Breathturn into Timestead
Page 30
Klinkerspiel | clinker game: Klinker is a word of Dutch origin, usually connected to a kind of brick that is partially vitrified, thus very hard and making a clinking noise when hit, used in the construction of buildings. In north Germany Klinkers is the name given to small, hard clay marbles used in playing marbles.
“Die Gauklertrommel” | “The jugglerdrum”
October 12, 1963. Written on the same day as the poem “In Prague.” This sequence of poems was composed prior to the one of the first cycle, Atemkristall, and, inserted here, disrupts the chronological continuity of the volume.
Odysseus, mein Affe | Ulysses, my monkey: Possibly an allusion to the East German poet Erich Arendt (1903–1984), who had dedicated his poem “Prager Judenfriedhof” (“Jewish Cemetery in Prague”) to Celan, a poem that contained very Celanian elements (imitations, “apings,” of Celan’s poetics were fairly common in the early sixties). Arendt had also asked Celan to help him find a West German publisher for a manuscript of poems (Ägäis) that he had sent him, poems that made use of the Ulysses theme. Wiedemann further notes that one of the quarters of Prague is called Troy (BW, p. 734).
rue de Longchamp: Celan’s Paris address at that time, where Arendt had dined with the Celans in late fall 1959.
“Wenn du im Bett” | “When you lie”
September 8, 1963. A Sunday. A poem with clear erotic undertones. The crane (a male bird in German) is a bird Celan associates with Odessa and Russian poetry, such as that of Sergei Yesenin (who has lines such as these: “And the cranes, sad as they flying by, / No longer regret anyone … Alone, I stand on the empty plain, / While wind carries the cranes far away”). Lefebvre (RDS, p. 234) also points to “Schiller’s ballad ‘Die Kraniche des Ibykus,’ and to Georg Heym’s story ‘Der Kranich.’ The directest reference is, however, to Klebnikov’s poem ‘The Crane,’ which also plays on the verbal kinship between the animal and the steel contraption.”
Further to the Russian connection, one could also think of Mandelstam’s Pindaric ode “The Horseshoe Finder,” specifically with reference to recurrent images of time and coins.
“Hinterm kohlegezinkten” | “Behind coalmarked”
September 1963.
“In Prag” | “In Prague”
October 12, 1963. A much-commented-on poem. Prague, where Celan never went, evokes for him Bohemia, Kafka, Rabbi Loew, and a whole range of connected historical and mythological themes. He thus writes in a letter to Franz Wurm of April 29, 1968 (PC/FW, pp. 142–43): “You know well that, because of a three-year residence in Bohemia by my mother also … I am somewhat bohemianized [angeböhmt].—also, cf. ‘In Prague,’ from one (and another and another) side, and recently I read her that the motto of Bohemia is ‘La Bohème vaincra’—how is that in fact, Czech or Latin?”
The critic Bernd Witte argues that this poem, and the one preceding it, commemorate a meeting with Celan’s friend and former lover, the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, and include references to Bachmann’s poem “Prag Jänner 64,” whose lines “Unter den berstenden Blöcken / meines, auch meines Flusses / kam das befreite Wasser hervor” (Under the bursting blocks / of my, yes even my river / the freed water appeared) are echoed in the previous poem’s lines: “there the rods dipped royally before our eye, / water came, water.” Lefebvre, on the other hand, does not endorse the Bachmann connection. Witte goes on to read the poem as a metapoem, or statement of poetics (which is true of many Celan poems). Witte: “So baut ‘der halbe Tod,’ der Tod-im-Text, sich ins ‘Wohin,’ auf den offenen Ausgang des Gedichtes zu” (Thus “half death,” death-in-the-text, builds itself into the “whereto,” toward the open exit/conclusion of the poem). According to Otto Pöggeler’s more hermeneutical reading (SPUR, p. 366), the wir concerns essentially “die Begegnung des Dichters mit seinem Du” (the encounter of the poet with his You).
