Breathturn into Timestead

by Paul Celan

  Georg-Michael Schulz provides a fascinating analysis of this poem in an essay in the Celan-Jahrbuch 2 (“‘Sterblichkeitsbeflissen.’ Zu Paul Celans Gedicht ‘Wege im Schatten-Gebräch,’” pp. 29–36). According to him, the poem is based on a very specific iconic image: “a figure one can find in Jewish cemeteries on a number of grave stones … a figure of two hands in the gesture of blessing.” He goes on to quote a description of how the hands have to be held during the blessing ritual which lies at the origin of the grave inscription. It is this mudralike figure that creates the “four-finger-furrow”: “the finger thus, with pinkie touching ring-finger, and the likewise linked middle and index fingers propped [sic], these (for their part) by both thumbs, so that five interstices ensue—two each opening up above; the middle ones, between the thumbs down below.”

  “Weißgrau” | “Whitegray”

  October 25, 1963.

  Strandhafer | sea oats: A psammophylic (sand-loving) species of grass in the Poaceae family, Leymus arenarius, is commonly known as sea lyme grass, or simply lyme grass. It could also be of the genus Uniola, that is, the species U. Paniculata, which we call sea oats. Both are strong grasses that consolidate seaside sand dunes, thus reducing land erosion. I prefer the literal translation “sea oats” here to “lyme grass,” for being closer to the original. See also the poems “Vom Anblick der Amseln” | “From beholding the blackbirds” and “Wir, die wie der Strandhafer Wahren” | “We who like the sea oats guard” (pp. 94 and 432) and their respective commentaries (pp. 497 and 619).

  ein Ohr, abgetrennt | an ear, severed: Reference to Van Gogh. See also the poem “Mächte, Gewalten” | “Principalities, powers” (p. 204).

  Ein Aug, in Streifen geschnitten | An eye, cut in strips: Brings to mind a core image in Buñuel’s film Un chien andalou.

  “Mit erdwärts gesungenen Masten” | “With masts sung earthward”

  October 26, 1963.

  “Schläfenzange” | “Templeclamps”

  November 8, 1963. Celan’s firstborn son, François, had died exactly ten years and one month before this date, a death due to a mismanaged forceps delivery. This is the center poem of the first cycle.

  Schläfenzange | Templeclamps: The usual German term for forceps is Geburtszange (birth tongs), but Celan’s neologism is immediately obvious.

  “Beim Hagelkorn” | “Next to the hailstone”

  November 8, 1963. Same day as poem above.

  den harten / Novembersternen | the hard / November stars … Schütze | archer: Celan was born on November 23, under the sign of Sagittarius, the archer.

  “Stehen” | “To stand”

  November 11, 1963. Armistice Day in France, the celebration of the end of World War I. Lefebvre (RDS, p. 203) links this poem to Celan’s translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets 79, 81, and 106. Exactly three years earlier, on November 11, 1960, an article by Rainer Kabel in Die Welt had made public in great detail Claire Goll’s accusations of plagiarism against Celan and for the first time spoke of Goll’s claims that the “Todesfuge” was essentially Goll. In the limited Atemkristall edition, the poem has a special position in that it is the only poem flanked on both sides by an etching by GCL (BW, p. 722).

  Stehen | To stand: For the importance of this stance for Celan, see my introduction to PCS (p. 6); see also the earlier poem from Die Niemandsrose, “Eine Gauner- und Ganovenweise,” which ends with the lines: “But, / but it rises up [bäumt sich], the tree. It, / it too / stands against / the plague.” Further information can be found in the poems and commentaries on poems using the concept of the upright station, such as “Für Eric” | “For Eric” (pp. 362 and 594), “Wirk nicht voraus” | “Do not work ahead” (pp. 316 and 575), and “Es stand” | “It stood” (pp. 430 and 617).

  für dich / allein | for you / alone: Both Wiedemann and Lefebvre link these lines to a quote, often cited by Celan during the Goll affair years, by Rabbi Hillel from the German edition by Reinhold Meyer, which says: “Wenn ich nicht für mich bin, wer ist dann für mich?” (If I am not for myself, who will be for me?) The Talmudic text continues: “And when I am for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?”

