by Paul Celan
5. “… EACH POEM HAS ITS OWN ‘20 JANUARY’ INSCRIBED IN IT.”
Always mindful of dates—those of history as well as those of his own story, inscribed as often as not in the poems—Celan wrote a poem on November 23, 1965, his forty-fifth birthday (“All deine Siegel erbrochen? Nie.” | “All your seals broken open? Never.”), and on the manuscript added the following motto, taken from Psalm 45 in the Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Bible: “Reite für die Treue.”26 Although the King James version gives this as “ride prosperously because of truth,” in this context it would be better to translate the motto as “ride for the Truth” or “ride for the Faith.” John Felstiner comments: “The Psalmist, having said ‘My tongue is the pen of a ready writer,’ was urging his king to ride forth righteously. The poet, for whom certain dates and dates as such held more than natural significance, was marking his birthday with an ancient motto that renewed his task.”27 For Celan, this truth or faith he was willing to ride for should, however, not be seen as theologically based. In 1960 he had told Nelly Sachs, after she had indicated that she was a believer, that he “hoped to be able to blaspheme until the end”—a stance that comes through in many of the poems of the late work, which show (while hiding, in a very Celanian fashion) a biting sarcasm often overlooked by critics, who tend to approach the work all too piously.
The conditions of the writing of the poems of this period, the midsixties on to the end, were difficult ones, as already mentioned. If the “Reite für die Treue” motto points to Celan’s wish for movement, for the poet’s desire, maybe, to be that “figure of outward” (as Charles Olson put it) this movement is never a simple, linear, one-to-one relation and interaction with some immutable outside, especially if the basic position from which the “traveler” moves is already exilic. It is then rather a nomadic line of flight over mutable, friable terrain: in one poem Celan speaks of phosphorous “detour-maps” pointing toward movements the temporal and spatial coordinates of which did not, could not, follow any straight two- or even three-dimensional map, but had to happen in accordance with other, at times controllable, and at times uncontrollable, modes of displacement, willed and unwilled dérives, drifts. Even the dates—which on the surface would seem to anchor at least the temporal coordinates—are caught up in movement, as he puts it a few lines later in the Meridian speech: “But don’t we all write ourselves from such dates? And toward what dates do we write ourselves?” This is not the place to analyze the question of the date(s) further, but I would like to refer the reader interested in this central Celanian topos to Jacques Derrida’s superb essay “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan.”28 That essay, like other critical writings about Celan, investigates a line, seen as of core importance to the poetics, from the Meridian speech, which says “perhaps one can say that each poem has its own ‘20 January’ inscribed in it” and which refers to the fact that in Georg Büchner’s novella Lenz, the poet Lenz is said to have set off for the mountains on a twentieth of January. This date then gets linked to further events in Celan’s life and to other historical occasions. Celan followed that sentence by this one: “Perhaps what’s new in the poems written today is exactly this: theirs is the clearest attempt to remain mindful of such dates.” Which Derrida glosses as follows: “Let us not believe that what thus becomes readable would be the date itself; rather, it is only the poetic experience of the date, that which a date, this one, ordains in our relation to it, a certain poetic seeking.”
The concept of “dated” poems is, however, not just a useful and elegant way of thinking theoretically through the historical or philosophical dimensions of Celan’s polyverse. In a very practical sense we have to be mindful of the dates of the poems in the compositional procedure of the late work—especially as Celan carefully erased them from the books as such, even if he had inscribed the manuscript just as carefully with the dates of composition—if we want to understand the cyclical nature of these books. It is this serial mode of composition that suggests the need, neglected in the various selected poems editions, for publishing translations of the exact and complete volumes Celan himself had published—or, as far as the posthumous work goes, readied for publication—rather than excerpting a few “translatable” poems from this or that book. As all his worksheets were dated, we can reconstruct in exact detail the chronological composition of the late volumes and determine the grounds they were built on. Such analysis corroborates what earlier had been only an intuition, namely, that these volumes were essentially composed chronologically with a sense of serial/cyclical composition as core structuring device. I have therefore given the dates of composition of the individual poems in the commentaries at the end of this book, as these dates were gathered and established by Barbara Wiedemann in her commented edition of the complete poems.29 Thus Jean Bollack, who knew Celan well, writes of Celan’s poems’ compositional process: “Their composition is each time conceived as an instant of life, of plenitude or emptiness, the instant of the act of writing (that is the only parousia, his—of a word: his) [instant de l’écriture en acte (c’est l’unique parousie, la sienne—d’un verbe: le sien)]; the texts give themselves as such, present themselves more and more in that biographical form, like poetic notes inscribed in an open ‘journal’; it opens and continues in discontinuity.”30
This organization into series of cycles building up to individual volumes can be seen, using a musical analogy, as sections that are durchkomponiert, “through-composed,” and then assembled into larger coherences. This has been shown for some of the cycles, especially as concerns the one most attentively studied so far, Atemkristall | Breathcrystal, comprising the twenty-one poems that open Breathturn, though we know it to be true of later cycles, as well. This is important to keep in mind, as it helps us understand the serial/cyclical nature of late Celan—which in turn will play a central role in how we approach the translation of those books, as well as being essential to any serious hermeneutical or theoretical reading of the work.
