Breathturn into Timestead

by Paul Celan

  To complicate matters further, Celan often creates neologisms based on analogical word constructions, in which it is essential to hear (or see) the original word. Maybe the best-known one—because the philospher Hans-Georg Gadamer gave a far-fetched and hotly contested metaphorical interpretation of it—is the word Schläfenzange (temple-tongs or -clamps) [p. 10], constructed by analogy with the word Geburtszange (obstetric forceps), with the baby’s temples being indeed the place where the obstetrician tries to apply the forceps. Celan does this also in nonspecialized vocabulary areas, creating puns and wordplays that get lost in the process of translation. In paronomastic formations such as rauchdünn (smoke-thin) one hears the common expression hauchdünn (paper-thin; literally, breath-thin); similarly, one hears Morgenrot (“the red of dawn,” literally, “morning-red”) in Celan’s “Morgen-Lot” (morning-sounder or -plumb). Such exempla could be extended ad infinitum.

  Another area that informs Celan’s language is that of Jewish mysticism. While not generally creating new words or word combinations (though some Hebrew word and grammar usages are on occasion adapted by Celan), his interweaving of mystical themes lays further strata of meaning on some of the most common words in the language, such as “light” or “sister,” as already mentioned above when discussing the poem “Near, in the aortic arch.” The abundant use of such specialized vocabularies and their interweaving with frequent neologisms poses problems even for the native reader. Seasoned commentators have been caught claiming a given word as a neologism when, in fact, a quick look into the Grimms’ Wörterbuch would have shown it to have once been a common German word, even if no longer in use. Conversely, one often comes across a word that looks and feels like a “real” German word, but when trying to trace it one realizes that it is a Celan “invention.” The effect of this manipulation of vocabularies is to create a linguistic minefield through which the reader—and a fortiori the translator—has to move with extreme care (and great delight at the poet’s endless inventive and combinatory powers). I have put the word “invention” between quotation marks with respect to Celan’s own reported claim: “At bottom my word formations are not inventions. They belong to the very oldest layers of language.” This statement may be philosophically true for its author, but it does not bring philological solace to the translator.

  One also has to take into account the influence of other languages, as Celan’s early acquisition of and familiarity with a number of these has inflected his own writing. Romanian would be one example, though it is likely that Russian will eventually be shown to have had a more conscious influence, not the least through Celan’s very strong identification with Osip Mandelstam—one commentator speaking of the “slavification” of certain grammatical moments in Celan. French, which was the language environment Celan functioned in during the last twenty-two years of his life, has in all probability had some influence. However, little work has been done on this as yet, except for a few commentators pointing out some rather obvious homophonic occurrences. The most often cited of these examples comes from a poem where the German word Neige (decrease) sees its French homonym meaning “snow” appear as the German Schnee in the next line. Another concerns Celan’s use of the word Kommissur in a poem that plays on the German meaning that refers to an anatomical aspect of the brain and on the French expression commissure des lèvres. In English the word “commissure” happily carries both meanings and for once the polysemy is not lost in the translation.

  * * *

  If knowledge of these and similar complexities in Celan’s language has anything to tell the translator it is essentially this: Celan’s language, though German on the surface, is a foreign language even for native speakers. Although German was his mother tongue and the Kultursprache of his native Bukovina, it was also, and in an essential way, his other tongue. Celan’s German is an eerie, nearly ghostly, language: it is both mother tongue, and thus firmly anchored in the realm of the dead, and a language the poet has to make up, to recreate, to reinvent, to bring back to life. One could say that Celan raids the German language—and I use the military metaphor advisedly, for there seems to me to run through Celan’s life if not a desire for assault on Germany and revenge for the death of his parents (or of his mother before all), then at least a constant, unrelenting sense of being on a war footing, of being under attack and needing to counter this attack. The Celanian dynamic is, however, not simpleminded or one-directional: it involves a complex double movement—to use the terms of Empedocles—of philotes (love) for his mother(’s tongue) and of neikos (strife) against her murderers, who are the originators and carriers of that same tongue.

  This profound alienation in relation to his writing language is the very ground upon which and against which Celan works, or, to use the Heraclitian formula: Celan is estranged from that which is most familiar. In his answer to the questionnaire sent out by the Librairie Flinker, he wrote: “Reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won.” Reality for Celan, maybe more so than for any other poet of his century, came to its deepest richness in the word, in language, while, to deturn Marx’s line that “all that is solid melts into air” (including the bodies of the Jews gone up in smoke in the extermination camps), only what is caught in, (re)created by, a purified, reconstructed language becomes real and is simultaneously able to retain its relationship to the actual world. Radically dispossessed of any other reality, Celan had to set out to create his own language—a language as absolutely exiled as he was himself. To try to translate it as if it was current, commonly spoken or available German—that is, to find a similarly current English or American Umgangssprache, or vernacular—would be to miss an essential aspect of the poetry, that of a linguistic undermining and displacement creating a multiperspectival mirroring that reticulates the polysemous meanings of the work.

