by Paul Celan
“Wirk nicht voraus” | “Do not work ahead”
December 6, 1967, Paris, rue d’Ulm.
steh / herein | stand / inward: Note the importance of “standing” for Celan, as already suggested in the poem “Eine Gauner- und Ganovenweise.” See also my introduction to Paul Celan: Selections (p. 6).
feinfügig | fine-fugued: A classical Celanian neologism, the word is not found as such in German, but echoes immediately with feinfühlig (sensitive), so, as Hans-Georg Gadamer also noted (Argumentum e Silentio, p. 65), the word recalls gefügig (amenable, supple) and feingefügt (neatly assembled, leading to Feingefüge, microstructure). The root constituent, fügig, the Grimms’ Wörterbuch gives as “adj. passend, geschickt, aptus, idoneus” (apt, deft, with finesse), never occurs by itself. Listening very hard, one could even hear the word Fuge (fugue) and the fine contrapuntal mode of construction. Thus my “fine-fugued,” though I’m aware I may be overplaying my hand in this case.
SCHNEEPART | SNOWPART
The poems in this, the first posthumous volume, were composed between December 16, 1967, and October 18, 1968, and are, according to their author in a letter to Ilana Shmueli from January 24, 1970, “probably the strongest and boldest” he wrote. The German poet Helmut Heißenbüttel, sharing this evaluation, writes: “Whatever irritation and disorientation these poems may express, they show an unerring ability of expression [Unbeirrbarkeit an der Fähigkeit dieses Ausdrückenkönnens]. They show the mastery and control Celan has over his materials, maybe better than any of the earlier volumes.”
The manuscript as such, containing seventy poems, constitutes a selection from among the poems written during this period, and was put together by Celan, who prepared a clean, handwritten copy for his wife on September 22, 1969 (which was then used for the 1971 Suhrkamp edition). Still, this is the first volume he was no longer able to hand in to his publisher in absolutely finished form. There are therefore questions concerning the final manuscript: one of the poems is crossed out (though rather tentatively, one could suggest) and accompanied by question marks; there are also differences between the table of contents and the manuscript’s organization into cycles. It is not certain whether the fifth, final cycle would have been part of the final manuscript had Celan prepared it for the publisher. In a letter to GCL (#611) from August 23, 1968, Celan suggests that he has recently written new poems (that would be those in cycle 5) for which “I had found the compact diction I had wished for. It will be a new book.”
The short year encompassing the composition of the poems was also the first one in some time that Celan spent teaching uninterruptedly at the École Normale Superieure. It is also the first full year that he lived apart from his wife and son in a small apartment on the rue Tournefort close by his place of work. This is, of course, also the year marked by the uprising in Czechoslovakia and of the student uprising in Paris (and beyond) of May 1968—all events that Celan was profoundly interested in and that enter his poems of this period.
Schneepart | Snowpart
The title of the collection is taken, as is often the case, from one of the poems, the last one of the first cycle (see p. 334). On an early surviving draft page, Celan had written down a number of further title possibilities, all crossed out except for Schneepart. The discarded ones were Sehstamm, “visionstem,” Leseast, “reading branch,” and Leuchtstäbe, “lightrods,” also all taken from poems in this volume.
The title element “part” comes from German der Part, a musical (or theatrical) term from the Latin pars that has the same meaning as its English cognate: “The music or score for a particular instrument, as in an orchestra,” and “One of the melodic divisions or voices of a contrapuntal composition” (American Heritage Dictionary). I had first translated the word as “share,” as “Snowshare” seemed to me a pregnant Celanian concept, but decided to use “part” when I saw the early draft of the poem (TA, Schneepart, p. 28) from which the title is taken and where the word is embedded grammatically in the sentence “Den Schneepart spielen” | “to play the snowpart,” clearly, I believe, pointing toward the musical or theatrical meaning of “part.”
I
“Ungewaschen, unbemalt” | “Unwashed, unpainted”
Written during the Paris–Berlin flight on December 16, 1967. The flight path led between Fulda and Eisenach over the Rhône, where potash was mined. This was Celan’s first trip to Berlin since the railroad journey he had taken on Kristallnacht 1938 as a young student traveling from his hometown, Czernowitz, to Paris. The current trip was a major one for him, with readings planned at the Academy of the Arts and the Free University and for radio Sender Freies Berlin.
