Breathturn into Timestead

by Paul Celan

  “Magnetische Bläue” | “Magnetic blue”

  October 3, 1967, Paris.

  “Vorflut” | “Outfall”

  October 4, 1967, Paris.

  “Die Mantis” | “The mantis”

  October 7, 1967, Paris.

  im Nacken | in the nape: In the English edition of Fabre’s book, we find this: “The Mantis attacks the Locust first at the back of the neck, to destroy its power of movement. This enables her to kill and eat an insect as big as herself, or even bigger.” And later on the following: “She even makes a habit of devouring her mate, whom she seizes by the neck and then swallows by little mouthfuls, leaving only the wings.” Wiedemann points to further such killing/devouring references in the edition Celan read.

  “Kein Halbholz” | “No halfwood”

  October 7, 1967, Paris.

  Wiedemann (BW, p. 818) points to Fabre’s description of climbing Mont Ventoux in Provence (not in the English version), for the provenance of the terms “halfwood,” “peakslopes,” “thyme,” and “bordersnow.”

  “Schwimmhäute” | “Webbing”

  October 3, 1967, Paris.

  Zeithof | timehalo: Celan encountered the term Zeithof in his readings of Edmund Husserl, where he underlined and marginally marked it with a double stroke in section 14 of Leçons pour une phénoménologie de la conscience intime du temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964) (LPC); compare Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins; and pp. 35–36 in the English translation (The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964]), which is cited here:

  Let us consider a case of secondary memory: We recall, say, a memory we recently heard at a concert. It is obvious in this case that the whole memory-phenomenon has exactly the same constitution, mutatis mutandis, as the perception of the memory. Like the perception it has a privileged point: to the now-point of the perception corresponds a now point of the memory. We run through the memory in phantasy; we hear, “as it were” [“gleichsam”], first the initial tone, then the second tone, and so on. At any particular time there is always a tone (or tone-phrase) in the now-point. The preceding tones, however, are not erased from consciousness. Primary memory of the tones that, as it were, I have just heard and expectation (protention) of the tones that are yet to come fuse with the apprehension of the tone that is now appearing and that, as it were, I am now hearing. The now-point once again has for consciousness a temporal fringe which is produced in a continuity of memorial apprehension; [Der Jetzpunkt hat für das Bewußtsein wieder einen Zeithof, der sich in einer Kontinuität von Erinnerungsauffassungen vollzieht,] and the total memory of the melody consists in a continuum of such continua of temporal fringes and, correlatively, in a continuum of apprehension-continua of the kind described. [und die gesamte Erinnerung der Melodie besteht in einem Kontinuum von solchen Zeithofkontinuen, bzw. von Auffassungskontinuen der beschriebenen Art.]

  Jean Greisch reads this poem as “something like a variation on the Husserlian image of the comet’s tail of protensions and retentions, marking the temporal slipstream of the living present and allowing it to shift toward the past. With this difference, however, that the incessant surge of the living present sustains a rather disquieting deformation: the ‘source-point’ of the present becomes a pool of stagnant waters, the luminous head of the present has an obverse, maybe the grayness of the impossible to forget non-sense.” He suggests that “to orient oneself in as ‘floating’ a temporality maybe one does indeed need words that are webbed” (in C-J, pp. 167–83).

  Celan uses the term twice more, next in the poem “Mapesbury Road” in Snowpart (p. 348), and a variant (Zeitgehöft) becomes the title of his last posthumous volume (p. 400). In Breathturn we find the composite term Lebensgehöft in the poem titled “Hohles Lebensgehöft” | “Hollow lifehomestead” (p. 28). I have chosen to translate Zeithof as “timehalo”—though other possibilities, such as “timeyard,” “timecourt,” even “timepatio,” came to mind at one time or another—and Zeitgehöft as “timestead” (with Lebensgehöft logically becoming “lifestead”).

  “Anredsam” | “Addressable”

  October 8, 1967, Paris.

  Amsel | blackbird: In the German word for the blackbird, Amsel, which occurs a number of times in Celan’s work, it is difficult not to hear a rhyme on Celan’s original name, Antschel. See also the poem “Frankfurt, September” (p. 110), which in German points out the sound-rhyme between Celan’s original name and Kafka’s Hebrew name, Amschel, while the name Kafka also refers to a black bird, the jackdaw.

  V

  “Oranienstraße 1” | “Oranienstraße 1”

  October 11, 1967, Frankfurt am Main, where Celan gave a reading from the just published Breathturn in the context of the annual book fair.