  Celan’s “language,” as I have tried to show, is really a number of dismantled and re-created languages. This dismantling and rewelding, this semantic and syntactical wrenching, uses as its substratum a German language that offers itself relatively willingly to such linguistic surgery. Other languages do not have that flexibility, or else have it to a much lesser degree. French, for example, basically does not permit such word creations and is also resistant to the syntactical wrenchings so characteristic of late Celan—which is why, despite his many years in France and his relations with some of the best French poets of his generation, it took so long to have good translations of Celan in that language. In English, the telescoping of multiple words, though more available than in French, remains problematic at a number of levels. Noun-composita of two elements, such as “Wortwand” | “wordwall” or “Eisdorn” | “Icethorn,” often can be rendered as such in English, while those made up of more than two root words, such as “Rundgräberschatten” | “roundgraveshadow” or “Knochenstabritzung” | “bone-rod-incisions,” tend to be unwieldy and inelegant and often demand to be broken up. The major formal problems posed by Celan’s verbal grafts, however, concern his play with prefixes and affixes, especially the use of spatial adverbs and prepositions. Word formations such as “weggebeizt” | “eroded” and “weggesackt” | “sagged away,” which sound quite natural in German, or those like “auseinandergebrannt” | “asunder-burned” and “hinüberdunkeln” | “darken over,” which sound clearly artificial, invented, even in German, usually cannot be rendered by an English compound word and require circumlocutions or simplifications, that is, entail loss in translation. There are a number of more complex and stranger-sounding word creations, such as “verunewigt” or “unentworden,” that are so artificial in the original that they both give permission for and require similar constructions in English: “de-eternalized” or, possibly, “diseternalized” and “undebecome” try to approach the oddity of the German. Many of Celan’s neologisms employ verbal or adjectival root elements that are turned into nouns. The capitalization of nouns in German helps the reader identify such formations much more easily than is possible in English. There
are, finally, no hard and fast linguistic rules the translator could apply across the board concerning these word formations. Solutions will tend to be local and dependent on context and on the eventual readability of the English term.

  Even more problematic than the vocabulary, however, are certain syntactical possibilities of German lacking in English, foremost the fact that in German it is possible to have nouns preceded by complete qualifying clauses. In the late poems, many of which are made up of long single sentences, Celan makes ample use of this possibility, thereby giving the poem a structure of suspense by deferring resolution of what or who is being addressed or modified until the end of the sentence. In a poem from Breathturn [p. 28], consisting in all of two sentences, this problem arises several times:

  ÜBER DREI im meer-

  trunkenen Schlaf

  mit Braunalgenblut

  bezifferte Brust-

  warzensteine

  stülp deinen sich

  von der letzten

  Regenschnur los-

  reißenden Himmel.

  Und laß

  deine mit dir hierher-

  gerittene Süßwassermuschel

  all das hinunter-

  schlürfen, bevor

  du sie ans Ohr

  eines Uhrschattens hältst,

  abends.

  Standard English syntax for the first sentence (making up the first two stanzas) would suggest a fourfold reversal of Celan’s construction, and would read something like this: “Clap your sky which is breaking away from the last raincord over three breast-nipple stones that are ciphered with brown-algae blood in sea-drunken sleep.” Trying to keep the movement of Celan’s sentence alive, so that “sky” can appear as the last word in the sentence, produces the following translation:

  OVER THREE in sea-

  drunken sleep

  with brownalgae-blood

  ciphered breast-

  nipplestones

  clap your

  from the last

  raincord breaking

  loose sky.

  There is no doubt that the twisted syntax sounds more strained in English than in German, especially the clause qualifying the sky in the second stanza. One could try to make the stanza more readable in English by altering the visual organization of the lines, possibly as follows:

  clap

  your from the last

  raincord breaking loose

  sky.

  But this does not remove the strain completely while falsifying the dense rhythmic movement of the original. The third stanza presents a similar though even more intractable problem. Keeping Celan’s syntax would give the following translation:

  And let

  your ridden with you to this place

  freshwatermussel …

  This is clearly nonsensical in English and needs to be altered so as to read something like:

  And let

  your freshwatermussel that rode

  with you to this place …

  Again, any solution is bound to be local, as the translator cannot rely on a generally applicable rule but has to try to reproduce, wherever possible, the movement of Celan’s language, while deciding how much strain it is reasonable to impose on the target language.

