Breathturn into Timestead

by Paul Celan

  WEGGEBEIZT vom

  Strahlenwind deiner Sprache

  das bunte Gerede des An-

  erlebten – das hundert-

  züngige Mein-

  gedicht, das Genicht.

  ERODED by

  the beamwind of your speech

  the gaudy chatter of the pseudo-

  experienced—the hundred-

  tongued perjury-

  poem, the noem.

  The neologism “Meingedicht” is based on the German word Meineid, “perjury,” but because Celan breaks the word the way he does, one cannot but also hear in the prefix the possessive mein, “my.” As Jerry Glenn has suggested,21 this “allude[s] to Celan’s own early attempts to come to terms with the past in elaborate, colorful metaphors.” The new language of the addressed “you,” which here seems to be the poet himself, his new “beamwind”-language, aims to erode the “gaudy chatter” of the early work, and lead into a bare northern landscape of snow and ice: nordwahr, “northtrue,” as another poem puts it, where the true “unalterable testimony” which it is the poet’s job to create can be found, located deep in the ice, as an Atemkristall, a “breath-crystal.”

  What all of Celan’s Widerrufe seem to have in common is a deep dissatisfaction with traditional (and that includes modernist) poetics, and a need to push toward a new vision of writing and the world, and of the relationship between those two. For Celan, art no longer harbors the possibility of redemption, in that it can neither lead back to or bring back the gods, as Hölderlin suggested, nor can it constitute itself as an independent, autonomous aesthetic sphere of Artistik, “artistry,” as Gottfried Benn sees it, and behind Benn, the tradition that starts with Mallarmé. It is this new poetics tentatively proposed in the Meridian speech that is implemented throughout the late work.

  3. “LINE THE WORD-CAVES”

  The Meridian speech thus points the way, with many “perhaps”es to the late work, but how to read these obviously difficult poems remains a problem. Happily, besides the Widerrufe poems, Celan has written a number of programmatic metapoems, showing how the poet envisaged the act of writing, thus how he would have liked his work to be read and understood. Let me give a somewhat detailed reading of one such poem from Fadensonnen | Threadsuns.

  KLEIDE DIE WORTHÖHLEN AUS

  mit Pantherhäuten,

  erweitere sie, fellhin und fellher,

  sinnhin und sinnher,

  gib ihnen Vorhöfe, Kammern, Klappen

  und Wildnisse, parietal,

  und lausch ihrem zweiten

  und jeweils zweiten und zweiten

  Ton.

  In my translation:

  LINE THE WORDCAVES

  with panther skins,

  widen them, hide-to and hide-fro,

  sense-hither and sense-thither,

  give them courtyards, chambers, drop doors

  and wildnesses, parietal,

  and listen for their second

  and each time second and second

  tone.

  Following Celan’s own suggestions, I have already insisted on the importance of the word in the late poetry. This poem thematically foregrounds the point, yielding insights not only into Celan’s writing process, but also into the reading process. The work of poetry is to be done on the word itself, the word that is presented here as hollow, as a cave—an image that suggests immediately a range of connections with similar topoi throughout the oeuvre, from prehistoric caves to Etruscan tombs. The word is nothing solid, diorite, or opaque, but a formation with its own internal complexities and crevasses—closer to a geode, to extend the petrological imagery so predominant in the work from Breathturn on. In the context of this first stanza, however, the “panther skins” seem to point more toward the image of a prehistoric cave, at least temporarily, for the later stanzas retroactively change this reading, giving it the multiperspectivity so pervasive throughout the late work.