  Title: the address of a bed-and-breakfast and restaurant, then called Römerkrug, in Frankfurt.

  Ossietzkys | Ossietzky’s: Carl von Ossietzky (October 3, 1889–May 4, 1938) was a German pacifist and the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize (which Hitler prohibited him from accepting) for his work in exposing clandestine German rearmament. He was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 after publishing details of Germany’s alleged violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force, the predecessor of the Luftwaffe, and training pilots in the Soviet Union. Ossietzky was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, being released at the end of 1932 in the Christmas amnesty. On February 28, 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was arrested and held in Spandau prison. In May 1936 he was sent to the Westend hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg because of his tuberculosis, but under Gestapo surveillance. He died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody, on May 4, 1938, of tuberculosis and from the aftereffects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps. He was supposedly so weak that he couldn’t raise up a teacup without help.

  durchstünde | endure: Wiedemann (BW, p. 819) points to the motto of the Oranien-Nassau family (Nassaustraße runs parallel to Oranienstraße), which is “Je maintiendrai” (I will hold steadfast), and its importance for Celan in the post–Goll affair days. See PC/GCL correspondence, letters 154, 198, 272, and 445. See also cover illustration of this book.

  “Brunnenartig” | “Well-like”

  October 19, 1967, Paris. Sukkoth, the Feast of Booths, Tabernacles, or Huts (see the penultimate line). There is a page of handwritten notes by Celan concerning this poem and reproduced in TA (Lichtzwang, p. 132), indicating readings in an unidentified book on early Italian/Etruscan burial customs. Wiedemann (BW, pp. 819–20) points also to Behn and the Fischer Weltgeschichte for further elucidation of terms from the note, such as Brunnengräber, “welldigger,” Sargkammer, “coffin chamber,” Hockerstellung, “crouching position,” Urnenfelder, “urnfields,” etc.

  “Mit Traumantrieb” | “With dreampropulsion”

  October 20, 1967, Paris. The vocabulary of this poem—written on October 20, 1967—draws on an article in the FAZ of that same day concerning the Soviet Venus 4 probe and the U.S. Mariner 5 spacecraft; the latter flew by Venus on October 19 at an altitude of 2,480 miles and was able to shed new light on the hot, cloud-covered planet and on conditions in interplanetary space.

  “Für den Lerchenschatten” | “For the larkshadow”

  October 22, 1967, Paris.

  “Der durchschnittene” | “The cut-through”

  October 23, 1967, Paris.

  “Fahlstimmig” | “Wan-voiced”

  October 25, 1967, Paris. Wiedemann (BW, p. 821) points to an article in the FAZ of that day titled “Klimaanalyse durch Eisbohrung” (Climate analysis through ice drilling).

  “Schalltotes Schwestergehäus” | “Sounddead sistershell”

  October 27, 1967, Paris.

  “Wetterfühlige Hand” | “Weathersensing hand”

  October 28, 1967, Paris.

  “Im Zeitwinkel schwört” | “In t
ime’s corner”

  October 28, 1967, Paris.

  “Auch mich” | “Me too”

  October 30, 1967, Paris.

  “Die rückwärtsgesprochenen” | “The backwardspoken”

  November 1, 1967, Paris.

  “Allmählich clowngesichtig” | “Gradually clownfaced”

  November 5, 1967, Paris.

  “Sperrtonnensprache” | “Roadblockbuoy language”

  November 6, 1967, Paris.

  “Unter der Flut” | “To fly under”

  November 11, 1967, Paris. Wiedemann (p. 822): A range of the vocabulary comes from an article in the FAZ of that day titled “50.000 Fragen an den Tod: Die erstaunlichen Methoden der Flugunfall-Untersuchung” (50,000 Questions for Death: The Wondrous Methods of Flight Accident Investigations) by Dieter Vogt.

  VI

  “Wahngänger-Augen” | “Delusionstalker eyes”

  November 14, 1967, Paris.

  “Sperriges Morgen” | “Unwieldy morrow”

  November 14, 1967, Paris. Wiedemann (BW, p. 823) suggests this poem draws on an article in the FAZ of that day titled “Serielles Farbenspiel” (Serial play of color) by Ulrich Schreiber on the premiere of Bruno Maderna’s Second Oboe Concerto in Cologne. She points to the three terms pastos, durchquäckt, and Schallbecher, citing the following sentence from the review: “Durch solchen um ein vom Schlagzeug begleitetes Streicher-Notturno gruppierten Wechsel wird eine Ausweitung des musikalischen Farbenspiels erreicht, dadurch verstärkt, daß zwei verschiedene Schalltrichter der Musette einen pastosen und einen an das Sopransaxophon de Jazz erinnernden quäkenden Klang geben. Schallbecher, Instrument und Farbe wechseln, die Faktur ist streng seriell, der Charakter kantabel.” (Through such a change, grouped around a string-notturno accompanied by drums, a widening of the musical play of color is achieved, and strengthened because two different bells of the piccolo oboe give one a pastose and one a squawking sound that recalls the soprano saxophone in jazz. Pavilion, instrument and color change, the facture is strictly serial, the character cantabile.)

