Breathturn into Timestead

by Paul Celan

  Then, the briefest stanza, three words distributed over two lines: “in der / Hütte” [“in the / cabin,” or “in the / hut”]. I have preferred to retain the German word Hütte here, because in a Heideggerian context … the word is heavily and symbolically loaded:… the Hütte itself, which Heidegger had built in 1922, was not only his holiday house in the mountains, but also his essential work and thinking place and, maybe more importantly, the refuge he went to in times of trouble. It was from there that he went down to Freiburg to take up the job as rector in 1933 and militate for what can be at best described as his own idiosyncratic version of a Hitlerian Germany. It is there that he took refuge during the denazification years … It was also there that in 1933 Heidegger ran Nazi indoctrination sessions.

  Not any hut or cabin or mountain refuge, then … The tight stanza “in der / Hütte” translates the gingerly steps, the hesitations that must have befallen Celan as he enters the Hütte as Heidegger’s guest. And then the longest—10-line—stanza, about the lines written into the guest-book. Before Celan’s actual entry, a further hesitation: Who else recorded his name in the book before him? What to write in a book that probably carries the names of those Nazis that took part in the 1933 indoctrination sessions?

  … In the poem … Celan transforms [his] actual inscription only slightly. He adds two important words: heute and eines Denkenden. Heute, “today,” indicates the burning necessity of the need for a word to come now, in this situation, in postwar Germany. The Denkender, the one who thinks, is clearly Heidegger, and is as close as Celan comes to naming the philosopher himself in the poem …

  The German syntax of this stanza makes, as Pöggeler has pointed out, for an ambiguity: the phrase im Herzen, “in the heart,” can mean either “a hope in the [visitor’s] heart for a thinker’s word” or “a hope for a word in the heart of a thinker [the visited thinker’s].” The first meaning is rather banal, associating hope with its traditional topos, the heart. The second possibility—the word in the heart—makes for a much more complex philosophical argument—one that Pöggeler discusses at some length, bringing in Augustin, Meister Eckhart, Heraklitus, Laotse (whom Heidegger translated in the Hütte at one point), as well as Pindar. Celan’s poetics, and the rhythm of his lines, rather clearly point to this reading …

  The rest of the poem consists of 5 short stanzas—only one of which has three lines—and takes us immediately outside again: The two men go for a walk on the moor in the mountains behind the Hütte. Celan again uses botany to set the scene: “Orchis und Orchis, einzeln” | “Orchis and orchis, singly.” Whereas in the first line arnica and eyebright, two different flowers, are simply juxtaposed, both part of the same scene, here the same flower, the orchids, standing for the two men, are separated by the word und and, as if that was not enough to show their separateness, the last word of the line insists on it: einzeln, “singly”/“single.” In German the plant is also known as Knabenkraut, “boy’s weed,” for its testicle-shaped roots (which, as Pöggeler notes, links it to a number of other Celan concepts and words, such as the Mandelhode, the almond-testicle, and the other Orchis poem which talks of the Fünfgebirg Kindheit, the five-mountain childhood…).

  … The bright, hopeful A’s of the first line have been replaced by the darker O’s—have we come from alpha to omega?… [The men] walk on “halb- / beschrittenen Knüppel- / pfade” | “half- / trod log- / trails,” literally on “paths made of wood”—the German Holzwege, which refers to a path in a forest, but also, in common parlance, to a dead-end, to a mistaken route, and is, of course, the title of a well-known book by Heidegger. Celan is too subtle to use Heidegger’s word, and his “log-trails” complexify the image further, as Knüppel—the German word means both “logs” and “rods”—are also used as weapons to beat people, prisoners, etc.

  “Half-trod” only:… The walk is interrupted, the walkers return to the car, Celan is driven back. In the car there is talk, Krudes, not a common word in German, “something crude” passes between Celan and another passenger, and the poet calls upon the third person present, “he who drives us, the mensch,” as a witness to this exchange (“he also hears it”). Clearly the Krudes cannot be the “word in the heart” Celan expected from the visit …

  [The word that caused me the most problems, however,] is Waldwasen, which is not a common word, and thus something that should make us aware that the poet intends something specific … At first glance one could conceivably think that the poet has simply chosen an erudite or “poetic” word instead of the more obvious and thus banal Waldwiesen—forest meadows, forest meadows, literally, or [the translator Robert R.] Sullivan’s “glades.” Or that Waldwasen was picked because it echoed, darkly [following on the O’s of “orchis”], via the two a’s following on the two w’s, the poem’s initial A-vowel rhyme of “Arnika, Augentrost.”