einer der Wieviel- / unddreißig | one of thirty- / and-how-many: Possibly the number of steps that lead to the Hradčany castle’s entrance, but possibly also a reference to the legend of the thirty-six Just Ones. Pöggeler asks: “Are the stairs those of the Hradshin, and are those holy figures meant that stand on the Karlsbrücke, something like a thirty-figure group? One should rather think of the thirty-six just men, who vouch their own lives to help the persecuted, who perhaps outweigh the extermination machinery of evil in the scales of time, to which in any case they don’t leave the last word” (SPUR, p. 354). According to Jewish tradition, as formulated by the Talmudic sage Abaye (a rabbi who lived in Babylonia, and died in 339), who gets to the number thirty-six by using gematria: “There are never less than 36 just men in the world who greet the Shekhinah [God’s worldly presence] every day, for it is written [in the book of Isaiah 30:18], “Blessed are all who wait for Him” [ashrei kol h.okhei lo], and [the word] lo [“for Him,” spelled Lamed-Vav] is numerically equal to 36.” (Cited by Philologos in “The Thirty-Six Who Save the World,” Forward, May 30, 2008, available at www.forward.com/articles/13406/the-thirty-six-who-save-the-world [accessed May 30, 2014].)
Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, in a short essay published in in 1962 under the title “The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men,” speculates that the number thirty-six “originates in ancient astrology, where the 360 degrees of the heavenly circle are divided into thirty-six units of ten, the so-called ‘deans’ [‘decans,’ in astrological parlance]. A dean-divinity ruled over each segment of the thus divided circle of the zodiac, holding sway over ten days of the year … [In Egyptian Hellenistic sources] the deans were regarded also as watchmen and custodians of the universe, and it is quite conceivable that [in Hellenistic astrology] the number thirty-six, which Abaye read into Scripture, no longer represented these cosmological powers or forces but rather human figures.”
Hradschin | Hradčany: The great castle in Prague, said to be the biggest castle in the world and housing the St. Vitus Cathedral and a number of noble historical palaces.
Goldmacher-Nein | goldmaker’s No: A reference to the Alchimistengasse, situated close to the Hradčany in Prague, and the street on which Kafka lived when he wrote the short stories gathered in the Landarzterzählungen.
Knochen-Hebräisch, / zu Sperma zermahlen | bone-Hebrew, / ground to sperm: Compare in the volume Mohn und Gedächtnis the poem “Spät und tief” with the line: “Ihr mahlt in den Mühlen des Todes das weiße Mehl der Verheißung.” (In the mills of death you grind the white flower of Promise.) See also the poem “Aus Engelsmaterie” | “Out of angel-matter” from the volume Threadsuns (p. 192).
“Von der Orchis her” | “Starting from the orchis”
September 11, 1963.
Orchis | orchis: The other German name, Knabenkraut (boy’s weed), and the etymology of the Greek word, ὄρχις, “orchis,” also “testicle,” due no doubt to the testicle-shaped paired root, link this flower from the orchid family to matters of childhood, manhood, and reproduction. See also the poem “Todtnauberg” (p. 254). There is, further, an interesting rhyme with Colchis on the Black Sea (Lefebvre, RDS, p. 238).
Zwölfnacht | twelfth-night: A festival marking the coming of Epiphany in some Christian churches. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is “the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking”; it also describes the period of the twelve nights that separate Christmas from Epiphany, in German also known as Rauhnächte (raw/rough nights).
“Halbzerfressener” | “Halfgnawed”
August 4, 1964.
“Aus Fäusten” | “From fists”
October 1, 1964. During this period, Celan took a leave of absence from his teaching and spent time in psychiatric hospitals. It is possible that the first stanza alludes to electroshock treatments he received at that time. The final stanza’s complexly convoluted syntax is not reproducible in English. The first version of my translation read:
The from you also star-
eyed loafer melancholy
hears of it.
A second version tried to clarify the English while still keeping what I have elsewhere called the “corkscrew motion” of the syntax in Celan’s sentence:
The—because of you also star-
eyed—vagabond Melancholy
learns of it.
Defeated, I decided for once to alter the syntax in English and reconstruct the stanza.
“Schwirrhölzer” | “Bullroarers”
October 3, 1964.
Schwirrhölzer | Bullroarers: An ethnological term referring to a cult object used in Africa and Australia. The German word lets the reader also hear the two basic words that make up the compound, namely “wood” and “whirring.” I have tried to retain some of that whirr/whizz sound by translating the indeterminate fahren as “whizz.” There are reading traces in Celan’s copy of Leo Frobenius’s Kulturgeschichte Afrikas.