  You can hear the piece (which Celan probably did not do) here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk041IJ29xQ.

  Two examples of translation problems: (1) the title word Morgen means both “morning” and “tomorrow,” more or less translatable via the more (too?) recherché/poetical “morrow,” which carries the older sense of “morning”; (2) a problem relating to gender-specific pronouns. The construction “bei ihr, der Erd- / achse” insists on ihr, the feminine pronoun, putting it in relation with the “male” image of the first line of that stanza: “den beschleunigten Herzschritt.” In this case I choose to use the feminine pronoun in English too.

  “Merkblätter-Schmerz” | “Notepaper-pain”

  November 18, 1967, Paris. Composed on the same day as “Sperriges Morgen” | “Unwieldy morrow”; see commentary above.

  “Streu Ocker” | “Strew ocher”

  November 20, 1967, Paris. On the day he wrote this (and the next) poem, Celan moved into a one-bedroom apartment on the rue Tournefort, a move that completed the separation from his family.

  Title: Compare mark in margins of the Fischer Weltgeschichte: “Very often the dead were sprinkled with red ocher, or pulverized red ocher was strewn into the graves” (original, p. 63).

  “Schwanengefahr” | “Swandanger”

  November 20, 1967, Paris. Written on the same day as the preceding poem. Wiedemann (BW, p. 825) notes that the exhibition Russian Art from the Scythians to Today had opened at the Grand Palais in Paris, and that in a letter to his wife from November 18, 1967, Celan mentioned his intention to take his son Eric to visit the exhibition (PC/GCL, #580). Two days later he sent the poem to his friend Franz Wurm in a letter, writing: “Well, that’s what happens to someone who expels a clawed Yakut-Pushkin from himself, on the way to the twice-redeeming-demonic Siberian Chebeldei, Chebeldei—” (PC/FW, #115).

  Jakuten- | Yakut-: A seminomadic people in present-day Russia, divided into two basic groups based on geography and economics. Yakuts in the north are historically seminomadic hunters, fishermen, and reindeer breeders, while southern Yakuts engage in animal husbandry, focusing on horses and cattle. Their language belongs to the northern branch of the Turkic family of languages.

  Jakuten- / Puschkin | Yakut- / Pushkin: Wiedemann points to the following lines from Alexander Pushkin’s 1836 poem “Exegi Monumentum”: “I shall be noised abroad through all great Russia, / Her innumerable tongues shall speak my name: / The tongue of the Slavs’ proud grandson, the Finn, and now / The wild Tungus and Kalmyk, the steppes’ friend.” (Translation by D. M. Thomas [New York: Viking Press, 1982])

  Chebeldei: According to Micha F. Lindemans in the Encyclopedia Mythica, Chebeldei are “the inhabitants of the underworld in Siberian myth. They are composed mainly of iron and are black in color and are not particularly friendly towards human beings.”

  “Schaltjahrhunderte” | “Leapcenturies”

  November 14, 1967, Paris. Celan’s forty-seventh birthday. Written at his workplace, the École Normale Supérieure. Celan wrote to Petre Solomon (PC/PS, #237): “It is still the 23rd, nine in the evening, I’m still in rue d’Ulm, in my office, I have just written a poem that ends with these words: / Kaltstart, trotz allem / mit Hämoglobin [cold start, despite all / with hemoglobin].” A range of the poem’s cybernetic vocabulary—“stocked in honeycomb-troughs / bits / on chips,… archived … reading stations”—comes via the article “Datenspeicher für eine Billion Bits” (Data Storage for One Billion Bits), extracts of which Celan wrote down in his notebooks (BA, vol. 9.2, p. 239; BW, p. 826).

  Schaltjahrhunderte | Leapcenturies: The year of Celan’s birth, 1920, was a leap year.

  das Menoragedicht aus Berlin | the menorah-poem from Berlin: According to Bertrand Badiou, the young poet Sabeth Sadei-Uhlmann sent Celan a letter on November 17 that included the typescript of a poem titled “Menora,” in the shape of a seven-armed candelabrum; the words of the poem do not come into Celan’s. On December 25 she thanked him for having read “Schaltjahrhunderte” to her (TA, Lichtzwang, p. 171).

