Breathturn into Timestead

by Paul Celan

  “Ein Ring, zum Bogenspannen” / “A ring, for bowdrawing”

  November 2, 1969, Dampierre-en-Burly.

  “Das Leuchten” | “The radiance”

  November 7, 1969. Café le Royal, boulevard de Port-Royal, Paris. He sent this poem the same day to Shmueli and in the accompanying letter speaks of his fears: “The news of last night, Nasser’s speech, which said war against Israel was the Arabs’ only way‚ —I know, all of you in Israel, or at least very many of you, bear that with equanimity, and something of this equanimity has communciated itself, you know that, to me as well; but you must know … that my thinking of Israel is also a deep worry about Israel” (PC/IS, p. 21).

  Abu Tor: (literally “Father of the Bull”) a mixed Jewish and Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem, south of the Old City and with the Valley of Hinnom to its north. During the Ayyubid period, this area was assigned to an officer in Saladin’s army called Sheikh Ahmed et Toreh (Sheikh Ahmed of the bull) or Abu Tor (the man with the bull, or the father of the bull), as he was said to have accompanied Saladin riding on a bull.

  Shmueli noted: “Bethlehem in the afternoon (October 9, 1969), past the Mar Elias monastery, Rachel’s tomb, the Church of the Nativity. On the way back to Jerusalem: the light—Abu Tor, the view toward the Valley of Hinnom (Moloch’s altars)—the light” (IS, p. 25).

  Goldboje | goldbuoy: The golden dome of the Omar mosque can be seen in the distance from Abu Tor. Celan wrote to Shmueli on November 26, 1969: “I unfurl Jerusalem. I see the paths we walked down and up, not all, but some of them. Who was leading us, who and what? / The golden buoy must rise up so that the danger is defeated” (PC/IS, p. 46). And already in his letter of November 10, 1969: “Have no fear, love: I will never turn away from you, I remain turned toward you, always. The golden buoy knows it—it too” (PC/IS, p. 25).

  “Du gleißende” | “You, nitid”

  Night of November 7–8, 1969, Paris, at 6, avenue Émile Zola, Paris. On November 6, Celan had finally, after many problems, moved into what would be his last dwelling, a three-room apartment in the fifteenth arrondissement, a mere five-minute walk from the Pont Mirabeau, from which he would jump most probably on the night of April 19–20, 1970.

  wildenzt | turn gamy: Wiedemann points to reading traces in the Thelen book (see also commentary to “Das gedunkelte” | “The darkened,” p. 609), which Celan had read in the fifties and which uses the verbal noun Wildenzen, and his note in his copy of L’univers de la parole by Rolland Renéville, where he annotated the phrase La délicate gloire des choses faisandées (The delicate glory of gamy things) with “Se faisander—den Wildgeruch annehmen (haben)/wildenzen, alt werden” (to take on [to have] the smell of game/to taste gamey, to become old) (BW, p. 873).

  “Komm” | “Come”

  November 8, 1969, Paris, rue d’Ulm. A poem of the same title appeared in the volume Threadsuns; see page 180.

  “Einen Stiefelvoll” | “A bootful”

  November 9, 1969, Paris, avenue Emile Zola.

  “Die Posaunenstelle” | “The trumpet’s part”

  November 16, 1969, Paris, avenue Emile Zola.

  As Wiedemann reminds us (BW, p. 874), “trumpet sounds are often connected to destruction in the Bible, as in the fall of the walls of Jericho (Josh. 20) and the trumpet blowing angels of John’s Revelation (Rev. 8:2 and 8:13). There and elsewhere they are also the audible signs for the terrifying presence of God in connection with fiery apparitions, see, for example, the story of God’s apparition on Mount Sinai: ‘And it came to pass on the third day, when it was morning, that there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of a horn exceeding loud; and all the people that were in the camp trembled’ (Ex. 19:16).” Bernhard Böschenstein comments (C-J, pp. 152–53): “In opposition to the title Schneepart [Snowpart], and in opposition to the ‘snowcomfort’ of the next poem, the trumpet’s part situates itself in the context of a cosmic conflagration recalling that triggered by the six angels of the apocalypse blowing on the trumpet so as to destroy earth and its inhabitants. The ‘timehole’ signals the destruction of that which is subjected to time, it suspends the text to the benefit of an empty text that evokes, with the annulment of time, the hearing of a second text, linked to the liberating sound of the seventh angel … The torch sent by the angel of the apocalypse burns a hole into time and opens access to a different temporality. There is an end of the world and a new birth.”

  “Die Pole” | “The poles”

  November 21, 1969, Paris, avenue Émile Zola. An early version of the poem (BA, vol. 14, p. 321) has the title “Mit Brief und Bild” (With letter and picture) and starts: “Hang the lionsign / before this pretend-door.” The title will be lost and the opening lines changed to become material for the following poem, “The kingsway.”