  [But on closer inspection] the choice is much more deeply and complexly motivated than by mere Tonmalerei, “sound-painting.” A Wase, according to Grimm’s Dictionary of the German Language, is, first of all, a piece of sod together with the plants that grow in it … Celan is not talking of some grassy surface, a pleasant meadow, but has in mind something that goes deeper and incorporates the network of underground roots. His thought is, as usual, directed below the surface. Further, in North Germany, the term Wasen is used essentially as a homonym for Torf, “turf,” “peat”—a word, and substance, that … plays a role in other Celan poems (something that can be used for making a fire and something that preserves matter, for example, the Danish peat bogs of prehistoric fame). From being a nicely romantic glade, the Waldwase has already become something slightly unheimlich, “uncanny”—to use one of Heidegger’s favorite terms.

  … Grimm further glosses Wasen as “the piece of land on which the knacker or Wasenmeister (the ‘Master of the Wasen’) guts and buries the dead livestock, also known in South Germany and on the Rhine as Schindanger—‘the knacker’s yard,’” which one could nearly translate as the “killing fields.”

  … Walking singly over the Wasen, Celan cannot but be close to that realm he is most familiar with: the realm of the dead. The walk is over a cemetery … the all-pervasive topos of Celan’s work. This is made even clearer by the next word, uneingeebnet, “unevened,” thus hilly, giving the image of grassy graves, over which the two walk on Knüppelpfaden—paths made out of logs, pieces of wood; we have seen above that these pieces of wood, at least under the German form of Knüppel, remind us of deadly weapons …

  As I was reading Grimm on Wase, and found the Schindanger, I thought I had gotten to the bottom … Then my eye fell on yet another Wase, a word current in North Germany, and used to describe a bundle of dead wood, the etymology of which Grimm leads back through French faisceau to Latin fasces, the curator’s bundle of rods, which became the symbol of, and gave the word for, “fascism.”

  … I have not found a word in English that would be truly “accurate” to [the polysemic richness of] the German Waldwasen, though “sward,” the word I am using at this point in the infinite project of revising, refining, reworking these translations (the same word is used by Michael Hamburger), which my dictionary glosses as “land covered with grassy turf; a lawn or meadow … from OE sweard, swearth, skin of the body, rind of bacon, etc.” comes close and does have that a. But then again it does not include the difference, that essential difference Celan’s a makes in the movement of its substitution for the ie of Wiesen. What in the original poem is truly a mise-en-abîme becomes in the English translation only a “poetic” word, albeit solid and useful enough per se, as its etymology, via the connotations of the “skin” root, creates a membrane that could possibly be porous enough to lead the reader through and into the dark underground Celan points to—without, however, creating that chain of meanings leading to the “fasces” connotation of Wasen.

  Further reading: The most compelling hermeneutical approach to the poem can be be found in the “Todtnauberg” section of Otto Pöggeler’s book S
pur des Wortes (1986). Useful also is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Poetry as Experience (1999) and James K. Lyon’s monograph Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (2006), especially pp. 173–91.

  “Sink” | “Sink”

  August 10, 1967.

  “Jetzt” | “Now”

  August 10, 1967.

  “Einem Bruder in Asien” | “To a Brother in Asia”

  August 11, 1967. The first version had “Eiter-Geschütze,” “pus-cannons,” when Celan showed the poem to Peter Szondi. The latter questioned the word “pus,” and Celan took his advice and removed it in the final version. The poem coincides with a period of marked intensification of America’s war in Vietnam via bombing raids, napalm attacks, and further troop landings.

  “Angerempelt” | “Jostled”

  August 10, 1967.

  “Wie du” | “How you”

  August 15, 1967. In August 1967 Celan spent ten days in London, visiting with his aunt Berta (his father’s sister). On August 15 he wrote to GCL: “This past night I dreamed—literally: dreamed—a little poem, I woke up instantly and was able to write it down: such a thing has only happened very rarely to me” (PC/GCL, #544).

