Breathturn into Timestead

by Paul Celan

  Otto Pöggeler, in his essay “‘Schwarzmaut’: Bildende Kunst in der Lyrik Paul Celans,” sees the word Kommissur as referring to the anatomy of the brain only (p. 287). But there is also a rhyme on the French word commissure (des lèvres), playing back to the first word in the poem, which can hold both kinds of lips, facial and sexual. Etymologically the word comes from the Latin commissura, “connection”; in English the word also has both denotations; see The American Heritage Dictionary, p. 381: “2.a. A tract of nerve fibers passing from one side to the other of the spinal cord or brain. b. The angle or corner of such structures as the lips, eyelids, or cardiac valves.”

  Thus the word itself, whose etymology points toward “a place at which 2 things are joined, a seam, a juncture” (ibid.), presents a joining of at least three familiar Celan motives: brain anatomy (deep structure of human mind), surface anatomy (the lips, and here sexual union), and a buried reference to that most abiding of Celan’s images, the eye.

  Schwarzmaut | Blacktoll: Maut, obsolete for Zoll, “toll,” as in road toll. The word Schwarzmaut, constructed after the model of Schwarzhandel (black market), thus corresponds to a forbidden, illegal toll or tax. Celan will use the word as the title of a limited edition of an artist’s book with eighteen poems and etchings by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange (see the introductory note to Lightduress, pp. 547–50).

  Leuchtkäfer | glowworms: In French vers luisants, where vers means both “worm” and “verse”—as in a poem.

  V

  “Mächte, Gewalten” | “Principalities, powers”

  May 13, 1967.

  Mächte, Gewalten | Principalities, powers: A New Testament, often Pauline expression. Compare Eph. 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places”; Col. 2:15: “And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.” The expression refers to satanic and demonic forces able to take over social or political institutions as well as individual humans.

  Vincents verschenktes / Ohr | Vincent’s offered / ear: When Van Gogh in an act of insanity cut off his ear, he offered it to a prostitute by the name of Rachel, whom he asked to take good care of it (report in the Forum Républicain newspaper of December 30, 1888) (BW, pp. 784–85).

  “Tagbewurf” | “Daybombardment”

  May 15, 1967. The two following poems were composed on the same day.

  “Redewände” | “Speechwalls”

  May 15, 1967.

  “Verwaist” | “Orphaned”

  May 15, 1967. This poem is clearly a reworking of a classical kabbalistic theme. The next day Celan finished his reading of Gershom Scholem’s On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (BW, p. 785).

  die vier Ellen Erde | the four ells of earth: In his essay on the golem (an important figure in Celan’s volume Die Niemandsrose), Scholem writes the following: “We come across the story that God and Earth concluded a formal contract concerning the creation of Adam … God demands Adam for a thousand years as a loan from Earth, and gives her a formal receipt for ‘four ells of earth,’ which is witnessed by the Archangels Michael and Gabriel and lies to this day in the archives of Metatron, the heavenly scribe” (On the Kabbalah, p. 165).

  Hebe | share: Hebe literally means “leaven.” But compare Scholem: “Just as according to the Torah a portion of dough is removed from the rest to serve as the priest’s share, so is Adam the best share that is taken from the dough of the earth” (On the Kabbalah, p. 160).

  “Beider” | “Of both”

  May 16, 1967.

  beider Todesblatt über der Blöße | of both: the deathleaf over their nakedness: Scholem: “The leaves of the Tree of Death, with which Adam veils his nakedness, are the central symbol of true magical knowledge” (On the Kabbalah, p. 175; Celan’s underlines).

  “Fortgewälzter” | “Rolled-away”

  May 20, 1967.

  “Als Farben” | “As colors”

  May 21, 1967.

  “Die Rauchschwalbe” | “The chimney swallow”

  May 24, 1967. Celan had started teaching again on the previous day, though returning to the clinic in the evening. He sent this poem to Gisèle on May 25, with beneath it the following line: “The times are hard. May Israel last and live!” (PC/GCL, p. 508).