Kaue | pithead: The room, usually on top of a mine shaft, where miners washed up and dressed.
wo wir uns finden | where we find ourselves: Wiedemann points to the opening stanza of the well-known folk song “Abendslied im Sommer” (Evening Song in Summer) by Anton von Zuccalmaglio: “Kein schöner Land in dieser Zeit / als hier das unsre weit und breit / wo wir uns finden / wohl unter Linden / zur Abendzeit” (“No land more beautiful in this day / as ours here so wide and large / where we find ourselves / at ease under the Linden / at evening time”) (BW, p. 832).
mit Narren-/beinen | on Fool’s / legs: Narrenbein is also the term for what in English is called the “funny bone,” that is, the ulnar nerve. For me, however, the image in the poem brings out the sense of the Narren as the “fool” more than something funny.
Sieben- / höhe | seven- / heighth: At one time Celan considered this term as a possible title for the volume Lightduress. It is also a place-name in the Black Forest. The French translator Jean-Pierre Lefebvre suggests as relevant here that the number seven is associated with mourning in Jewish culture, for example, sitting shivah (where shivah = the number seven) (PDN, p. 108). This further suggests a reading of the poem as a meditation on the death by extermination of the Jewish people, this time locating the mourning on the surface of the earth while the poet flies through the air, that is, this poem could be read as a mirror image of the “Todesfuge,” where the dead are buried in the air. Celan’s last passage through Berlin on the eve of Kristallnacht 1938 is likely to have been on his mind (compare the poem “La Contrescarpe,” where he remembers that night: “Via Kraków / you came, at the Anhalter / railway station / a smoke flowed toward your glance, / it already belonged to tomorrow” [see p. 514]).
The manuscript has no final period after the last word.
“Du liegst” | “You lie”
December 22–23, 1967, Berlin. This poem narrates a walk Paul Celan took in Berlin (carefully documented by Peter Szondi) in company of the psychiatrist Walter Georgi that led to the banks of the rivers Havel and Spree and to Plötzensee, as well as to a Christmas market. During his stay Celan read the newly published book Der Mord an Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht: Dokumentation eines politischen Verbrechens, edited by Elisabeth Hannover-Drück and Heinrich Hannover (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967).
Fleischerhaken | butcher hooks: Plötzensee was the place where the conspirators of the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler were executed and hung on butcher hooks.
Äppelstaken / aus Schweden | apple stakes / from Sweden: In a first version sent to Peter Szondi on December 22–23, 1967, the word Äppelspaken is used rather than Äppelstaken, and was titled “Winter Poem” (PC/PS, #232). The reference is to Advent and Christmas decorations using apples and candles at a Swedish market stand.
er biegt um ein Eden | he turns around an Eden: Szondi had shown Celan the ex–Hotel Eden in the Budapester Straße, which had served as general quarters for the Cavalry Guard Division in 1919 and where the Spartakist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht spent the last hours of their lives.
Der Mann ward zum Sieb, die Frau / mußte schwimmen, die Sau | The man became a sieve, the woman / had to swim, the sow: Compare the documentation gathered in the Hannovers’ book: “I approached the table and asked if Dr. Liebknecht was, in fact, really dead,
to which one of the comrades answered that Liebknecht had as many holes in him as a sieve” (p. 99). And: “About Luxemburg it was said: ‘The old sow already swims’” (p. 129).
Landwehrkanal | Landwehr canal: an eleven-kilometer canal parallel to the Spree River and crossing much of Berlin. After Rosa Luxemburg was murdered on January 15, 1919, her body was dumped in the canal, where it was not found until June 1. Today a memorial marks the site.
