Breathturn into Timestead

by Paul Celan

  “Mit uns” | “With us”

  April 9, 1966. Werner Hamacher (WHH, p. 195, n. 44) points to motives from Rilke’s Fifth Duino Elegy, which in turn picks up motives from Picasso’s Saltimbanques, depicting a family of traveling acrobats. (It is interesting to note that Celan’s son Eric would become a professional acrobat, though a sedentary one), and suggests that Rilke’s “Und kaum dort, / aufrecht, da und gezeigt: des Dastehns / großer Anfangsbuchstab” (“And just arrived, / upright, there and pointed out—Destiny’s / first letter,” translated by Leonore Hildebrandt and Tony Brinkley) “dynamically becomes the ‘rebellious / grief.’” He argues that “Celan’s ‘Leerstellen-Lyrik’ [blankspace / gap / poetry] has learned more from Rilke’s than from any other German-language poetry.”

  Gram | grief: See also the occurrences of Gram in the title of the uncollected poem “Niemals, stehender Gram” (Never, standing grief), and in the uncollected poem that starts: “Diese / freie, / grambeschleunigte / Faust (sie / bahnt sich den Weg):” | “This / free / griefquickened / fist (it / clears its way):”

  LICHTZWANG | LIGHTDURESS

  The poems in Lichtzwang | Lightduress were written between June and December 1967, gathered by Paul Celan in the chronological order of their composition, and organized into six cycles. The book itself appeared in July 1970, roughly three months after the poet’s suicide, thus constituting the first posthumous volume of his work, yet being simultaneously the last book Celan himself saw through publication. Nineteen sixty-seven was a very difficult year for Celan. On January 30, he tried to kill himself with a knife (or a letter opener) that missed his heart by an inch. His wife had him transported to the Boucicaut hospital, where he was operated on immediately. From mid-February until mid-October he was interned at the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, though from late April on he was allowed out for work and travel. In April he and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, after long and difficult discussions initiated by his wife, concluded that a separation was necessary, and Celan reluctantly started looking for an apartment in Paris. Throughout these difficult months, he was, however, able to concentrate on his work, and during this period of internment he composed more than half of the poems that make up Threadsuns, as well as a major part of Lightduress—the first four cycles and a few poems of the fifth cycle. In March he sent the final manuscript of Breathturn to his publisher; in April he started teaching again at the École Normale Supérieure; in early June he took part in a pro-Israel march and wrote several poems concerned with Israel and the Six-Day War; from June to August he translated a book of poems by Jules Supervielle. Between June 9 and July 17, he composed a cycle of fourteen poems first published with engravings by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange under the title Schwarzmaut in March 1969, in a limited edition of eighty-five copies by Brunidor, Paris, which became the opening cycle of Lightduress. Between July 22 and August 2, he traveled in Germany, where on July 24 he gave a reading at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau attended by more than one thousand people, among them the philosopher Martin Heidegger. The next day the poet visited Heidegger in the philosopher’s Todtnauberg “Hütte” in the Black Forest—an unsatisfactory meeting for Celan, who had great expectations for it, as his inscription in the guest book shows: “Into the Hütte-book, while gazing on the well-star, with a hope for a word to come in the heart / July 25, 1967 / Paul Celan.” (See the poem “Todtnauberg” on p. 254, written on August 1 in Frankfurt am Main as response to the meeting.) From August 12 to August 23, Celan was in London, visiting with his aunt Berta Antschel, and in September he spent two weeks in Switzerland, mainly with his old friend Franz Wurm in Tegna in the Tessin. On the latter’s counsel, once returned to Paris later that month, Celan met with the neurophysiologist Moshé Feldenkrais (1904–1984) in the hope of finding an alternative treatment to the antidepressants he had been undergoing for his anxiety attacks. October saw the publication of his translations of twenty-one Shakespeare sonnets in book form, and of the first reviews of Breathturn on the occasion of the Frankfurt Book Fair—a book from which he would give a private reading at the house of his publisher, Siegfried Unseld, in Frankfurt am Main on October 12. Five days later he was definitively released from Sainte-Anne hospital after eight months of therapeutic supervision, first as an inpatient and then as outpatient, and on November 20 he moved into a small studio apartment on rue Tournefort in the fifth arrondissement, where he would live until late 1969. Later that month he again traveled to Germany to record a reading of poems from Breathturn for German television. His reading during that year, established via diaries and letters, included a wide range of authors, among them Adorno, Thomas Bernhard, Leo Shestov, his prefacer Benjamin Fondane, Adolf Faller on anatomy, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabès, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Thomas Mann, Shakespeare, John Millington Synge, and Osip Mandelstam. All the poems that make up Lightduress were composed by December 15, as the finished manuscript was referred to (though still under the early title Schwarzmaut) in a testamentary note Celan wrote that day.