  “Highgate” | “Highgate”

  August 17, 1967, London. Highgate is a section of north London with a cemetery of the same name where Karl Marx is buried. The toponym had already been noted by Celan when working on Die Niemandsrose in 1962 (BW, p. 809).

  “Blitzgeschreckt” | “By lightning scared”

  August 23, 1967. Celan had seen Théodore Géricault’s painting Cheval effrayé par la foudre | A Horse Frightened by Lightning in the National Gallery in London and owned a postcard reproduction of it.

  Trittstein | stepstone: may refer to a fall from horseback Géricault took, which, combined with his tuberculosis, led to his early death (BW, p. 810).

  III

  “Wurfscheibe” | “Discus”

  August 24, 1967, Paris.

  “Klopf” | “Knock”

  August 25, 1967.

  “Die entsprungenen” | “The escaped”

  August 27, 1967.

  “In den Dunkelschlägen” | “In the darkclearings”

  August 27, 1967.

  Dunkelschlägen: Plural of Dunkelschlag, in German defined as “Samen-, Besamungsschlag, in der Forstwirtschaft die erste Lichtung … eines alten Bestandes zum Zwecke der Verjüngung,” that is, a first clearing in a forest, leaving enough trees standing for the crowns to still touch and give protection to seedlings. My translation creates a pun on light and dark that is not there in the original.

  “Streubesitz” | “Scattered property”

  August 29, 1967.

  Klage- / vögte | grievance- / reeves: Wiedemann (BW, p. 811) proposes to link this term to the Klage-Fürsten of the Tenth Duino Elegy, where Rilke writes: “And she leads him gently through the wide landscape of Lament, / shows him the columns of temples, the ruins / of castles, from which the lords of Lament / ruled the land, wisely” (as translated by A. S. Kline).

  “Der von den unbeschriebenen” | “The letter read from”

  August 30, 1967. Reading traces (BW, p. 811) of an annotation in Rudolf Bilz, Die unbewältigte Vergangen-heit des Menschengeschlechts: “when a delirium tremens patient reads a letter from a completely white page” (my translation).

  “Schneid die Gebetshand” | “Cut the prayerhand”

  August 30, 1969. Reading traces in Bilz: “I do not address the prayerhand, especially the physiognomic change that has occurred.”

  Barbara Klose, in “‘Souvenirs entomologiques’: Celans Begegnung mit Jean-Henri Fabre,” has shown that this poem, as well as ten further poems in the next section of Lichtzwang, show traces of Celan’s reading of French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre’s selected writings in German, edited by Adolf Portmann.

  “Was es an Sternen bedarf” | “What’s required as stars”

  September 2, 1967.

  “Ich kann dich noch sehen” | “I can still see you”

  September 2, 1967, Paris.

  “Lauter” | “Nothing but”

  September 3, 1967, Paris.

  “Im Leeren” | “In the void”

  September 5, 1967, Paris.

  “Die lehmigen Opfergüsse” | “The loamy sacrifice downpours”

  September 2, 1967, Paris.

  “Das Wildherz” | “The wildheart”

  September 8, 1967, Camedo, in the Domodossola–Locarno train.

  vom halbblinden Stich | by the halfblind stab: A reference to Celan’s recent suicide attempt, when he stabbed himself with a knife (or a letter opener, depending on the source), barely missing the heart but puncturing his left lung.

  This and the next poem were written on a trip to Switzerland (September 7–22, 1967), where Celan would spend a few days with his friend Franz Wurm, after a long forced residence in the Paris hospital. These two, as well as the previous poem (“The loamy sacrifice downpours”), are connected with the poems that Celan gathered under the title Eingedunkelt | Tenebrae’d (p. 222). Compare, for example, “Einbruch” | “Irruption” for “unterwaschen” / “washed out” (p. 232) and, in Zeitgehöft | Timestead, “Kleines Wurzelgeträum” | “Little rootdreamings” for “blutunterwaschen” | “bloodwashedout” (pp. 232 and 428), as well as the poem “Unterhöhlt” | “Hollowed out” (from the poems around Eingedunkelt not collected here):

  HOLLOWED OUT

  by flooding pain,

  soulbitter,

  amidst the wordbondaged

  steepstood, free.

