Breathturn into Timestead
Page 27
unterm linken
Fuß
ein Fenster – der
Erde?
* * *
ORTSWECHSEL bei den Substanzen:
geh du zu dir, schließ dich an,
bei verschollenem
Erdlicht,
ich höre, wir waren
ein Himmelsgewächs,
das bleibt zu beweisen, von
obenher, an
unsern Wurzeln entlang,
zwei Sonnen gibts, hörst du,
zwei,
nicht eine –
ja und?
* * *
DIE WELT, Welt,
in allen Fürzen gerecht,
ich, ich,
bei dir, dir, Kahl-
geschorne.
* * *
WAS BITTERT
herein?
Die großen Alleinigkeiten
verzwergen
im Hörrinden-Hymnus,
selig
tuscheln die Daumenschrauben in
heiterer
Streckfolterhöhe,
die entscheidenden
Pausen
erhalten
Zufuhr,
in der Zählkammer,
rebellisch,
beten die Ringe
den Rest an.
* * *
DIE GESENKTEN
Götterdaumen, ich hole, im Borken-
hemd,
die untersten Baumläufer ein, bald ist
heute, für immer, die
Markierungen, das
Strahlengezücht,
kommen
über die Antimaterie
getanzt, zu dir,
in die Kometen-
Schonung.
* * *
KROKUS, vom gastlichen
Tisch aus gesehn:
zeichenfühliges
kleines Exil
einer gemeinsamen
Wahrheit,
du brauchst
jeden Halm.
* * *
REBLEUTE graben
die dunkelstündige Uhr um,
Tiefe um Tiefe,
du liest,
es fordert
der Unsichtbare den Wind
in die Schranken,
du liest,
die Offenen tragen
den Stein hinterm Aug,
der erkennt dich,
am Sabbath.
Commentary
Besides their obvious function of trying to provide some minimal yet specific information concerning difficulties both in the original poems and in the translations, these commentaries want to point out the kind of complexities an in-depth reading, hermeneutical or other, will have to contend with. Obviously, what is proposed here are only a few examples that should not be mistaken for an annotated translation of any completeness. These minimalia function more as a map of our ignorance than as a showcase of our knowledges regarding Celan’s late poems. They are gleaned from the vast array of Celan scholarship available and a detailed system of references would be too cumbersome and diminish readability too much. The core sources for the information in these commentaries come from Barbara Wiedemann’s Paul Celan, Die Gedichte: Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band; from the two available scholarly editions (the so-called Bonner and Tübinger editions); from Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s French annotated editions of Breathturn and Snowpart; from the two volumes of annotated correspondence between Paul Celan and his wife, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange; as well as from various books and essays by Bertrand Badiou, Otto Pöggeler, Jean Bollack, and others. See also the bibliographies at the end of this book.
But a warning is also necessary in that however many links we can establish to an hors-texte (and there are such loci, pace Jacques Derrida), to this or that place or time or book, we should always remember Celan’s own warning to Ilana Shmueli, who notes in her book after thinking of a specific biblical reference for a line in the poem “The trumpet’s part” (p. 439): “But I note it down here with some hesitation and immediately remember that Celan often warned me about citations (especially biblical citations): ‘please write without citations,’ he said, ‘let only your own words speak.’ I shouldn’t allow anything tendentious, didactic, I should remain ‘open’ for my own reading and experiencing. The last two short lines (‘listen your way in / with the mouth’) command you to be absolutely attentive to the text, the ‘Empty-text,’ that carries the glowing enigma inside itself” (IS, p. 42).
And yet, a lifetime of reading and writing poetry has also taught me that to read a poem is always at least a double movement: the systole of absolute attentiveness brought to bear on the text, and the diastole of letting your mind move from every word in the text out into the world of both books and experience.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
ATEMWENDE | BREATHTURN
The eighty poems in this volume were composed between September 1963 and September 1965 and are organized into six near-chronological cycles. The first cycle is made up of the twenty-two poems of Atemkristall (see below), cycle 2 of seventeen poems written between January 22 and August 2, 1964, and cycle 3 of sixteen poems (eleven of which were written between August 9 and December 15, 1964, with four—“Wenn du im Bett,” “Von der Orchis her,” “Die Gauklertrommel,” and “In Prag”—written in September and October 1963 and moved as a block into this cycle). Cycle 4 gathers eighteen poems written between December 19, 1964, and May 23, 1965, while cycle 5 consists of seven poems dated June 7 to August 18, 1965. The final cycle 6 consists of a single poem. The poem “Coagula,” placed in the fourth cycle after “Solve,” had originally been part of a project conceived during the writing of Die Niemandsrose in 1962 called “Paris Elegy,” but was moved to its place in Atemwende after the writing of “Solve” on February 2, 1965.
Concerning Atemwende, Celan wrote to his wife, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, on March 8, 1967: “Yesterday and the day before I have been working on the manuscript of Atemwende. It is truly the most dense work I have written so far, also the most encompassing. At a number of turns in the text I have, I must admit, felt pride.—I finally divided the manuscript into cycles—it needed to be aerated—of unequal lengths, but ‘in sich geschlossen’ (self-contained) as they say in German. At the end, separated by an empty page, single poem and cycle simultaneously, the ‘EINMAL’ (ONCE)” (PC/GCL, #479).