  “Dein vom Wachen” | “Your dream”

  November 25, 1963. This twelve-line poem coincides with the twelfth anniversary of Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange’s first meeting in November 1951. This and the following poem have been analyzed in detail in relation to Celan’s use of dream language by Böschenstein-Schäfer (“Traum und Sprache in der Dichtung Paul Celans,” pp. 223–38), who suggest that Celan, like many survivors of terrorist regimes, and despite his attraction to Surrealism, is wary of dreams and afraid of invasion or betrayal of/by that most private area, the unconscious. He has two ways of defending himself against this:

  Of these the first is the concentration on awakening, the second, the replacement of the structures of dream speech in the poetic. In the place of the dream image the poet thematizes the attempt to produce, through the recollection of the dream, contact with the unconscious. “Shaft,” “gorge” and “suction pipe” are all variants of the vertical, which especially in the volumes Breathturn, Threadsuns, and Lightduress characterize the way dream elements enter into consciousness.

  In these poems one could also hear a Lacanian theme: the unconscious/the dream is/as language. It is more than likely that during the sixties in Paris Celan was aware of, and probably read, Lacan.

  Horn | horn: A very rich multisemic image invoking the shofar, traditionally the horn of a ram, used in Jewish religious ceremonies where shofar blowing, often mentioned in the biblical texts, is incorporated into services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Another image arising here, via the “helically carved spoor,” is that of the torsions of the ivory unicorn, while a further turn could connect it to the “Gate of Horn,” which according to Homer leads to the true dreams. The Odyssey 19, 562–69, in Charles Stein’s 2008 translation (p. 474), says: “Guest-stranger / dreams are difficult to make sense of / and not all are fulfilled for men, / for there are two gates for fleeting dreams to pass through: one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. / Dreams that come through the gate of sawn ivory deceive us, / bearing words that will not be fulfilled. / Dreams that come through polished horn / bring truth to pass / when some mortal sees them.”

  “Mit den Verfolgten” | “With the persecuted”

  November 27, 1963. The following poem was also written on that day.

  Das Morgen-Lot | the morning-plumb: Another complex paranomastic construction that creates insurmountable difficulties for the translator. This and many similar constructions are based on common German expressions—in this case Morgenrot (dawn redness)—that do not carry over into the translation, but that in the German poem the new word forces one to also read/ hear. In this specific case the translation also loses a further connotation, that of the biblical figure Lot who was led by the angels from the condemned city at dawn—“And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying: ‘Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters that are here; lest thou be swept away in the iniquity of the city’” (Gen. 19:15; Jewish Publication Society Bible). A Lot is, further, the plumb or lead instrument with which to measure water depth. One could be tempted to link this sailor’s instrument to the marine imagery of the ferryman’s pole in the previous poem.

  “Fadensonnen” | “Threadsuns”

  November 27, 1963. A poem much discussed and analyzed in the critical Celan literature. Hartmut Steinecke, for example, has written a sharp-tongued essay comparing the various analyses it has been subjected to.

  Fadensonnen | Threadsuns: The title of this poem will provide the title of the next volume. We do not know if Celan was familiar with the measuring instrument (used to calculate the exact moment of noon) known as a Faden-Sonnenzeiger or Filargnomon, in French méridienne filaire. In the first draft of the poem, the word was hyphenated as Faden-Sonnen. Celan may also have had in mind a word he underlined in his reading of Jean Paul’s Die unsichtbar
e Loge, namely, Fadensommer, something close to our Indian summer.

  Lichtton | light-tone: “Light-tone” and “light-pitch” are literal translations of Lichtton, if one considers the word as a Celanian composite. The German word is, however, also a technical term in filmography, where it refers to the process of “sound-on-film” in which sound is inscribed as variations of light values on film.

  “Im Schlangenwagen” | “In the serpentcoach”

  December 16, 1963. Hanukkah was celebrated that year from December 11 to 18.