  Tor / des Erbarmens | Gate / of Mercy: Bernhard Böschenstein comments (C-J, pp. 154–55):

  The poles exist in the relationship between two partners as well as in each one of them. This polarity can only be crossed when the state of wakefulness gives way to the sleep state, which implies a forgetting of the self. In that state, death engenders consolation and mystical love crosses the “gate of mercy” that is closed in the state of wakefulness, but only provisionally, a Scheintür [a pretend-door] as long as the Messiah has not come. It is the same golden gate, located next to Gethsemane, near Absalom’s tomb, that appears in another poem …

  There is thus simultaneously the awareness of a closure and the experience of a crossing. The latter presupposes the double forgetting of the self and brings the double recovery: by losing themselves mutually in their partners, the I and the you find themselves again via a detour summed up in the line “I lose you to you” (“ich verliere dich an dich”). This detour that crosses the poles is nothing else than the path described by The Meridian. Loss and recovery are linked to the crossing of the poles, to the “breathturns”: “something circular that returns to itself across both poles [Meridian, p. 12].”

  Schneetrost | snowcomfort: “Consolation” would have been the more literal translation, but it does not sound right and also leans too much toward a Christian sense. It is a complex, paradoxical term, as in Celan’s work snow is always linked to death, the winter landscape in which his parents perished. But see also the poem in Breathturn (p. 2): “YOU MAY confidently / serve me snow.” Or the poem “Schneebett” | “Snowbed” in Sprachgitter, with the lines: “The snowbed beneath us both, the snowbed. / Crystal by crystal, / timedeep grilled in, we fall, / we fall and lie and fall.”

  “Der Königsweg” | “The kingsway”

  November 23, 1969, Paris, avenue Émile Zola. Celan’s forty-ninth birthday, the last he was to celebrate; on that day he sent this poem to Shmueli. See also “Königswut” | “King’s rage,” page 74, and “the king’s caesura” in “Ich trink Wein” | “I drink wine,” page 442.

  Scheintür | pretend-door: See previous commentary.

  Gegen- / Zeichen | counter- / sign: Wiedemann (BW, p. 875) points to Celan’s note in the back of his copy of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s La pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind): “Note for Fadensonnen [Threadsuns]: / countersign / in the countersign.” The reference is to a marked paragraph on page 14 of the French edition (page 8 of the English edition), itself a citation of an article on reptile lore by F. G. Speck, that reads: “The whole class of reptiles … affords no economic benefit to these Indians; they do not eat the flesh of any snakes or batrachians, nor do they make use of other parts except in a very few cases where they serve in the preparation of charms against sickness or sorcery.” Celan has noted in the margin: “snakeskin as countermagick.”

  Löwenzeichen | lionsign: Jerusalem’s Lions’ Gate is located in the Old City walls and is one of seven open gates. Shmueli (IS, pp. 44–45): “The words come again from the gates of Jerusalem, but what speaks now is the feeling of powerlessness that is burdening his days. The King’s way lies behind the ‘pretend-door.’ No king, no path, no gate
of Mercy for him. The ‘constellation,’ his direction-giving sign, lies keel up and mired in: the lion is deathed about by the countersign.”

  “Es kommt” | “There also”

  November 29, 1969, Paris, avenue Émile Zola.

  die engere Schneise | the narrower cut: See the poem “Das Stundenglas” | “The hourglass” (p. 38) in Breathurn, which speaks of thinking coming down the “Pfingst- / schneise” | “the Pentecost-lane.”

  erbricht | breached: The German verb has two meanings, one describing an infraction, a breach, the other referring to the act of vomiting, of expelling like vomit, the word thus subsuming in a very Celanian manner two simultaneous movements in opposite directions. Bernhard Böschenstein (C-J, p. 157) suggests that one can give an erotic reading to this poem, as to the previous one, linking it to the sexual symbolism of the Kabbalah, reading the last line thus:

  stehenden Male | standing marks: “This stela, erected, phallic can merge with the column that in the Kabbalah represents the just one, the Zaddik. He is in the void, in him flows the vital flux. Through him, everything concentrates around the root of things.” Böschenstein refers the reader to Gershom Scholem’s On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead.