The title was first used by Celan as a word/concept in the 1960 Meridian speech, where he wrote: “Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route—also the route of art—for the sake of such a breathturn?” Speaking of Georg Büchner’s character Lucile, he says: “Twice, with Lucile’s ‘Long live the king,’ and when the sky opened as an abyss beneath Lenz, the Atemwende, the breathturn seemed to happen.” In the notes he took for this speech he had written at one point: “I had survived some things,—but survival hopefully isn’t ‘everything’—, I had a bad conscience; I was searching for—maybe I can call it that?—a my breathturn.” At the same time it should be noted that for a while Celan had several titles in mind, most, if not all, based on two words, breath (Atem) and/or delusion (Wahn), the latter pointing to the bouts of psychic instability, often accompanied by sojourns in psychiatric clinics, that Celan suffered from 1962 onward, triggered no doubt by the psychic load of the Goll affair. Among the rejected titles were: Wahndock | Delusiondock; Wahnspur | Delusionspoor; Atemkristall | Breathcrystal; Atemgänge | Breathpassages or -errands; also Atem, Aufruhr | Breath, Uproar (riot, tumult, insurrection, ferment); and Atemzeile | Breathline or -row.
The poems that make up the first cycle of Atemwende were published under the title Atemkristall with eight etchings by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange in a bibliophile edition from Brunidor, Paris, 1965. (The word Atemkristall appears in one of the poems of that cycle, “Weggebeizt” | “Eroded.”) This represents a first major collaborative realization where reflecting on the art of etching and lithographic reproduction becomes important fo
r Celan’s poetic art, as he acknowledges in a letter to his wife of March 29, 1965: “In your etchings I recognize my poems: they go through them and are there still.” And on May 20, 1965, from the clinic at Le Vésinet, the day before his release: “And we will pick up our work again. I have seen your etchings being born next to my poems, being born of those very poems, and you know well that ‘Atemkristall / breathcrystal,’ which has reopened the path of poetry for me, was born from your etchings.”
I
“Du darfst” | “You may”
October 16, 1963. The next four poems were also written on that day. This cycle of Atemwende opens and closes with one of Celan’s most powerful images: snow. (See also Hans-Michael Speier’s essay on the posthumous volume Schneepart in Celan-Jahrbuch 1, and the commentaries for that volume.) “Schnee” | “snow,”and the associated ice- and glacier-cosmos, marble Atemwende. See, for example, the well-known and much-commented lines (p. 24):
Tiefimschnee,
Iefimnee,
I – i – e.
The image of snow, in this poem only a few words away from an evocation of summer, always rhymes with winter and death. It is, as Lefebvre writes, “the meteor of 20 january, of the Wannsee conference, of Auschwitz, of the crossing of the mountain by Lenz. Each time the word appears, that historical and semantic horizon is deployed” (RDS, p. 192).
In his essay “Erfahrenes Sprechen – Leseversuch an Celan-Entwürfen,” in Argumentum e Silentio, Rolf Bücher indicates that in the first manuscript version the second section (lines 3 through 6) of the poem reads: “ich komme mit sieben / Blättern vom Sieben- / stamm.” (I come with seven / leaves from the seven- / trunk.) After analyzing the Jewish/kabbalistic component of the early version, including the relation of the seven-armed candelabra, the menorah, to the world tree, Bücher writes: “The poem should still be understood entirely with an eye to this image’s genealogical heritage, in the sense of the original image of the ‘seven-trunk’” (where Stamm means both tree trunk and tribe). Bücher goes on to suggest that a straightforward reading of the early version “would lead to a very abstract sense of ‘heritage,’ which must also be seen, in its narrowest context, as a very concrete Judaicism,” concluding that it is specifically “this abstractness that is caught in the published version of the poem, and transposed into the image of a concrete life experience.”
I disagree with Bücher’s suggestion that the poem should be “understood entirely” from this perspective (especially since Celan did edit out the specific reference to Jewish religion and mythology) and prefer to read it both with a more personal and a wider view. Take the image of the mulberry tree: as personal reference we know that Celan planted three of these trees in the garden of the family’s summer home in Moisville, life symbols for each of the three members of the family. Besides its associations with silk, the mulberry tree is richly represented in various mythologies; as Lefebvre suggests, for example, “in China it is the tree of the Levant, in Greek mythology it is the meeting place for Pyramus and Thisbe. The walking tree may evoke Orpheus” (RDS, pp. 192–93).