  Lightduress is a continuation of the poetic investigations began by Celan after what he himself called die Wende, “the turn”—a term inscribed in the title of the first volume that represents the mature expression of these poetics, Atemwende | Breathturn. After Threadsuns, Lightduress thus constitutes the third volume (and the last book-length manuscript Celan himself was able to give as finished work to his publisher for publication) in the poet’s ongoing investigation of a new poetics.

  Title: Compare the last two lines of the poem “Wir lagen” | “We already lay” in the first cycle. The title can be seen as programmatic if we take the poem in which the word first appeared into consideration. The German poet and critic Horst Bienek, meditating on how to read late Celan, and focusing on this very word, wrote: “Once we’ve found the basis of the poem, it stands rather clearly in front of us: the maquisard, the resistance fighter, maybe wounded, whom one wanted to bring into the safety of darkness, the darkness of his very body—but ‘lightduress’ ruled, maybe daylight, or the moon, or the enemy’s searchlight? Or is it the truth of the poem, performing a feat: timelessly it arrives, full of secrets, apocryphal: and then it opens up, in one word, with one word: and maybe that one word is ‘Lichtzwang’ | ‘lightduress,’ simultaneously the demand to open up the darkness of his poems with light: Lightduress, that is the name of the last volume of poems Paul Celan handed to his publisher a few weeks before his suicide.”

  I

  “Hörreste, Sehreste” | “Soundscraps, visionscraps”

  April 1–June 9, 1967. Compare the earlier poem “Anabasis” (Gedichte in zwei Bänden, p. 1:256), in which Celan speaks of “Sichtbares, Hörbares,” something “visible, hearable.” Also (BW, p. 798) Celan’s reading in April of Sigmund Freud’s Das Ich und das Es | The Ego and the Id: “Die Wortreste stammen wesentlich von akustischen Wahrnehmungen ab … Es darf uns nicht beifallen, etwa der Vereinfachung zuliebe, die Bedeutung der optischen Erinnerungsreste—von den Dingen—zu vergessen, oder zu verleugnen, daß ein Bewußtwerden der Denkvorgänge durch Rückkehr zu den visuellen Resten möglich ist und bei vielen Personen bevorzugt scheint.” (“Verbal residues are derived primarily from auditory perceptions … We must not be led away, in the interests of simplification perhaps, into forgetting the importance of optical memory-residues—those of things [as opposed to words]—or to deny that it is possible for thought-processes to become conscious through a reversion to visual residues, and that in many people this seems to be a favourite method.”) (Das Ich und das Es, p. 248; The Ego and the Id, p. 23)

  “Ihn ritt die Nacht” | “Night rode him”

  June 9–11, 1967.

  “Muschelhaufen” | “Musselheap”

  June 14, 1967. Celan draws from a range of readings for this poem, among others on Friedrich Behn’s Kultur der Unzeit, the encyclopedic Fischer Weltgeschichte, and the geological dictionary Brockhaus-Taschenbuch der Geologie.

  Allverwandelnde | all-transforming: Following his frien
d Franz Wurm’s advice, Celan had replaced this word borrowed from Hölderlin’s Death of Empedokles in the poem “Denk Dir” with Unbestattbaren, but was able to let his friend know that he had managed to find a place for the word (BW, p. 800).

  “Mit der Aschenkelle geschöpft” | “Scooped with the ashladle”

  June 15, 1967. The first three lines seem to bring up extermination camp matters: the ashes from the crematorium were used to make soap.

  Tränentrumm | tearbrink: The word trumm, as singular of Trümmer, “ruins,” refers to a piece of something, or the end bit. The English cognate “thrum” is today used only in knitting—a fringe or warp, a wisp of unspun fleece—and in music.

  unpaariger … Lunge | unpaired … lung: Trying to commit suicide, Celan had stabbed himself with a knife or letter opener, and, missing the heart, he had perforated his left lung. One of the working titles of the collection had been Fahnenlunge (Flaglung).

  “Mit Mikrolithen” | “Larded with microliths”

  June 16, 1967. The Fischer Weltgeschichte offers reading traces; microliths as arrow- and spearheads; “rockart” referring to prehistoric art.