“Abends” | “Evening”
November 8, 1964. Hamburg. Celan stayed in that city in early November 1964 for a radio recording at the Norddeutscher Rundfunk. The poem is drafted on paper bearing the logo of the Hotel Alster-Hof. On November 8 he saw Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
unendlicher Schuhriemen | endless shoelace: In the margin of an essay by Hugo Bergmann (“Die Heiligung des Namens [Kiddusch haschem],” in Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch, edited by Verein jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba [Prague] [Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913], p. 43), Celan wrote, “Reread 2/20/65. What a confirmation!” next to the sentence asking that in a time of persecution the Jew be serious about the “sanctifiction of the Name,” and that he should “refuse to knot the shoelace in the manner of the heathens.”
“Bei den zusammengetretenen” | “At the assembled”
November 17–25, 1964. On November 17 Celan returned from his trip to Germany, after a stop in Cologne to visit with Heinrich Böll. Wiedemann reports that “in Cologne he remembered his first visit there in 1954, when he saw the plague-cross in the Saint Mary church in the Capitol: ‘destroyed romanesque church, one of which, I thought about it again yesterday, with a so-called “plague-cross,” arms V-shaped’ (PC/GCL, #191). Celan links the concept of the plague-cross to the plague outbreak in Cologne in 1349, which was followed by a pogrom in which the whole Jewish community of the city was wiped out” (BW, p. 737).
Ölzelt | oiltent: Lefebvre reads this as referring probably to the “tabernacle where the chrism, the consecrated oil was kept” (RDS, p. 241).
“Das aufwärtsstehende Land” | “The upward-standing country”
December 3, 1964.
Steinschlucht | steep ravine: The first draft had Wortschlucht, “wordravine.”
“Das umhergestoßene” | “The pushed-around”
December 9–10, 1964.
“Aschenglorie” | “Ashglory”
December 15, 1964.
Pontisches Einstmal | Pontic erstwhile: In 1947 Celan spent his summer holidays in Mangalia on the Black Sea—Pontus Euxinus in Latin—with his friends Petre Solomon and Nina Cassian. Mangalia, a resort much frequented by artists, was partly peopled by Tatars.
The Black Sea is also the place where Ovid was exiled and wrote his Tristia and Pontic epistles, and where Osip Mandelstam spent much time. In his letter to Petre Solomon of November 23, 1967, Celan says of this poem: “C’est quelquechose comme l’anamnèse de Mangalia.” (It is something like the anamnesis of Mangalia.) (PC/PS, p. 238)
ertrunkenen Ruderblatt | drowned rudder blade: Wiedemann (BW, p. 738) connects this with the death by drowning (a possible suicide) of Celan’s friend Lia Fingerhut (with whom he had also been in Mangalia) in the Mediterranean off Israel, of which he learned on November 2, 1961, and about which he wrote to Petre Solomon on November 23, 1967: “I’m thinking of our excursion into the Carpathians more than 20 years ago, Lia, Lia, drowned, drowned” (PC/PS, p. 238). Lefebvre suggests that Celan may also have been thinking of the actress Corinna Marcovici, with whom Celan had a relationship at that time (RDS, p. 243).
Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen | No one / bears witness for the / witness: For an analysis of this statement and the translation problems it poses, see my essay “Paul Celan’s Counterword: Who Witnesses for the Witness?” (Justifying the Margins, pp. 79–86). See also Jacques Derrida’s essay “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” (Sovereignties in Question, pp. 65–96).
IV
“Das Geschriebene” | “The written”
December 19, 1964.
Tümmler | dolphins: The German word for “dolphin” is more descriptive of movement: sich tummeln means “to splash about in the water” and can be said of children as much as of dolphins. (Celan marked the word in his etymological dictionary.)
wo nur? | where only?: The first draft had in Dortmund replaced in the final version by the question (TA, Atemwende, pp. 122–23).
“Cello-Einsatz” | “Cello-entry”
December 24, 1964.
Cello-Einsatz | Cello-entry: Gisela Dischner informed Wiedemann (BW, p. 739) of a connection to the solo cello entry in the Adagio ma non troppo section of Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto op. 104.