  These words need to be worked, transformed, enriched, in order to become meaningful. In this case the poem commands the poet to “line” them with animal skins, suggesting that something usually considered as an external covering is brought inside and turned inside out. The geometry of this inversion makes for an ambiguous space, like that of a Klein bottle, where inside and outside become indeterminable or interchangeable. These skins, pelts, hides, or furs also seem to be situated between something, to constitute a border of some sort, for the next stanza asks for the caves to be enlarged in at least two, if not four, directions: “hide-to and hide-fro, / sense-hither and sense-thither.” This condition of being between is indeed inscribed in the animal chosen by Celan, via a multilingual pun (though he wrote in German, Celan lived in a French-speaking environment, while translating from half a dozen languages he mastered perfectly): “between” is entre in French, while the homophonic rhyme-word antre refers to a cave; this antre, or cave, is inscribed and can be heard in the animal name “Panther.” (One could of course pursue the panther image in other directions, for example, into Rilke’s poem—and Celan’s close involvement with Rilke’s work is well documented.) Unhappily, the English verb “line” is not able to render the further play on words rooted in the ambiguity of the German auskleiden, which means to line, to drape, to dress with, and to undress.

  These “Worthöhlen,” in a further echo of inversion, call to mind the expression hohle Worte—“empty words.” (The general plural for Wort is Wörter, but in reference to specific words you use the plural Worte.) Words, and language as such, have been debased, emptied of meaning—a topos that can be found throughout Celan’s work—and in order to be made useful again the poet has to transform and rebuild them, creating in the process those multiperspectival layers that constitute the gradual, hesitating, yet unrelenting mapping of Celan’s universe. The third stanza thus adds a further stratum to the concept of “Worthöhlen” by introducing physiological terminology, linking the wordcaves to the hollow organ that is the heart. These physiological topoi appear with great frequency in the late books and have been analyzed in some detail by James Lyon,22 who points out the transfer of anatomical concepts and terminology, and, specifically in this poem, how the heart’s atria become the poem’s courtyards, the ventricles, chambers, and the valves, drop doors. The poem’s “you,” as behooves a programmatic text, is the poet exhorting himself to widen the possibilities of writing by adding attributes, by enriching the original wordcaves. The poem’s command now widens the field by including a further space, namely “wildnesses,” a term that recalls and links back up with the wild animal skins of the first stanza. Celan does not want a linear transformation of the word from one singular meaning to the next, but the constant presence of multiple layers of meaning accreting in the process of the poem’s composition. The appearance in the third stanza of these wildnesses also helps to keep alive the tension between a known, ordered, constructed world and the unknown and unexplored, which is indeed the Celanian Grenzgelände, that marginal borderland into which, through which, and from which language has to move for the poem to occur.

  But it is not just a question of simply adding and enlarging, of a mere constructivist activism: the poet also has to listen. The last stanza gives this command, specifying that it is the second tone that he will hear that is important. The poem itself foregrounds this: “tone” is the last word of the poem, constituting a whole line by itself, while simultaneously breaking the formal symmetry of the text which had so far been built on stanzas of two lines each. Given the earlier heart imagery, this listening to a double tone immediately evokes the systole/diastole movement. The systole corresponds to the contraction of the heart muscle when the blood is pumped through the heart and into the arteries, while the diastole represents the period between two contractions of the heart when the chambers widen and fill with blood. The triple repetition on the need to listen to the second tone thus insists that the sound produced by the diastole is what interests the poet.

  The imagery of the heart and of the circulatio
n of the blood is, of course, a near-classical topos in poetry; Celan, however, transforms it in such a way that it becomes vital poetic imagery at the end of his century. In no way is it readable as a kind of postmodernist (in the aesthetical-architectural sense) citation or pastiche of classical poetic/decorative topoi. Numerous other poems take up, develop, and transform this and related imagery. Here, as one example, is a poem that appears a few pages after “Line the wordcaves” and that speaks of this second movement, though this time from an anatomical position slightly above, though still near, the heart:

  NAH, IM AORTENBOGEN,

  im Hellblut:

  das Hellwort.

  Mutter Rahel

  weint nicht mehr.

  Rübergetragen

  alles Geweinte.

  Still, in den Kranzarterien,

  unumschnürt:

  Ziw, jenes Licht.

  NEAR, IN THE AORTIC ARCH,

  in the light-blood:

  the light-word.

  Mother Rachel

  weeps no more.

  Carried over:

  all the weepings.

  Quiet, in the coronary arteries,

  unconstricted:

  Ziv, that light.