Such research and textual clarification concerning the sequence of books starting with Breathturn also helps to dispel any notion of a Verstummen, a falling silent by the poet, which had been one of the alibis used to dismiss the late work: Celan, or so this fallacious argument went, in the last however many years of his life, because of illness or some other unexplained cause, had either nothing left to say, or only incoherencies, as is obvious from the poems’ growing smaller and more gnarled and incomprehensible—this dismissive argument even attempted to bring to bear the poet’s suicide as alleged proof of his desperate rush toward a Verstummen, a “becoming mute.” A quick accounting will tell us that it is not so. Between 1948 and 1963, Celan published five collections of poems, the publication of each volume separated by roughly four years. With Breathturn, this pattern changes drastically: published in 1967 (again four years after the publication of the previous volume), it is the largest single volume up to then, containing seventy-eight poems, while the average number of poems in the previous collections was fewer than fifty. Fadensonnen | Threadsuns, the largest single collection, with 105 poems, follows in rapid succession; it is published in 1968, while Lichtzwang | Lightduress appears in the spring of 1970, shortly after the poet’s suicide. Schneepart | Snowpart, published in 1971, contains poems written in 1967 and 1968, thus at times preceding, or often overlapping with, or composed just after those in Fadensonnen | Threadsuns and Lichtzwang | Lightduress. During 1967 and 1968 Celan had also published two limited editions of poems later gathered in Lightduress, and four volumes of translations. To talk of Verstummen in the case of such high, not to say hectic, productivity is simply nonsense—or a malevolent attempt at out-of-hand dismissal; it is a wrongheaded reading based on critics comparing the size and word count of individual poems and speaks more to their own bafflement and shortsightedness than to the actual facts. Rather than falling silent, Celan became truly voluble in those, the last years of his life. The present volume gathers this great, rich late harvest in its fullness.
/> 6. “POETRY IS BY NECESSITY A UNIQUE INSTANCE OF LANGUAGE.”
Indeed, so unique, that a number of practitioners and commentators have concluded that therefore poetry is untranslatable. Celan’s work, given its supposed and much vaunted hermeticism, given the actual and unarguable linguistic and hermeneutic difficulties it presents, has often been held up as exemplary of just such untranslatability. And yet Celan’s own practice, including as it does an immense oeuvre of translation of very difficult poetry from more than a half-dozen languages, certainly intimates nothing of the kind. A good translation presupposes a certain complicity between original poem and translator—something Celan expressed in a letter to Vittorio Sereni, editor and translator at the Italian publishing house Mondadori, in relation to a projected translation of his work into Italian: “Among the problems that remain to be resolved there is before all—and it is a major one—that of the translator. Personally, in matters of poetry, I have only ever tried to translate something that did, as one says in my language, speak to me (was mich anspricht), and I imagine that your own experiences must be similar to mine.”31
Celan’s poetry does exactly that—it speaks to me, has, in fact, spoken to me since I first heard it read aloud when I was fifteen (I have written of this in more detail elsewhere), and has accompanied me for some fifty years now. I too—obviously—believe in the possibility of translating poetry, would even call it a necessity, even if such faith is at times sorely questioned. Or maybe exactly because of this very dynamic: to question the possibility of translation means to question the very possibility of literature, of writing, of language, which is always already a translation, that is, is both an act of translation and the result of such an act. In the half century I have by now spent in the practice of poetry, both writing it and translating it, a sense has emerged suggesting that a poem is not only the one version printed in a book, but also all its other (possible) printed versions—context changing or adding to or subtracting from meaning(s)—plus all the possible oral and/or visual performances, as well as the totality of translations it gives rise to. The printed poem is, in fact, only a score for all subsequent readings (private or public) and performative transformations, be they through music, dance, painting, or foreign-language translation. Such a view is bound to destabilize any concept of the poem as some fixed and absolute artifact, readable (understandable, interpretable) once and for all. This is also how I hear Celan’s line in the Meridian speech: “The absolute poem—no, it certainly does not, cannot exist.”