Schwarz / -blütige | black / -biled: Schwarzblütig (blackblooded) is a common term describing someone melancholic. As the Greek word μελαγχολία (melancholia) literally means “black bile,” I’ve elected to stay with that word.
“Frihed” | “Frihed”
December 25, 1964.
Frihed: The Danish word meaning “freedom.” In early November 1964 Celan had visited the Frihedsmuseet (Freedom Museum) in Copenhagen with its exhibits of the Danish resistance against the Nazi occupation, including documentation of acts of sabotage and of the efforts to save the Jewish population.
Steinboote | stone boats: The Danes transported many Jews to safety in Sweden in fishing and leisure boats in October 1943, an act remembered in a stone monument in Jerusalem. See also “Es stand” | “It stood” and the commentary to that poem (pp. 430 and 617).
Orlog-Wort | man-of-war-word: Orlog is an old German word meaning “war,” which has survived in the Scandinavian countries in the vocabulary of the navy; there is thus an Orlogsmuseet, a museum of the Royal Danish Navy, in Copenhagen. Celan seems to have known the word from his readings in Hans Henny Jahnn’s 1949 novel Das Holzschiff, where the expression Orlogschiff is underlined.
ich singe – // was sing ich? | I sing— // what do I sing?: In the draft versions Celan had written: “ich sang // El Canto, El Canto / de Riego” (I sang // El Canto, El Canto / de Riego), which refers to the revolutionary patriotic hymn of the Spanish republic.
mit den roten, den weißen | with the red, with the white: red and white are the national colors of Denmark.
“Den verkieselten Spruch” | “The silicified saying”
December 27, 1964, Paris.
verkieselten | silicified: A term from petrology describing the process in which organic matter becomes saturated with silica. A common source of silica is volcanic material. Celan had the term via his book on geology by Roland Brinkman.
schießen / … an | crystallize: The German verb anschießen (though also having a range of meanings connected to shooting, and thus to speed and noise) here refers to the process of crystal formation in crystallography. Lefebvre refers the reader to Celan’s earlier poem “Engführung” | “Stretto” (PCS, p. 67) in the volume Sprachgitter | Speechgrille, adding: “The points and the edges of the crystal are in a way structured by a network of punctuations” (RDS, p. 247).
“Wo?” | “Where?”
December 30, 1964, Paris.
Lockermassen | friable matter: A geological term Celan located in his geology books. I use “matter” rather than “mass,” as the compound “friable mass” in English is used specifically in medicine to describe tumorlike formations.
“Königswut” | “King’s rage”
February 1, 1965, Paris.
“Solve” | “Solve”
Solve: Part of the classical alchemical formula “Solve et Coagula.” There are reading traces in Hugo von Hoffmanthal’s Andreas oder die Vereinigten: “True poetry is the arcanum that united us with life, that separates us from life. The separation—through separating we start to live—we separate, so then death too remains bearable, only the composite is gruesome (a fine, pure hour of death like Stillings’s)—but joining is just as essential as separating—the aura catena of Homer—‘Separabis terram ab igne, subtile ab spisso, suaviter magna cum ingenio | thou shalt separate earth from fire, the subtle from the dense, smoothly and with great skill’ and—solve et coagula. the universal binding agent: gluten; the universal seperating agent: alkahest.” Otto Pöggeler also points to a further phrase in Andreas: “Das ‘Ergon,’ sagt die Fama, ‘ist die Heiligung des inneren Menschen, die Goldmacherkunst ist das Parergon’—solve et coagula” (The “Ergon,” says the Fama, “is the sanctification of the inner man, the art of making gold is the parergon”—solve et coagula) (SPUR, p. 306). Celan’s use is more poetological, as this action of dissolving and (re)joining closely approximates the process to which his work subjects language. Wiedemann also points us to a note by Celan dated November 1, 1966, “concerning a phrase by [Margarete] Susman in connection with a remark by Rosa Luxemburg: ‘To be good is the main thing. To be good simply and humbly, that dissolves and joins everything and is better than all intelligence and self-righteousness’ (From Geheimnis der Freiheit, p. 274)” (BW, p. 741).