  This poem centers around both historical and kabbalistic Judaic motifs (Ziv is Hebrew for “light” and refers to the mystical light of the Shekinah, the female aspect of God, and also to various symbolic accretions, such as the figure of Sophia/Wisdom, and connects to that of Rachel, as maternal figure/personification of Zion), though the place it opens out from and which grounds it—“the aortic arch” of the “coronary arteries”—clearly links it to the biological/anatomical topos of “Line the wordcaves.” More could be said of this poem and its topoi, but let’s return briefly to the first poem and close this excursus by presenting another, additive reading of some of the complexities of “Line the wordcaves.” In a brilliant essay, Werner Hamacher discusses the movement of the figure of inversion as central to the poetics of late Celan, using a poem from Speechgrille, “Stimmen,” and concentrating on the line “sirrt die Sekunde” (the second buzzes) where he de- and reconstructs the expression “die Sekunde” (the second) as “diese Kunde” (this message, this conduit of information). In a footnote he includes a brief analysis of “Line the wordcaves,” which I will cite and let stand as conclusion to my own analysis, if only to show how the polyperspectivity of a Celan poem permits multiple approaches, all of which help to shed light on the wordcaves these late poems are. Having also picked up on the sound pun of antre, and the transference of the animal’s outer layer into the word’s inside, Hamacher writes:

  Here too we have an inversion of familiar ideas … Sense is only one—and indeed an alien, second—skin, an inner mask. Tone, as “that which is always second,” is in each case distanced further than the audible tone, infinitely secondary; it too a second. Celan’s later poems are written out of this second and for its sake; they are dated, as finite language, on the second. The inversion of the secondary into the “primary,” of the outer into the “inner,” is always effected in them so that they expand the character of the secondary, in fine, instead of domesticating it. Thus, as he himself stressed, we can only “understand” his texts “from a distance.”

  In addition, auskleiden is one of the possible meanings of auslegen (to interpret). Insofar as the poem takes on this—second—sense in the image, in the clothing, in the pelt, it itself practices the hermeneutic operation it recommends: the whole becomes feline, fellhin und fellher, although not without falling into what would count as failure for a normative understanding.23

  For Hamacher, the tropes and images of Celan’s poetry are thus “not metaphors for representations but metaphors for metaphorization, not images of a world but images of the generation of images, not the transcription of voices but the production of the etched voices of the poem itself.”

  4. “… ABOVE THE GRAYBLACK WASTES”

  Breathturn, which so forcefully marks the entrance into the late work, includes a poem titled “Fadensonnen” | “Threadsuns.” Celan will reuse this title to name his next volume of poems. It should therefore prove useful to read the poem closely as it may not only help with clarifying some of Celan’s poetological thinking but also throw light beyond that on his philosophical outlook—if these two can, in fact, be separated.

  FADENSONNEN

  über der grauschwarzen Ödnis.

  Ein baum-

  hoher Gedanke

  greift sich den Lichtton: es sind

  noch Lieder zu singen jenseits

  der Menschen.

  THREADSUNS

  above the grayblack wastes.

  A tree-

  high thought

  grasps the light-tone: there are

  still songs to sing beyond

  mankind.

  A desolate landscape, truly “north of the future,” as Celan writes in another poem. But also one that lets us formulate exactly where and how the late poetry of Paul Celan settles—even as it unsettles. Neither utopia nor dystopia, Celan’s topos is a visionary-realistic land- and language-scape mapping the second half of the twentieth century, from the devastating aporia constituted by World War II, with its extermination camps and nuclear wastelands, and reaching beyond Celan’s own dates through that fin de siècle into the mauled dawn of the twenty-first century. Today, nearly fifty years after the composition of these poems, their readability has opened up, making the very difficulties they present not a stumbling block but a gate to anyone attentive to the times and the words. This gate may be narrow; indeed, it needs to be narrow—it is an Engführung, a “straightening,” a “leading into the narrows,” as Celan calls an earlier poem that rewrites the “Todesfuge”—if only as an index to the irreducible complexity of the age and to the effort needed to crack—“à la pointe acérée” (with the sharpened tip) of pen and thought—the husk humanity frantically consolidates, thickening around the kernel of whatever truth there may be. And Celan believed in being, in working, at all costs, in a realm where clarity was law.