Nichts / stockt | Nothing / stalls: Here Celan is most likely referencing a line (he marked marginally) in Büchner’s Danton’s Death, where Lucile says just before the execution of her husband: “The stream of life should stall if but one single drop is spilled. The earth should receive a wound from that blow. / Everything moves, the watches tick, the clocks advance, the people run, the water seeps and so on everything there up to there—no! it must not happen, no—I want to sit down on the ground and scream so that, scared, everything now stands still, everything stalls, nothing any longer moves” (act 4, scene 8 of Dantons Tod, in Georg Büchner, Werke und Briefe, eds. Karl Pörnbacher, Gerhard Schaub, Hans-Joachim Simm, and Edda Ziegler [Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1980], p. 132).
“Lila Luft” | “Lilac air”
Another walk through Berlin with Walter Georgi and the literary scholar Marlies Janz, who describes the walk in her book Vom Engagement absoluter Poesie:
On the night of 19 to 20 December, Celan, Walter Georgi and I drove along the Landwehr canal to the Anhalter railroad station … The reason for this drive had been the fact that Celan had earlier spoken of his journey through Berlin in 1938 … To the historical reminiscence of 1938, the year of the so-called “Kristallnacht,” correspond in “Lilac air” the “yellow windowstains”—the yellow stain being an urform of the yellow star Jews were made to wear. On the large empty space in front of the Anhalter ruin we stomped through the snow … and when Walter Georgi spoke of the “three stars of Orion’s belt,” we searched the sky for that constellation. When we had found it, Celan suggested that “their name is, yes, they are called Jacob’s staff, those three” (p. 235).
The title probably refers to a well-known song Celan may have heard in the “standing bar” of the penultimate line, namely Paul Lincke’s 1904 hit “Berliner Luft,” lines of which could be (mis)heard as “lila Luft” (lilac air) in, for example, Lizzi Waldmüller’s 1944 recording (BW, p. 833).
Trumm | ruin: In a letter to GCL (#595) Celan explains the word as being “the singular of Trümmer, ruins—moignon (stump), ruin.”
Kokelstunde | flamehour: In the same letter (#595) Celan explains the kokeln as a Berlin expression meaning “playing with fire and light.”
nichts / Interkurrierendes | nothing / intercurrent: Celan underlined this term in Rudolf Bilz (p. 140f). In English the term is found mainly in medical literature, where it is defined as occurring at the same time as and usually altering the course of another disease. In Bilz the German term was widened to refer to animal behavior patterns.
“Brunnengräber” | “Welldigger”
Written on Christmas Day 1967 in Berlin. The title word is a semantically ambiguous compound: it can mean “well-graves” (as I had translated it at first in 1997), linking back to several poems from Lichtzwang | Lightduress that use early Italian archeological funeral terminology (see the poem “Brunnenartig” | “Well-like” on page 288 and commentary on page 568). See also the poem “Es war Erde in ihnen” | “There was earth in them” in Die Niemandsrose (English version by Cid Corman in my PCS, p. 75). But it can also refer to the person who digs wells, in the singular or the plural. Given the addressee in the final lines of the poem, a young “digger- / well,” that is, a personified well (with a “twelvemouth,” I prefer to use “welldigger” in the title).
Bratsche | viola: The French translator uses the Italian term viola da braccio, which gets in the sound and etymology of the German word Bratsche. I have preferred to stay with the straight translation, as viola, as the use of the Italian term, though sound-informative, may (at least in English) indicate more preciosity than intended.
“Das angebrochene Jahr” | “The breached year”
Written on January 2, 1968, on Celan’s return to Paris, and sent to GCL on January 8.
Wahnbrot | delusion bread: Lefevbre (PDN, p. 110) suggests that the word built on the model of Wahnsinn (madness, loss of meaning, from Wahn [delusion, vain hope] and Sinn [sense] “gives ‘Brot / bread’ the sense of sense”).
“Unlesbarkeit” | “Unreadability”
January 5, 1968, Paris, rue d’Ulm.
Alles doppelt | Everything doubles: Reading trace in Joseph Joubert, Pensées (p. 69), where Celan has underlined “Souvenons-nous que tout est double” (Let us remember that everything is double) (PC/GCL, #597). In a letter to Franz Wurm, he similarly declared: “A poem just arose from, I noticed, simple words” (PC/FW, p. 125).
“Huriges Sonst” | “Whorish else”
January 7, 1968, Paris, place de la Contrescarpe.