  Schlangenwagen | serpentcoach: Grammatically the word can mean a serpentlike type of conveyance, or describe the content of the coach. Böschenstein-Schäfer (p. 234) suggests the following reading: “The image of the serpentcoach: in this are knotted the image of Medea of Kolchis, fleeing in despair in a chariot drawn by dragons, and of the muse’s chariot, even as Pindar or Empedocles hoped to mount it.” Lefebvre thinks of it as an “Orphic visit to the mother, deported from Czernowitz to the Michailovka camp (crossing the Bug river, the train snaked along all the way to death)” (RDS, p. 207). In the Orphic tradition, it is also remembered that Eurydice dies of a snakebite. In his volume of Georg Trakl’s poems, Celan had written “strange. cf. Todesfuge” next to a line from the poem “Psalm” that reads: “In his grave the white magician plays with this serpents.”

  weißen Zypresse | white cypress: Celan owned a copy of the pre-Socratic fragments that contain the following Orphic text, consisting of directions on how to enter Hades, the English translation of which reads: “You will find a spring on the left of the halls of Hades, and beside it a white cypress growing. Do not even go near this spring. And you will find another, from the Lake of Memory, flowing forth with cold water. In front of it are guards. You must say, ‘I am the child of Gê (Earth) and of starry Ouranos (Heaven); this you yourselves also know. And they themselves will give you to drink from the divine spring, and then thereafter you shall reign with the other heroes” (Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosphers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983], p. 5).

  “Harnischstriemen” | “Slickensides”

  December 18, 1963. A fascinating poem by which to gauge various readings/ interpretations. For one such reading, see Klaus Manger, “Paul Celans poetische Geographie” (Psalm und Hawdalah: Zum Werk Paul Celans. Bern/ Frankfurt am Main/New York/Paris: Peter Lang, 1987). Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reading of the same poem goes wrong, as James K. Lyon has shown, because he misunderstood the vocabulary. Thus: “Harnischstriemen” | “Slickensides” and the next two words, “Faltenachsen” | “fold-axes” and “Durchstich- / punkte” | “rechanneling- / points,” are geological terms, the first of which refers to striae, that is, striations on rock surfaces that are visible where monolithic blocks have scraped against each other during large-scale volcanic upheavals. I prefer to use another geological term, “slickensides,” a more interesting English word, which in geology is defined as fine parallel scratches or grooves on a fault surface that have been produced by the movement of the rocks on either side of the fault.

  Faltenachsen | fold-axes: Refers to the direction of the thrust when the earth’s strata are folded by volcanic activity to form rises and depressions.

  Durchstich- / punkte | rechanneling- / points: In geology the term refers to a technical term in flood control for cutting through sharp curves in a meandering river, that is, a means of altering the landscape by rechanneling the river. But—see James K. Lyon’s “Paul Celan’s Language of Stone”—another meaning is also possible: “[It] can also refer to the points left in a chart or map which is copied by means of pinpoints.”

  An beiden Polen | On both poles: For a discussion of Celan’s use of “poles,” see E. Hünnecke’s essay “Hoffnung auf ein menschliches Heute und Morgen” (Celan-Jahrbuch 1, pp. 149–50). In the posthumous volume Zeitgehöft, in the poem “Das Flüsterhaus” | “The whisperhouse,” the poles return. Compare page 418 and the commentary on that poem (p. 614).

  Kluftrose | cleftrose: The rose/flower as image/metaphor is present throughout Celan’s work, most insistently so in the volume Die Niemandsrose. It becomes rarer in the later volumes and appears only three times (twice as a composite and once as the flower name) from Breathturn onward. The present composite, Kluftrose, is most likely derived from Windrose, or compass rose, or maybe also plays on the geological term “joint rosette” (see Pajari Räsänen, “Counter-figures: An Essay on Anti-metaphoric Resistance,” Ph.D. diss., Department of Comparative Literature, University of Helsinki, 2007, p. 213).

  “Wortaufschüttung” | “Wordaccretion”

  December 24, 1963. On the previous day, December 23, which was also his eleventh wedding anniversary, Celan completed the typescript of his Shakespeare translations that would be broadcast on Norddeutscher Rundfunk for Shakespeare’s four hundredth birthday on April 23, 1964, and published as William Shakespeare: Einundzwanzig Sonnette by Insel Verlag in 1967.

  Wortaufschüttung | Wordaccretion: The German Aufschüttung comes again from the vocabulary of geology, where it designates accretion or aggradation, where an elevation is created by successive deposits. Celan underlined the three words of the opening two lines in Siegmund Günther’s Physische Geographie: “In earlier geological eras the process of underwater volcanic accretion [unterseeischer Vulkanaufschüttung] was not rare.” The qualifier “word” here points the poem toward a poetological statement. Other reading traces (underlinings) appear in similar scientific sources.

  Nachbild | replica: See Ernst Bloch, vol. 1, p. 743 of the German edition of Das Prinzip Hoffnung | The Principle of Hope (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1954).