  Kammlinien unter Beschuß / crestlines under fire: in several drafts annotated with “Dak To.” Dak To was a U.S. Army base in South Vietnam. Der Spiegel of November 20, 1967, printed a photo with the caption “Burning U.S. Base Dak To: In the bitterest phase of the war so far, the first dead general” (TA, Lichtzwang, p. 171).

  Hämoglobin | hemoglobin: Reading traces in Reichel/Bleichert: “In the erythrozytes, oxygen is bound to the red blood coloring, the hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is a proteid, whose effective group, the hemo [Häm], is a protoporphyrin with a 2-valence Fe-atom in the molecule” (p. 247).

  “Quellpunkte” | “Sourcepoints”

  November 25, 1967, Paris–Cologne train.

  “Treckschutenzeit” | “Trekscowtime”

  December 3, 1967, Paris, rue de Longchamp. The last two poems of Lichtzwang | Lightduress were written on the same day. Both draw on a sermon by the great German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart, a source cited by Celan himself, specifically sermon 14 in the edition of Eckhart’s sermons as edited by Joseph Quint.

  Treckschutenzeit | Trekscowtime: Wiedemann cites Badiou, pointing to unidentified reading notes by Celan from August 11, 1957: “(Zugschiff) – bateau tiré pas des chevaux ou par des hommes” ([barge]—ship pulled by horses or by men) (BW, p. 827).

  der Enthöhte, geinnigt | the diselevated one, interiorized: Wiedemann points to Joseph Quint’s commentary (on p. 237 of his edition) on sermon number fourteen: “Eckhart came upon the idea that God should not be elevated through me abasing myself, but that God should be elevated and man should be elevated simultaneously by taking God from outside and from above into himself, ‘interiorizing’ him, as it were, so that man will grasp the godly not as something foreign on the outside, but as his own, inside himself” (BW, p. 827).

  Gottes / quitt | quits with / God: Wiedemann points to a handwritten note by Celan that quotes a motto by
Meister Eckhardt that the German-Jewish politician Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), one of the leading theorists on anarchism in Germany and an avowed pacifist (also known for his study and translations of Shakespeare’s works into German), used as epigraph to his book Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluß an Mauthners Sprachkritik (Berlin, 1903): “That is why I beg God to make me quits with God, for unessential [unwesenthaftes] Being [Wesen] is above God and above differentiation [Unterschiedenheit]; there I myself was, that’s where I wanted myself to be and recognized myself making this human, and that’s why I am cause of myself according to my Being, that is eternal, and according to my Being, that is itself. And that’s why I am born and can, following the mode of my birth, which is eternal, never die” (BW, pp. 827–28).

  “Du sei wie du” | “You be like you”

  December 3, 1967, Paris, rue d’Ulm.

  Stant up Jherosalem inde / erheyff dich … inde wirt / erluchtet: Middle High German version of Isa. 60:1 literally translates as: “Stand up, Jerusalem, and raise yourself, and become illuminated.” King James version: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”

  wer das Band zerschnitt | he who cut the band: Eckhart’s sermon 14 quotes Ps. 2:2 and 3: “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, / Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us” (King James version).

  Gehugnis | gehugnis: From the Middle High German word Hugnis, for Erinnerung, “memory” (memory, recollection, remembrance). Used by Meister Eckhart, transformed into “Gehugnis” by Celan.

  Finster-Lisene | dark pilaster strip: Wiedemann finds a reading trace in Hans Weigert’s Stilkunde: “The first means of articulation is as with the capital-shield [Kapitellschild] the splitting of the plane into layers. This is done with a pattern of round arch friezes on pilaster strips [Pilastern ohne Kapitell]” (p. 85f) (BW, p. 828).

  kumi / ori: The Hebrew words that open Isa. 60:1: “Arise, shine.” There is another “biblical” interpretation of these words, proposed by Celan’s last lover, Ilana Shmueli, who was interviewed a short time before her death in 2011 (as reported by Mako Martin in Die Welt of January 31, 2013): “But how loud Ilana Shmueli’s laughter in her old age home in Jerusalem when she spoke about her renewed early love for Paul Celan: ‘May the German literature specialists chew on this—I know what Paul Celan meant when he wrote, Kumi, ori, raise yourself, stand up, shine. It was in praise of a part of his own anatomy, which woke up again on the occasion of a visit here in Jerusalem.”