  The complex intertwined imagery here is difficult to sort out. (1) Barbara Wiedemann links the shark to the biblical big fish that spat out Jonah. (2) Though we have no information about Celan’s sources, she connects the Inca figure to the Spaniard Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), a relative of the poet with the same name, who was the illegitimate son of a conquistador and an Inca noblewoman (thus his surname) and wrote a critical narrative on the conquest of the Inca territories (Commentarios Reales de los Incas) that was eventually banned and not republished in the Americas until 1918. (3) There is a reading trace for the term Landnahme in Hans Krahe’s Germanische Sprachwissenschaft I: Einleitung und Lautlehre (Berlin, 1948), p. 25: “Because of political disagreements many Norwegian noblemen had felt forced to leave their homeland. They emigrated to Iceland, which they settled during the so-called landnāma-tīd ‘Landnahmezeit’ | ‘conquest-time’ (about 872–930)” (BW, p. 787).

  “Weiß” | “White”

  May 25, 1967.

  “Unbedeckte” | “Bare one”

  May 25–June 2, 1967.

  “Der Schweigestoß” | “The silence-butt”

  May 27, 1967. The next poem was also written on that day.

  “Haut Mal” | “Haut Mal”

  May 27, 1967. It is impossible to translate this title, as it can be read both as a German and a French title: In German “Haut Mal” could be a variation on Mutter-Mal, a birthmark, or mole, where Haut means “skin.” Thus “skin-mark,” “skin-blemish.” But the title could more obviously be read in French as “Haut Mal,” literally “High Evil/Sickness,” and could be a citation of the title of one of Michel Leiris’s books of poems. It would seem that Leiris’s title plays against/with the more idiomatic term “grand mal,” which refers to the strong form of epilepsy. Barbara Wiedemann also reports that Celan kept a magazine page with a part translation of a Boris Pasternak poem by Pierre Pascal with the title “Haut Mal” in his Italian edition of Pasternak’s poetry (BW, p. 788).

  Concerning the medical images of the poem, Wiedemann locates most of these in Hippocrates’s essays (Fünf auserlesene Schriften [Zurich: Fischer Bücherei, 1955]), although the presence of the book in Celan’s library is not attested.

  “Das taubeneigroße Gewächs” | “The pigeon-egg-size growth”

  May 28, 1967. According to some sources, the philosopher Leibniz is said to have had a growth the size of a pigeon egg on his neck. Thus the “Denkspiel” | “thoughtgame” most likely refers to Leibniz’s idea of a mathesis universalis.

  “Angewintertes” | “Bewintered”

  May 30, 1967.

  “Draußen” | “Outside”

  June 3, 1967. The following poem was written on the same day.

  “Wer gab die Runde aus?” | “Who stood the round?”

  June 3, 1967.

  “Heddergemüt” | “Dysposition”

  June 4, 1967. The following poem was written on the same day.

  “Kein Name” | “No name”

  June 4, 1967.

  “Denk Dir” | “Imagine”

  June 7–13, 1967. The Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors lasted from June 5 to June 10. Much of Celan’s thinking and feeling during that week can be seen in the three letters to Franz Wurm of June 8, 12, and 13 (PC/FW, #47, #49, #50), as well as in his letter to Gisèle of June 6 (PC/GCL, #514), in which he tells her that “at noon there was a mimeo sheet in my mail slot [at the École Normale Superieure] that says: ‘That / Israel may live / Everyone to the / Concorde / Tuesday 6 June at 7 p.m.’ I called Jean, whom I’ll meet up with there at a quarter to seven behind Palais-Bou
rbon to take part in the demonstration (which, I believe, is organized by young people). / Israel will win and will live.” In a later letter (PC/GCL, #531) he calls this poem “an important poem,” which the position of the poem as the final one in the volume tends to bear out.

  Moorsoldat | moorsoldier: From “Die Moorsoldaten,” title of a song (usually translated as “The Peat Bog Soldiers”) written by prisoners in Nazi moorland labor camps of Börgermoor, which held about one thousand socialist, anarchist, and communist internees. The words were written by Johann Esser (a miner) and Wolfgang Langhoff (an actor); the music was composed by Rudi Goguel and was later adapted by Hans Eisler and Ernst Busch. In his often cited memoir, Es war ein langer Weg (Düsseldorf: Mahn- und Gedenkstätte, 2007 [first published in 1947 by Komet-Verlag]), Goguel described the first performance: “The sixteen singers, mostly members of the Solinger workers choir, marched in holding spades over the shoulders of their green police uniforms (our prison uniforms at the time). I led the march, in blue overalls, with the handle of a broken spade for a conductor’s baton. We sang, and by the end of the second verse nearly all of the thousands of prisoners present gave voice to the chorus. With each verse, the chorus became more powerful and, by the end, the SS—who had turned up with their officers—were also singing, apparently because they too thought themselves ‘peat bog soldiers.’”