  But there is yet another problem facing the translator of Celan into English. It concerns what I like to call the present episteme of American poetry, that is, the set of presuppositions, linguistic and historical, that determine to a great extent how we hear and what we recognize as “good” poetry and, by extension, good translations. This episteme, so revivifying for American poetry since World War II, is in part inherited from such great modernists as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and others, but goes back at least as far as Walt Whitman. It demands that the language of poetry be as close as possible to the spoken, colloquial language of today. As a reaction to the genteel tradition of the British poetry of the Victorian and Edwardian eras (and its American equivalents), this has meant avoiding rhetorical flourishes and most traditional “poetic” effects. In relation to translating Celan into English, this can all too often induce the temptation to oversimplify the original poem, by giving short shrift to the oddities of the word constructions and by ironing out the twists and quirks of Celan’s syntax, in a doomed attempt to make the language sound “natural.” Yet the development of Celan’s poetry away from the traditional metrics and rhymes still present in the early work toward a line based on different units (breath, syllable, word) brings to mind certain developments in American poetry—one need only think of Charles Olson’s injunctions in the “Projective Verse” essay concerning a new breath-based metrics or compare the tight vowel-leading poetics of Louis Zukofsky’s poem “A” with similar attentions in Celan.

  In my versions I have drawn on every possible scrap of information I could garner concerning the poems and on all possible poetic knowledge I have been able to gather in English. My first aim has not been to create elegant, easily readable, and accessible American versions of these German (under erasure) poems. The aim has been to get as much of the complexity and multiperspectivity of Celan’s work into American English as possible, and if elegant moments or stretches of claritas occur, all the better. Any translation that makes a poem sound more accessible than (or even as accessible as) it is in the original will be flawed. I have doubtlessly not achieved what Hölderlin did with his translations from the Greek—to write Greek in German, and thus to transform the German, though that must remain the aim of any translator, just as it is the aim of any poet to transform his or her language.

  Paul Celan himself spoke to the difficulties in his work and suggested that they were inherent to a poetry that dealt with experiencing the actual world: “Imagination and experience, experience and imagination make me think, in view of the darkness of the poem today, of a darkness of the poem qua poem, a constitutive, thus a congenital darkness. In other words: the poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.”32 But such darkness is not hermeticism, which would be willed obscurity for the sake of obscurity; it corresponds to the real darkness that surrounds us and that is inside us as much as it is inside the outside world. The poem thus does not try to throw some “light” (or fake “light-ness”) on either inside or outside worlds. This darkness should not, however, discourage us, but should remind us to read Celan with negative capability, that is, with what Keats defined as the needed ability to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

  For me as translator, and, I believe, for anyone coming to his work, Celan’s own suggestion as to how to read the work is still the best: “Lesen sie! Immerzu nur lesen, das Verständnis kommt von selbst.” (Just read and keep on reading! Understanding will come by itself.)

  * * *

  There are too many who have contributed in one way or another to this work over the past forty-five years for me to be able to acknowledge them all here individually. May they all be thanked, because without them this project would never have come to fruition—or with a much different and no doubt poorer result. Of course, it is I who am responsible for any and all remaining errors.

  NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

    1. For the relationship between Celan and his wife, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, as well as for all the biographical details of his life as a poet in Paris (1948–1970), see Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, Correspondance (1951–1970), ed. Bertrand Badiou with Eric Celan (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

    2. Israel Chalfen, Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth (New York: Persea Books, 1991), p. 13.

    3. Much detail here is taken from Celan Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, ed. Markus May, Peter Goßens, and Jürgen Lehmann (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2008), pp. 7–9.

    4. Paul Celan: Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986), pp. 33–34.

 
  5. Chalfen, Paul Celan, p. 180.

    6. Amy D. Colin, “Paul Celan,” in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, ed. S. Lillian Kremer (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1:216.

    7. Chalfen, Paul Celan, p. 184.

    8. For a detailed account of those years, see “Displaced”: Paul Celan in Wien, 1947–1949, ed. Peter Goßens and Marcus G. Patka (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001).

    9. Yves Bonnefoy, “Paul Celan,” in Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France, ed. Benjamin Hollander, ACTS, a Journal of New Writing 8/9 (1988): 12.

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

  11. In Felstiner’s citation and translation in Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 243.

  12. See especially side 3 of the double cassette edition of Paul Celan’s readings Ich hörte sagen: Gedichte und Prosa (Munich: Der Hörverlag, 1977).

  13. For more details regarding the intersections between the life and the work, see the introductions to the various volumes of poems in the commentaries section at the end of this book; see also the introduction to my Paul Celan: Selections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

  14. Pierre Joris, A Nomad Poetics: Essays (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), p. 47.

  15. George Steiner, “A Terrible Exactness,” The Times Literary Supplement, June 11, 1976, pp. 709–10.

  16. Paul Celan: Collected Prose, pp. 15–16.

  17. Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull; trans. Pierre Joris. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 7–8.

  18. Gerhard Buhr, “Von der radikalen In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst in Celans Rede ‘Der Meridian,’” Celan Jahrbuch 2 (1988): 169–208.

  19. Götz Wienold, “Paul Celans Hölderlin-Widerruf” (Paul Celan’s Hölderlin Revocation), Poetica 2, no. 2 (April 1968): 216–28.