  Celan insisted, and rightly so, I believe, on the fact that his poetry was directly linked to, and arose from, the real. This insistence is important to keep in mind today, here in the United States, even though it was first formulated in the narrower focus of an answer to the early German critics who wanted to dismiss the work as just “surreal,” that is, as imaginary/fictive imagery, or, even worse, as psychotic ravings, and did so in order to cover up their own inability and actual refusal to acknowledge the lethal reality (and German responsibility for it) from which Celan wrote himself into the present.24 This is shared reality—thus not only Celan’s landscape but ours too, even if we are often unwilling to acknowledge the starkness and the darkness of the place in which we live. For indeed, we no longer live, as the plural of the poem’s title immediately makes clear, under the cozy reassurance of a world held in place, centered around a or the sun, our sun, Helios, as it was called under an older dispensation. We have had to acknowledge, at least at the macrocosmic level, the fiction of the one star from which we have been able metaphorically to derive the (to us) reassuring though fictitious conditions of a single belonging, a single origin, a single fate—a realization that traverses Celan’s work: In a poem from the 1963 volume, Die Niemandsrose, there is “eine Sonne”—a, one, one could nearly say “some,” sun—that comes along “swimming.” The prose récit “Conversation in the Mountains” opens with the sentence “Eines Abends, die Sonne, und nicht nur sie, war untergegangen” (One evening, the sun, and not only the sun, had set), where “untergegangen” (to set), especially because the sun is accompanied in this action by something else (“and not only the sun”), also clearly carries its further meanings of “to perish,” “to disappear,” “to sink,” “to founder,” “to drown,” etc. Ezra Pound lamented in the Cantos that “the center does not hold”—Celan knows that this is so because there is no single center, no single sun that can hold it all up, that, in fact, there
has always been only a decentered multiplicity of centers.

  But not only have the centers multiplied (or maybe because of that), the shape of our certainties has also altered radically. That most reassuring of shapes, the circle, the sphere, the form of perfection, the unalterable, unbreachable, unanswerable form of the truth, which we had derived from the single sun as source of our world, that form too has, under the pressure of the multiple and the many, been changed, has ex- or imploded: these suns are threads now, thin, elongated—lines of flight. And there is doubt how much light, if any, such suns may shed—clearly the scape beneath or against which these suns appear is barren, desert, a wilderness—eremiai anthrôpôn. Threads are fragile, they can break: we can no longer barter our own finitude for the possible transcendental infinitude of the sun-circle, Helios, or Jahve, or however he was named. Our, man and woman’s, finitude is our measure—and, as the expression has it, it hangs, we hang, by a thread. The thread spun by the Fates, or their Norse counterparts, the Norns—these latter dwell, as it happens, in a northern scape, a place, in Celan’s phrase, “north of the future.”

  Yet all is not loss. These “Fadensonnen,” these threadsuns fold into the word that gives their elongation—the Faden, the thread—something more, something which in English is still there in the word “fathom,” which comes to us via the Indo-European root pet and Germanic fathmaz: “the length of two arms stretched out.” The thread is thus a way of measuring space, or of “sounding” depth (the poem also speaks of a “Lichtton,” a “light-tone” or sound), and, maybe, of a measure, or a new measure for the world and for poetry. If the first volume that announced the late work and its radically innovative poetics was called Breathturn, to indicate that a turn, a change, was needed—had, in fact, taken place—then the title of the next volume spoke of a new measure, of new measures, to be accurate: of those new measures needed in a world seen as “grayblack wastes” to link the above and the below, the inside and the outside, the tree-high thought and the wastes, because, Celan goes on, “there are / still songs to be sung,” poems to be written even under the duress—Lightduress will be the title of the next collection—of the present condition. Even if these poems are “beyond mankind”—beyond any older humanistic category of aesthetics. (As he told Esther Cameron at this time: “But I don’t give a damn for aesthetic construction.”25) His writing had moved toward such a postaestheic, posthumanist condition nearly from the start, even if early work, say the “Todesfuge,” achieves this only through an acidly sarcastic use of a traditional aesthetic form. The late work would realize this condition, exactly.