I started translating Atemwende, the volume that opens this compilation, in 1967, the year of its publication. I did so not with the immediate intention of having it published (though I certainly did not want to exclude that possibility, even then), but rather as the only way I saw of entering into an apprenticeship with the poet to whose work I owed my own turn to poetry, what I can only describe as the epiphanic experience that, six years earlier, had opened the realm of poetry as possible place of a life’s quest and fulfillment. In the spring of 1969 I completed the first translation of Breathturn in the context of an undergraduate thesis at Bard College, where I had the subtle and immensely enriching advice of the poet and scholar Robert Kelly to help me along the way. Four or five years later—by then I was living in London—Asa Benveniste, the poet and publisher of Trigram Press, proposed to print Breathturn. I revised the book carefully, but despite all his efforts Trigram was unable to secure the rights from the German publishers and the project came to nothing. Between 1976 and 1979, living in Constantine, Algeria—and with much free time on my hands—I yet again went over the early translations while starting work on Threadsuns and Lightduress. Upon my return to London—and even more so after moving to Paris in the early eighties—I became friends with Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, the poet’s widow, a friendship that proved a further spur and kept me working on Celan, reading, rereading, thinking about, and writing on the oeuvre—when I was not translating. When I moved back to the United States in 1987, I brought along a near complete translation of all of late Celan, starting with Breathturn. Between 1988 and 1991, I reworked all of these translations yet again for a Ph.D. dissertation at SUNY Binghamton—an occasion that gave me the leisure and ability to catch up on the vast amount of secondary Celan literature that had accrued over the years. Three volumes—Breathturn, Threadsuns, and Lightduress—were published between 1995 and 2005, work I followed up with my translation of the scholarly edition of The Meridian—a book it took me nearly seven years to complete and that was published in 2011. I then set to work on preparing this volume, gathering and reworking all the poems from Breathturn on, adding the cycle Eingedunkelt | Tenebrae’d, as well as the commentaries the reader will find at the end of this book.
The detailed narrative of the various stages of this project is not meant to propose the count of years and the accumulation of versions as proof of quality—to the contrary: it is meant to relativize the very notion of a definitive, final translation. Any given stage was as definite a translation as I could make at that time, and next year’s version would no doubt be—even if only ever so slightly—different from this one. (On the ontogenetic level, this tale of successive versions of translations repeats the phylogenetic need for all great poems—and maybe the less great need this even more so—to be retranslated, generation after generation, to be of use. The accumulation of these readings, for that is what translations are, constitutes the [after]life of a poem.) The presentation of the Celan translations (and of most other such work of meta-phorein I’ve done) that I would prefer has always been linked to the time I studied medicine: namely, to those wonderful textbook inserts consisting of a series of transparent plastic sheets, each of which had a part or layer of the anatomy printed on it, making for a palimpsest one could leaf through backward and forward. All books of translations should be such palimpsests, for if there can be a definite original text—which we know is not true, though it may be a necessary fiction from the translator’s perspective—there can be only layers upon layers of unstable, shifting, tentative, other-languaged versions, even if a given one may be the most fitting and thus the “best” one for its moment and place. But this synchronic or symphonic presentation of the versions is not a practical possibility; we will have to make do with the tale of the diachrony of the work and hope that the narrative of the process will permit these versions to be seen as just that: versions, momentary stopping points, and configurations in an unending process of transmutation.
7. SOME FURTHER NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION
There are specific problems that make translating Celan a difficult undertaking. Among them is the extremely complex, not to say complicated, relationship Celan had to the language in which he wrote. His German strongly distances itself from any use that language was put to, both in literature and as vehicle for spoken communication, either before or during the poet’s lifetime. It is truly an invented German. A translator thus first has to locate the language, or rather the languages, from which Celan has “translated” or “transcribed” his poetry into German. The sources are manifold, and the commentators have laid some of these bare: to “cleanse” his language “of historical political dirt” (Steiner), Celan has often gone to earlier forms of German, so that medieval or late medieval words and etymologies enter the poems and need to be tracked down. Similarly, rare or dialectical (such as north and south German, as well as Austrian) words no longer in current use, or known only to dialect speakers, make frequent appearances, baffling even native German speakers. Celan was an assiduous reader and user of the Grimm Brothers’ monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch, probably the most important dictionary and reference book for coming, literally, to (the) terms with (of) his language.
For the same reasons Celan has mined other politically uncontaminated vocabularies (uncontaminated at least by the plague of thirties’ and forties’ Germany), such as those of botany, ornithology, and entomology, but also geology, mineralogy, geography, chemistry, crystallography, nuclear p
hysics, contemporary and Space Age technology, hunting, anatomy, physiology, and medicine, with the latter gaining in importance in the late work. But even the ability to determine the origin of a given word rarely resolves the translator’s problem. In German, most of the technical and scientific terms, are composite forms of common German words; in Celan’s use of the terms, those common word-roots shine through and create multiple levels of meaning. In English, such vocabularies are based mainly on Greek or Latin roots, which severs their use from any vernacular connection to the language, reducing the multilevel play of meanings. One such term, a traditional technological description of a machine, can be found in the poem “Hafen” | “Harbor” [p. 38]: in the expression “Laufkatze Leben” Celan clearly wants the reader to hear the compound word made up by the words Katze (cat) and Lauf (run) as descriptive of Leben (life), but the word Laufkatze is also, and unavoidably in the poem’s harbor geography, the technical apparatus called in English a “trolley” or “trolley hoist.” Unable to find an English equivalent that would render this meaning-complex in a satisfactory manner, I have, in this particular instance, tried to play with a paratactic juxtaposition of both meanings, combined with the use of the female pronoun “she” rather than the expected “it.”