  “In die Nacht gegangen” | “Gone into the night”

  June 20, 1967. “The word stern-/durchlässig suggests a ritual requirement concerning the roof of the tabernacle which has to be definitely a covering of some sort, usually greenery, but transparent enough to admit the light of stars,” according to Elizabeth Petuchowski (“Bilingual and Multilingual Wortspiele,” p. 644). The commentator has just been discussing the poem “Hüttenfenster” (Gedichte in zwei Bänden, pp. 1:76–77) in reference to the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkoth).

  “Wir lagen” | “We already lay”

  June 24, 1967.

  Macchia | underbrush: The Italian word for thick underbrush calls up the French equivalent, le maquis, which was used to name the secret organized resistance to the Nazi occupiers during World War II, les maquisards, who took refuge in the maquis.

  In accordance with her attempt to draw Jewish and Hebrew themes from Celan’s work, Petuchowski suggests the following link—somewhat far-fetched as far as my understanding of the word goes: “Lichtzwang may well refer to the requirement of the roof of the ritual hut and some of its figurative implications. The symbolism surrounding the festival and the tabernacle is rich” (p. 644).

  “Tretminen” | “Contact mines”

  June 27–28, 1967.

  “Wer schlug sich zu dir?” | “Who sided with you?”

  July 1, 1967.

  The image of the lark, here as “lark-shaped / stone,” reappears in another poem of Lichtzwang as “larkshadow,” in the poem “Für den Lerchenschatten” | “For the larkshadow.” These are the two only appearances in Celan’s oeuvre of that bird, so favored by the Romantic poets.

  “Abglanzbeladen” | “Reflection-laden”

  July 5, 1967. Bertrand Badiou pointed out a reading trace in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, in connection with the “Three Fates” dream: “I acquiesced in the belief which I was later to hear expressed in the words: ‘Du bist der Natur einen Tod schuldig’” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 296). This “You owe nature a death” is evidently the transformation of the Shakespearean line (Henry IV, act 5, scene 1) “Thou owest God a death.” An interesting trace, which to me confirms a sense of Celan’s agnosticism. Wiedemann (BW, p. 802) also notes that in Celan’s interlinear French translation of this poem, he very carefully “avoids a determination of the ‘you’ as either male or female: ‘La mort / dont tu m’es resté(e) redevable.’”

  “Freigegeben” | “Cleared”

  July 8, 1967. Much of the vocabulary of this poem comes via Celan’s reading of Lincoln Lee, Fluggäste, Flieger und Maschinen. Wie man heute geflogen wird (Frankfurt am Main/Hamburg, 1967) (LPC), the German translation of Three-dimensioned Darkness: The World of the Airline Pilot in the Jet Age (Boston, 1963).

  Corona | fermata: Compare Celan’s early poem titled “Corona” (BW, p. 39). Wiedemann (BW, p. 803) also notes the leaf with the French translation of the poem, where Celan explains “Corona” according to the Italian word, via a drawing of a fermata (musical pause, hold) above a quaver. This made me decide to change the translation from “corona” to “fermata.”

  “Bakensammler” | “Beaconcollector”

  July 8, 1967.

  On two previous occasions Celan had used the word Meister (besides his most well-known use of the word in the “Todesfuge”): it first occurred in Mohn und Gedächtnis (Gedichte in zwei Bänden, p. 1:76), where he writes “denk, daß ich war, was ich bin: ein Meister der Kerker und Türme.” It reoccurs in Atemwende (Gedichte in zwei Bänden, p. 2:39), where he writes “Keine Sandkunst mehr, kein Sandbuch, keine Meister.” Here the context seems to point to a sense of the poet as a master of the signal tower. One could also note that this tower, which serves communication with the outside world, is, in a way, the opposite of the traditional poetic “ivory tower”—though association with Hölderlin’s tower and the poet as silenced by madness are never far away in Celan. The specialized vocabulary also carries traces from aeronautics via Lincoln Lee (see previous commentary), from a novel on the German Imperial Navy, and (BW, p. 804) from Arno Schmidt’s Gelehrtenrepublik | The Egghead Republic, in which Celan has marked the line: “Aber jetzt vorsichtshalber das Signal zurechtmachen; zum Anpeilen; die Bake” (p. 27), as well as, on the same page, the note: “die Bake = festes Seezeichen | (frz.: balise)”

  “Aus Verlornem” | “A you”

  July 17, 1967.