  Massada | Masada: ancient fortification on a isolated rock plateau on the eastern edge of the Judean desert overlooking the Dead Sea. The siege of Masada by troops of the Roman Empire toward the end of the First Jewish–Roman War ended in the mass suicide of the 960 Jewish rebels and their families holed up there, in 73 C.E.

  vom Unbestattbaren her | from what cannot be buried: In the first three drafts the final line read: “vom Allverwandelnden her.” | “from the all-transforming.” In his letter to Franz Wurm of June 13, Celan explains the change: “You see it exactly, you hear it accurately, for example, the Allverwandelnden: this word from Hölderlin’s Empedocles puts me in that state, which you know well, which ever more tautly toward the poem—every possible poem—tensing toward—and then, out of gratitude, returned in the text. Except that this gratitude, that is witnessed here, wanes in the face of the sudden, stronger call: now it says—rightly so, I believe—: vom Unbestattbaren her | from what cannot be buried” (PC/FW, #50).

  EINGEDUNKELT | TENEBRAE’D

  The eleven poems that make up this cycle, all written during the time of the composition of Threadsuns, and originally conceived as part of that volume, were composed between March 17 and April 19, 1966, thus falling chronologically between the first and second cycles of Threadsuns. During that period Celan was hospitalized in Paris in the psychiatric clinic Sainte-Anne. He chose these eleven from a folder of twenty-six poems, but here, rejecting the chronological arrangement he used for the late volumes, he organized the cycle on different principles. Wiedemann suggests that the selection “seems to have consciously avoided thematic overlaps.” In January 1968, Celan sent the cycle with the added title Eingedunkelt to Siegfried Unseld, the publisher of Suhrkamp Verlag, who had asked for a contribution to an anthology to be called Aus aufgegebenen Werken (From Abandoned Works).

  The title, Eingedunkelt, refers not only to one of the poems in the cycle, but also to a 1966 etching by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, named by Paul Celan, as was their habit, Enténébrée—Eingedunkelt.

  The more obvious translation of the title would be “Endarkened,” which was my first choice. But despite the fact that Celan’s version of Ungaretti’s expression nella tenebra uses umdunkelt, which is closer to eingedunkelt, I decided on “tenebrae’d,” which of course recalls the earlier poem titled “Tenebrae” (in Sprachgitter) and the title in French he gave GCL’s engraving (most likely his own back translation—or simultaneous creation—of the German title).

  “Bedenkenlos” | “Unscrupulously”

  April 3–8, 1966. Written during Passover week (April 5–11). Wiedemann (BW, p. 792) points to reading traces in Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (read on April 6) for lines 5–7, namely the sentences (given here in the original English, though Celan read a German translation): “His own skin had sizzled under the red-hot brand, he murmured softly,” and “Stevie knew very well that hot iron applied to one’s skin hurt very much.”

  “Nach dem Lichtverzicht” | “After the lightwaiver”

  March 29–31, 1966. Wiedemann (BW, p. 792) points to reading traces in Thomas Wolfe for lines 4 and 5, quoting the lines “Der Frühling hat keine Sprache außer den Schrei, grausamer aber als April ist die Natter der Zeit” (“Spring has no language but a cry; but crueler than April is the asp of time”) from Of Time and the River.

  “Deutlich” | “Explicit”

  March 29, 1966. Further Thomas Wolfe reading traces pointed out by Wiedemann (BW, p. 793) of lines Celan marked in the margins of his copy: “The flower of love is living in the wilderness, and the elm-root threads the bones of buried lovers. / The dead tongue withers.” “Beglänztes” (line 7), Wiedemann further suggests, could also link to Wolfe’s line “Later, when they left his rooms and went out on the street, the sensuous quickening of life, the vital excitement and anticipation which Starwick was somehow able to convey,” where in German Beglänzung is used to translate both “the sensuous quickening of life” and “the vital excitement.” “Ulmwurzel-Haft,” via the German translation of Wolfe’s “elm-root,” can also be a pun on his workplace, the École Normale Supérieure, situated on the “rue d’Ulm.”