  The oscillations that

  once more

  report

  to us.

  IV

  “Die Ewigkeiten” | “The eternities”

  September 20, 1967, Zurich. Compare the poem “Die Ewigkeiten tingeln” | “The eternities honkytonk” (p. 162).

  “Herzschall-Fibeln” | “Heartsound-fibulas”

  September 23, 1967, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris.

  dem Fangbein der Mantis | the mantis’s trapleg: reading traces of Fabre’s “Souvenirs entomologiques.”

  “Aneinander” | “Grown weary”

  September 25, 1967, Paris.

  “Ein Extra-Schlag Nacht” | “An extra dollop of night”

  September 26, 1967, Hotel Raspail (where the next poem was written as well), just before Celan’s meeting with the physicist and neurophysiologist Moshé Feldenkrais, a friend of Franz Wurm’s, from whom Celan expected to receive an alternative treatment to the heavy antidepressant pharmacopeia of his Parisian doctors.

  Reading traces (BW, p. 815) cite a note on an early draft that mentions Extra-Schlag Suppe (an extra ladle/scoop/dollop of soup) from a Spiegel magazine article on Stalin’s eldest son as wounded prisoner of war of the Germans in 1941: “In the officer’s prisoner of war camp Hammelburg, Dzhugashvili carved … cigarette holders and exchanged them with the guards for tobacco, bread and an extra scoop of soup.”

  “Hinter frostgebänderten Käfern” | “Behind froststreaked beetles”

  September 26, 1967, Hotel Raspail, Paris.

  “Die Irin” | “The Irishwoman”

  September 27, 1967.

  “Die mir hinterlassne” | “The left-to-me”

  September 28, 1967, Paris.

  “Verworfene” | “Repudiated”

  September 30, 1967, Paris.

  kunkelbeinige | distaff-legged: Reading traces (BW, p. 815) in Fabre, who uses the image of the spindle when describing the “murderous machinery” of the praying mantis’s forelegs. (The only available English translation—Fabre’s Book of Insects, Retold from Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’ Translation of Fabre’s “Souvenirs entomologiques” by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1921]—has omitted this image.)

  Gegenblut- / Sinn | counterblood- / sense: Reading traces in Rudolf Bilz (Celan’s underlines): “Bei primitiven Völkerschaften gibt es ein Winken im Gegenzeiger- und ein Winken im Uhrzeigersinne. Im Uh
rzeigersinne winken bedeutet: ‘Komm!’ ‘Her zu mir!’” (Among the primitive peoples there exists a counterclockwise and a clockwise. To nod clockwise means: “Come!” “To me!”) (BW, p. 815).

  “Fertigungshalle” | “Productionhangar”

  October 1, 1967, Paris–June 23, 1969. In a July 4, 1970, letter to his publisher, Siegfried Unseld, cited by Wiedemann, Celan expands on his sense that he is not writing abstract or hermetic poetry, saying, “My poems have not become more hermetic or more geometric; they are not cyphers, they are language; they do not move further away from the everyday, they stand, in their very wording—take for example ‘Productionhangar’—in the today” (BW, p. 816).

  Indeed, as Barbara Wiedemann shows, a range of this poem’s technical vocabulary comes directly from an article in the previous weekend edition of the FAZ, “Stress am Fließband” (Stress on the assembly line) by K. L. Ulrich, relating a walk through a car assembly plant with the company physician.

  “In der Blasenkammer” | “In the vesicle chamber”

  October 3 1967, Paris.

  Blasenkammer | vesicle chamber: A terminus technicus from nuclear physics; its literal referent is the “bubble chamber,” where atoms are ionized. But the association with breath via “das Entatmete”—and Celan’s constant linking of breath and speech—suggest strongly the image of the lung’s alveoli. According to James K. Lyon, it is, however, a Celanian construct based on the geological term Blasenräume, “the geological term for the spaces formed in basalt and other igneous rock through intense heat” (Lyon, “Paul Celan’s Language of Stone,” p. 306). Given the volcanological vocabulary of the second stanza (“crater,” “porphyry”) I tend to agree with that reading and rather than translating the word as “bubble chamber,” I have used the neologism “vesicle chamber.”