  “Was uns” | “What threw”

  July 17, 1967–c. February 13 1969.

  II

  “Einmal” | “Once”

  July 18, 1967.

  “Beilschwärme” | “Hatchetswarms”

  July, 20, 1967. Reading traces (BW, p. 804) via Fischer Weltgeschichte and Behn’s Kultur der Urzeit.

  “Vorgewußt” | “Precognition”

  July 21, 1967.

  “Bei Brancusi, zu Zweit” | “Two at Brancusi’s”

  August 4, 1967. The poem remembers a visit by Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange (the “two” of the title) to the sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s studio on February 24, 1954. In a letter of August 8, 1967, he tells Gisèle that he has “made, for a Romanian poet whose name you know, Ion Caraion, who is putting together a book on Brancusi, the little poem I am sending along” (PC/GCL, #540). Celan had already met Brancusi once, back in 1951, when he and some ten other French and German writers and artists went to visit him. Celan had met the Surrealist poet Ion Caraion back in 1946; a year later Caraion would print Celan’s first published poems in German in the Bucharest magazine Agora.

  “Wo ich” | “Where I”

  August 5, 1967.

  “Seit langem” | “Long ago”

  June 9, 1967.

  “Todtnauberg” | “Todtnauberg”

  August 1, 1967, Frankfurt am Main. Probably the single most discussed poem of this volume, it is the record of Celan’s visit to the philosopher Martin Heidegger at the latter’s Hütte in the village of Todtnauberg in the Black Forest on July 25, 1967, the day after the poet gave a poetry reading at the University of Freiburg in the presence of the philosopher. The poem was composed on August 1 in Frankfurt. In a letter of August 2 (PC/GCL, #536), written immediately upon his return to Paris, Celan tells his wife: “The reading in Freiburg was a major, an exceptional success: 1200 people listened to me with bated breath for an hour, then, after much applause, they listened to me for another fifteen minutes … Heidegger had approached me—The day after my reading I went with Mr. Neumann, Elmar’s friend, to Heidegger’s little hut [the Hütte] in the Black Forest. In the car, a serious dialogue ensued, I spoke with explicit words. Mr. Neumann, who witnessed the exchange, told me afterward that for him this conversation had an epochal character. I hope Heidegger will take up his pen and write a few pages in response, also to forewarn, given the increase of Nazism.” Heidegger didn’t, was
proud of the poem Celan sent him, misreading it as an homage, as his student, Hans Georg Gadamer did, in turn, when he came to write about it.

  “Translation at the Mountain of Death,” a close reading of the poem in the act of translating it into English, was included in my 2009 book of essays, Justifying the Margins. Here, a shortened version of that analysis:

  The poem itself is a single sentence, divided into eight stanzas … essentially composed of parataxically juxtaposed nouns and noun-clauses commenting on those nouns, separated by commas until a single period brings the poem to a close. It gives the feeling of something cut-up…, foreshortening itself:… the remainder, the residue, of an aborted or impossible narration …

  The poem’s opening line, Celan’s account of the surrounding botany he espies upon arriving, is, however, full of hope and healing: Arnica is a bright-yellow flower, whose mountain variety, A. montana, is used to prepare a tincture helpful for healing sprains and bruises. Eyebright—Augentrost—is a small white and purplish flower of the old world, whose very name indicates its healing faculties: it is used to bring succor to failing or ailing eyesight … Notice also the two bright A’s that begin the words: the English translation, as well as the various French ones, lose the second A, though, by a happy coincidence, the English plant-name, “Eyebright,” rather accurately translates the German one.

  The next two lines indicate that the traveler … takes a draft of water from a well…, [which is] described as having a Sternwürfel, literally a star-dice, on top. This was indeed the case: old photos of Heidegger’s Hütte show this wooden cube with a painted or carved star-motto on it, which seems to have been a piece of local folk-art … Würfel, though indeed a cube, is primarily a dice—here the whole complex of Celan’s relation to Mallarmé and his “Coup de dé” comes into play … The topos is … even more complexified by the star on it: think of the six sides of the dice, which no matter how often you throw it, cannot come up with the number seven, Mallarmé’s famous “constellation,” Celan’s Siebenstern, that is, the Pleiades (the seven sisters of Atlas transformed into stars, of which only six are visible to the naked eye) and much more. The star on the dice rimes with the yellow arnica, giving the five-pointed Jewish star: the Jewish poet at the door of the politically suspect philosopher, etc.…