“Von Ungeträumtem” | “By the undreamt”
October 16, 1963. The earliest version of this poem begins: “Traumgeätzt, / wirft das durchwanderte Brotland den Berg auf.” (Dream-etched, / the wandered-through breadland casts up the mountain.) A handwritten emendation inserts schlaflos, which then requires in the following version of the poem the logical change from traumgeätzt into its opposite, von Ungeträumten geätzt. Bürger’s comment on this is worth quoting in extenso: “This will to paradox, which corresponds with the often observed paradoxes of Celan’s work, here shows itself most clearly as determining and putting into motion the poetic fixing-process. Only insofar as a logical paradox seems to be cleared up, namely the contradiction between sleeplessness and dream-reality, does an extremely effective pictorial paradox arise—in the reality and effectiveness of an absence, the ‘undreamt.’ In this paradox, the ‘undreamt’ is yet again tendered in the poem as dream-reality, and enters into a new contradiction with “sleeplessly” in the second line.”
geätzt | etched: Evoked here is the process of using strong acid or mordant (from French mordre, “to bite”) to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface (usually copper, zinc, or steel) to create a design in intaglio in the metal. This was the core process GCL used in her art. See introduction notes for Atemwende, and this cycle, Atemkristall, above.
“In die Rillen” | “Into the furrows”
October 16, 1963.
Himmelsmünze: In the first edition, as in my 1969 translation of this volume, the word was given as Himmelssäure (heavensacid), which turned out to be a typo.
“In den Flüssen” | “In the rivers”
October 16, 1963. The north is for Celan associated with ice and snow, and thus landscapes of death and desolation. Useful here may be to remember that the ur-mythologies the Nazi system misused were such Nordic settings and heroes, as Friedrich Nietzsche postulated, for example, in the opening paragraph of his Antichrist, worth quoting here in full (in H. L. Mencken’s translation):
Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how remote our place is. “Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans”: even Pindar, in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness … We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?—The man of today?—“I don’t know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn’t know either the way out or the way in”—so sighs the man of today … This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,—we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that “forgives” everything because it “understands” everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds!… We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate—it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from “resignation” … There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast—for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.
Lefebvre also points to Henri Michaux’s poem “Icebergs” and its hyperborean landscapes; the second stanza reads: “Icebergs, icebergs, cathedrals without religion of the eternal winter, wrapped in the glacial icecap of planet Earth.”
beschwerst | weight: Besides the meaning “to weigh (down) with,” the German beschweren also resonates with the meanings of sich beschweren, “to complain,” and one can hear beschwören as “invoke,” “conjure,” “beseech.”
“Vor dein spätes Gesicht” | “Before your late face”
Exact date of composition unknown.
“Die Schwermutsschnellen hindurch” | “Down melancholy’s rapids”
October 17, 1963. On a list with corrections for the proofs, Celan noted: “re: melancholy’s rapids:… / there the forty and four / (check the date in the original)” (TA, Atemwende, p. 16). Celan’s forty-fourth birthday was November 23, 1964. Barbara Wiedemann (BW, p. 720) notes that, computing from Celan’s birth year, the number forty gives 1960, the year Celan received the Büchner Prize and gave the Meridian speech. This is, however, also the year in which the Goll affair reached its paroxysm. Calculating backward from the date of composition of the poem, the number four gives October 17, 1959, the day on which Celan read the, to him, very painful review of Sprachgitter by Günter Blöcker.
vierzig | forty: Also connotes a range of biblical meanings; it is a number often used by God to represent a period of testing or judgment, thus the forty years the Israelites spent in the w
ilderness, the forty days of rain in the days of the flood, the forty-day periods of fasting, testing, and communing with God faced by Moses (who was forty when God called on him) and Jesus, etc.
Lebensbäume | lifetrees: The first draft of the poem had Lebensstämme, where stämme, the plural of Stamm, can refer to a tree trunk and/or to a tribe, that is, a family line. See also the later poem “Zwanzig für immer” | “Twenty forever” (p. 22).
“Die Zahlen” | “The numbers”
October 18, 1963. First notes toward the poem on a page of the French daily Le Monde dated October 18, 1963 (which means the paper came out the previous afternoon) and on an envelope postmarked October 16, 1965. The following poem was also written that day. Lefebvre suggests “a relation between the title and the fact that this is the seventh poem of the cycle. Celan showed an interest in numbers that at times bordered on superstition, and that often linked to the interpretations of the esoteric tradition. But here it is mainly a matter of the numbers’ association with the images in language in terms of quantity (number of words in a text, or in a verse) and as order of the elements of an alphabet or discourse. The numbers’ alliance [my ‘in league’] with the images is thus also the combination of a kind of abstract rigor with the changing fate of images in poetry (Verhängnis)” (RDS, p. 197).
“Wege im Schatten-Gebräch” | “Paths in the shadow-break”
October 18, 1963.
Gebräch | break: Gebräch is a hunting term and refers to the ground uprooted by wild boars. Unable to find the exact corresponding term, I have preferred to translate—albeit by an overly abstract word—the core term of the German word, which is the verb brechen, “to break.” Lynch and Jakowsky have tried to keep the hunting image alive, and give the line as “PATHS in the boar-tusked shadowland,” which sounds not only contrived, though vaguely Celanian, but also introduces two terms, “boar” and “land,” that are not in Celan’s text. By translating wühlen in the next stanza as “root up,” I hope that some sense of the hunting/animal terminology is brought back in. See also Celan’s early poem “In der Gestalt eines Ebers” | “In the shape of a boar” (Von Schwelle zu Schwelle).