  “Vom Hochseil” | “Forced off”

  April 7–19, 1966. Wiedemann points to two reading traces in Conrad: (1) “The Chief Inspector, driven down to the ground by unfair artifices, had elected to walk the path of unreserved openness,” which in German contains the image of “vom Hochseil auf den Boden gezwungen,” not there in the original; (2) “His pasty moon face drooped under the weight of melancholy assent,” again closer in the German translation of “pasty” as Käse-weißes face. Wiedemann also cites Theodor Adorno for the expression unbotmäßigen from the following sentence (marginally annotated by Celan) in the essay “Zeitlose Mode,” which was translated into English as: “The Element of Excess, of Insubordination in Jazz, Which Can Still Be Felt in Europe, Is Entirely Missing Today in America.”

  “Über die Köpfe” | “Heaved far over”

  March 28, 1966. Wiedemann (p. 794) points to reading traces in Homer’s Odyssey (which Celan read on March 27) for the expression “hinweggewuchtet” (line 2). The English version of this section in Charles Stein’s translation reads: “Then he put in place / an enormous heavy door-stone, having easily lifted it. / Twenty-two four-wheeled wagons / would not have been able to budge it from the ground, / such was the giant stone he put in the doorway,” where “not able to budge” in the German reads “nicht … wegwuchten können.”

  “Wirfst du” | “Do you throw”

  March 27–28, 1966. More Homer traces. The “anchor stone” comes from lines 200–201 of The Odyssey, in Stein’s translation: “so there’d be no need for moorings, / no need to throw anchor stones or secure stern cables.”

  “Angefochtener Stein” | “Contested stone”

  March 17, 1966. Celan offered this poem as present to his wife for her thirty-ninth birthday (PC/GCL, #373).

  “Eingedunkelt” | “Tenebrae’d”

  March 8–18, 1966. See discussion of translation of title above.

  The word “Schlüsselgewalt” (line 2) most likely goes back to Leo Shestov, a major figure for Celan, who read his “Le Pouvoir des Clefs” (which comments on Jesus’s words to Saint Peter concerning the keys to heaven) in 1959 and again in 1967. Shestov, born Yehuda Leyb Schwarzmann to a Jewish family in Kiev in 1866, was a Ukrainian/Russian philosopher who emigrated to France in 1921, fleeing from the aftermath of the October Revolution. He lived in Paris until his death on November 19, 1938.

  “Füll die Ödnis” | “Shovel the void”

  March 31, 1966. Wiedemann (BW, p. 795) points
to another Wolfe line for “Äugensäcke” | “eyebags,” which I was unable to locate in the original. The German translation, underlined by Celan, gives: “Die Mutter war eine kleine, volle Frau mit einem weißen, kloßigen Gesicht und Augensäcken.”

  “Einbruch” | “Irruption”

  March 31, 1966. The two opening lines show reading traces (BW, p. 795) from Homer: “Dort stand es (das Trojanische Pferd) nun. Sie aber sprachen viel Ungeschiedenes, während sie um es saßen.” In Charles Stein’s translation: “So it stood there while the people discussed it / in long, inconclusive debate, / standing about it.” “Ungeschieden” feels much stronger than “inconclusive,” no matter how accurate the latter is, as I hear a near-biblical tone in the German, the undifferentiated before the beginning, that is, before the Word separates the undifferentiated, as Genesis has it—while in the Celanian universe, the opposite happens: the unseparated breaks into one’s language.

  Nachtglast | nightshimmer: Wolfe: “Und dieser letzte rote Nachglast [sic] des Tags lag auf diesen Leuten” and “der rote Nachglast der untergegangenen Sonne.” I am unable to locate the original phrase.

  Sperrzauber | counterspell: Wolfe: “Inständig-augenblicklich, und wie erlöst von einem Sperrzauber, der ihn jahrelang ans Fremdferne gebannt hatte, und mit einem unerträglichen Gefühl von Schmerz und Verlust erinnerte er sich seines Zuhause, seiner Heimat und der verlorenen Welt seiner Kindheit” (“And suddenly, out of this dream of time in which he lived, he would awaken, and instantly, like a man freed from the spell of an enchantment which has held him captive for many years in some strange land, he would remember home with an intolerable sense of pain and loss, the lost world of his childhood”).

  Flutgang unterwaschen | floodflow washed out: Underlined in Wolfe: “Du aber bist gegangen: unsre Leben sind zerstört und zerbrochen in der Nacht, unsre Leben sind unterwaschen vom Flutgang des Stromes” (“But you are gone; our lives are ruined and broken in the night, our lives are mined below us by the river, our lives are whirled away into the sea and darkness and we are lost unless you come to give us life again”).