“Was näht” | “What sews”
Written on January10, 1968, at 8:00 p.m. and sent the same day to GCL with the note: “I just wrote a poem composed with rather simple words—I’m sending it to you. I hope that it will speak to you.” As Lefevbre (PDN, p. 112) notes, this is (with “Ein Leseast “ | “One reading branch” [p. 386]) the longest poem in the volumes, and that length “accentuates the threadlike character of the text, linked to the paradigm of sewing. The deliberate absence of a final period contributes to the thread-effect, the thread that links speech to that of which it speaks.”
“Ich höre, die Axt hat geblüht” | “I hear the axe has blossomed”
The first line/title of the earliest versions gave as the date of composition “the twentieth January [Jänner] 1968,” an essential date in Celan’s cosmos, referred to in the Meridian speech, where (quoting Büchner) Lenz, “on 20th January walked through the mountains” (MFV, p. 7). It was also the date in 1942 when, at the Wannsee Conference, the “final solution”—that is, the extermination of the Jews—was planned and set in motion by the Nazis. A little further along in the Meridian speech (MFV, p. 8), Celan writes: “Perhaps one can say that each poem has its own ‘20th of January’ inscribed in it? Perhaps what’s new in the poems written today is exactly this: theirs is the clearest attempt to remain mindful of such dates?”
In that early version he had located the place where “the axe has blossomed” as Hungary, but when he sent that version to Franz Wurm, the latter suggested that this place-name of a state would narrow the poem too much, and Celan changed it to an “unnameable” place (PC/FW, #93).
“Mit der Stimme der Feldmaus” | “With the voice of the fieldmouse”
January 20, 1968, Paris, rue d’Ulm.
Possibly Celan had in mind Franz Kafka’s last short story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.”
“In Echsen-” | “In lizard-”
January 20, 1968, Paris, rue d’Ulm. See the poem “Haut Mal,” which also speaks of epilepsy (p. 212).
“Schneepart” | “Snowpart”
January 22, 1968, Paris, rue d’Ulm. The poem that gives its title to the volume. See notes on the title above (p. 576).
II
“Die nachzustotternde Welt” | “The to-be-restuttered world”
January 23, 1968, Paris. If the poem that gave its title to the whole volume closes the first cycle of the book, then the poem following it and opening the second cycle can be seen as programmatic—as Lefebvre argues cogently (PDN, p. 115). The work of the poem can be seen as a restuttering of the world, not mimetic reproduction, but a rearticulation, thus a re-creation. Lefebvre: “To re-say the world with re-made words, decomposed into syllables that bang against each other and have trouble gathering together, privileging hard onsets, to re-say a world that is a passage where one is only invited. Note the inscription of this program in a retrospective gaze anticipating on the totality of existence: the (unreadable) world in which I will have lived (written, and read).�
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Also useful is this quote from The Meridian (MFV, pp. 124–25): “Büchner’s last words on his deathbed, Lenz’s words (Moscow) have not come down to us—it is the return into the just still voiced, as in Woyzeck—it is language as involution, the unfolding of meaning in the one, word-estranged syllable—: the it is the ‘rootsyllable,’ recognizable in the [death-rattled] stuttering, the [language as] what has returned into the germ—the meaning-carrier is the {mou} mortal mouth, whose lips won’t round themselves. Muta cum liquida,—and vowel-buttressed, the rhyme-sound as self-sound.”
See the related term “lallation-stage” in the poem “Das Flüsterhaus” | “The whisperhouse” from Zeitgehöft | Timestead (p. 418), but before all, see “Tübingen, Jänner” | “Tübingen, January” in Die Niemandsrose (PCS, pp. 79–80), which speaks to Hölderlin (Pallaksch is an invented word Hölderlin used during his madness):
Eyes con-
vinced to go blind.
Their—“a
riddle is pure
origin”—, their
remembrance of
swimming Hölderlin-towers, gull-
blown.
Visits of drowned carpenters by
these
diving words:
If,
if a man,
if a man was born, today, with
the lightbeard of
the patriarchs: he could,
speaking of these
days, he
could