidating me with ... the separate pieces of my self. It won't surprise you if I tell you that the first to have "come up" with that are the pseudo-poets. There are many of those among our common "friends," Rene Char. Many. — Beware of those who ape you, Rene Char. (I know well of what I speak, alas.) In their nullity they consider you a source of images to be added up in order to create a semblance for themselves: they do not reflect you, they darken you.* And they have worked hard at undermining our friendship ... they had a lot of help ...
You see, I have always tried to understand you, to respond to you, to take your work like one takes a hand; and it was, of course, my hand that took yours, there where it was certain not to miss the encounter. To that in your work which did not — or not yet — open up to my comprehension, I responded with respect and by waiting: one can never pretend to comprehend completely —: that would be disrespect in the face of the Unknown that inhabits — or comes to inhabit — the poet; that would be to forget that poetry is something one breathes; that poetry breathes you in. (But that breath, that rhythm — where does it come from?) Thought — mute —, and that's again language, organizes that respiration; critical, it clusters in the intervals: it discerns, it doesn't judge; it takes a decision; it chooses: it keeps its sympathy — and obeys sympathy.
But permit me to backtrack: you tell me that you were able to create the emptiness into which your enemies fall and kill themselves — I rejoice at seeing you so strong, so fortified. As far as my own emptiness is concerned, as far as the emptiness they have been able to create around me is concerned, I see it... as the generator of a whole race of creatures that I couldn't name. And these creatures, I see them as very prolific: they multiply and keep on multiplying; for the Lie knows how to perpetuate itself— thanks to the "nymphe
ttes" or, if not, by scissiparity.
*To which these last few months has been added a true "psychological action" that aims at my psychic destruction.
Wandering, Exile of the Human to be True ...
(I know some who'd quote St-John Perse at you and his "bilingual" poet —: there too they believe they can obtain (an affidavit) an argument for their vile duplicity . . . )