  Königs- / geburten | kings- / births: Note the date of the poem’s composition—Christmas Eve. See also the translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 60: “Nativity, once in the main light, / crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d, / Crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight…” In Celan’s translation: “Geburt, ins volle Licht gerückt, sie kraucht | zur Reife hin; und so, gekrönt, umglänzt noch eben…” (translated the previous month).

  “(Ich kenne dich” | “(I know you”

  January 9, 1964. This poem, written for his wife, has had many commentators. For one of the most complete analyses, see James K. Lyon’s 1987 essay “Ganz und gar nicht hermetisch.” Lefebvre suggests that “this rhymed quatrain could resemble a parody of Rilke, or of Goethe (The Divan) or another great lyric poet. The parentheses (which are not present in the Atemkristall volume) underline its deliberate isolation in the volume—as well as the specificity of the you—, but also draw attention to the very term Klammer (parenthesis), remanent in Celan. This framing and the classical form isolate and iconize the poem (making it a sort of pietà). ‘To know,’ here, in the lover’s aparte, keeps its eroto-biblical sense: the loved woman thus melts into the mother of the pietà, with the mother of the poet transperced by pain” (RDS, p. 210).

  “Weggebeizt” | “Eroded”

  December 30, 1963. The last poem of 1963, this is also the last poem of the Atemkristall cycle, returning to the first poem’s snow imagery. Here, however, the snow is not proffered, no “you” is invited to partake of the snow: the snow has frozen into classical glacier features, terms found and underlined in Siegmund Günther’s Physische Geographie: Büsserschnee, “penitent’s snow,” Gletschertisch, “glacier table,” Gletscherstube, “glacier parlor,” vom Winde weggebeizt, “eroded by the wind,” Auswirblung oder Evorsion, “evorsion/ed,” Wabeneis, “honeycomb-ice.”

  Weggebeizt | Eroded: Besides the geological reference, the word wegbeizen also refers to the vocabulary of art, where acid is used to create patterns on metal. GCL used such techniques in her etchings.

  Mein- / gedicht | perjury- / poem: Celan’s neologism “Mein- / gedicht” is based analogically on the German word Meineid, “a false oath,” “perjury,” while the other meanings of mein of course vibrate along: “mine
” and gemein, common in both senses as communal and cheap, maybe even Meinung, “meaning.”

  II

  “Vom großen” | “By the great”

  January 22, 1964. First published in the Festschrift Auf gespaltenen Pfaden (ed. Manfred Schlösser, Darmstadt, 1964) for the ninetieth birthday of Margarete Susman (1872–1966). Susman was a poet, dramatist, and essayist (on Kafka, Jean Paul, Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Landauer, and Rosa Luxemburg, among others, all thinkers important to Celan, and on modern poetry and Jewish questions). Celan, who had met her in 1963 in Zurich, had read her 1946 book, Das Buch Hiob und das Schicksal des jüdischen Volkes (The Book of Job and the Fate of the Jewish People), the first book on the Shoah, as well as her work on Spinoza.

  sechs- / kantige | six- / edged: Wiedemann locates a reading trace in Franz Lotze’s Geologie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1955): “As the minute components are blown away in the arid regions, there come into existence … stone deserts with wind-blown sand on rocks and boulders (triple-edges [Dreikanter]; such like also under other climatic conditions as on sandy shores)” (BW, p. 727). See also the poem “Einkanter” (p. 376). The six-edged stone also links to the star of David (see also note on Esther below).

  Findling | erratic: In German the word Findling has two distinct meanings: (1) as a variant of Findelkind it means a foundling (child); (2) as a geological term it translates as “glacial erratic” and refers to a large piece of rock, or a boulder, that has been carried by ice for some distance and has then come to rest where the ice has melted.

  Esther: The biblical Esther was an orphan who, married to the non-Jewish King Ahasuerus, managed to thwart a plot to kill all the Jews. Here the name also honors Margarete Susman, making her “into a figure of the resistance: Esther, consonant with Stern (star), stehen (to stand). The name itself, Ishtar, of Babylonian origin, seems to be connected to the Persian stareh: ‘star’; Esther is the Babylonian name of Hadassa, which in Hebrew also means ‘star.’ The tyrant Ahasuerus, to whom Esther had been married by force, is identified with Hitler in the Jewish community” (Lefebvre, RDS, p. 214).