  “Ich trink Wein” | “I drink wine”

  November 29, 1969, Paris, avenue Émile Zola.

  zackere | harrow: In Wilhelm Michel’s biography Das Leben Friedrich Hölderlins (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1967; first published 1940 by Carl Schünemann), in a letter by Hofrat Gerner, state employee and amateur poet, Celan triply marked the following sentence: “Hölderlin, der immer halbverrückt ist, zackert auch am Pindar” (Hölderlin, who is always half-crazed, also harrows Pindar [BW, p. 875]). In a letter of November 30, 1969, to Shmueli, Celan writes: “‘The other one’: Hölderlin is meant here, about whom, when he was translating Pindar, a mean-spirited person wrote that he was ‘harrowing through’ [probably: making a mess of (tinkering with, P.J.)] Pindar—” He then points Shmueli to the poem “Tübingen, Jänner” from the volume Die Niemandsrose (PC/IS, p. 49).

  Celan himself (as Bertrand Badiou pointed out to Barbara Wiedemann) uses the word in a notebook, writing: “Harrowing Mandelstam, again.”

  Königszäsur | king’s caesura: Hölderlin writes in his Anmerkungen zum Ödipus (Annotations to Oedipus): “For the tragic transport is actually empty, and the least restrained.—Thereby, in the rhythmic sequence of the representations wherein the transport presents itself, there becomes necessary what in poetic meter is called caesura, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic rupture—namely, in order to meet the onrushing change of representations at its highest point, in such a manner that not the change of representation but the representation itself very soon appears” (quoted in WBSW, vol. 1, pp. 340–41).

  “According to Hölderlin, the caesura is that place in the Sophoklean tragedies where the seer appears and makes the events transparent according to their background, according to the meeting of the mortals with the gods” (STEIN, p. 70).

  kleinen / Gerechten | small / just ones: In his years in Bucharest, Celan translated Paul Éluard’s poem cycle Les petits justes (The small just ones) as Die kleinen Gerechten (BW, p. 876).

  aus der Lostrommel fällt / unser Deut | from the lottery drum falls / our doit: Celan to Shmueli: “So make your magic—yes, Ilana, make magic. (I could do it too, once.) And conjure up the word, too, that should fall from the drum with its chances [Lostrommel: lottery drum or wheel] choose this word, then I shall set it in place of that ‘lot’ [Deut], which already displeased me when I wrote it. You are cowriting, after all, so come, with it too, with this word. Or should I strike out the drum [Lostrommel] and its chances altogether, put it away?” (PC/IS, p. 57). Badiou also points to an unidentified reading note by Celan: “er tat seine Pflicht, aber auch keinen Deut mehr” (he fulfilled his duty, but not a bit more).

  Deut | doit: Bernhard Böschenstein comments: “A Deut is a Dutch coin that has no value and simultaneously connects to interpretation (Deutung) while devalorizing it. There are thus two ways of understanding the caesura: it can mark the dividing line between the divine and the human and it can merge with the road that the King of the Jews took before dying.” Böschenstein, in a classic gesture of deep Celanian reading, goes on in a near paragrammic way: “If, furthermore, we were to take the first letter of the first verse and the second of the second and so on, we would get INRI, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum. And if we continue that practice from verse five to verse eight, we get the word Niete, also of Dutch origins, and meaning blank ticket in a lottery, thus exactly that Deut that falls from the lottery drum” (C-J, pp. 160–61).

  “Es wird” | “Something shall be”

  December 13, 1969, Paris, avenue Émile Zola.

  See commentary on “Vor mein” | “Before my” (pp. 613–14) for connection with a translation of Nina Cassian, whom Celan knew from his Bukovinian days and had met again in December 1969 (and also on the day he wrote the poem) in Paris.

  “Das Nichts” | “Nothingness”

  December 18, 1969, Paris, avenue Émile Zola.

  “Im Glockigen” | “In the bellshape”

  December 29, 1969–January 16, 1970. The following poem was also completed on January 16. Ilana Shmueli was in Paris intermittently from December 23, 1969, to February 3, 1970; Celan gave her a copy of the poems at that time.

  “Wie ich” | “As I”

  January 5–16, 1970.

  Ringschatten | ringshadow: See the poem “Du wirfst mir” | “You throw gold” (p. 418), which spoke of the moment Celan took off his wedding band.

  “Das Fremde” | “Strangeness”

  January 20, 1970, Paris, rue d’Ulm. Erich Fried’s 1976 essay “Also a Love Poem” in Die Muse hat Kanten: Aufsätze und Reden zur Literatur, ed. Volker Kaukoreit (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1995) addresses the question of the “comprehensibility” of a late Celan poem, using this poem, which he says is in its language, content, and feeling for life and death unmistakingly Celanian. He writes:

  The first two lines indicate the basic situation: A fate has us in its net. A fate that comes seemingly from outside, that the poet cannot identify and that he cannot completely decipher. Thus, “strangeness.” Another power at work in this net is transience, which is our lot and which will eventually destroy us, no matter how we stand in relation to our being in the net, if it remains strange to us, or if we’re willing to play along. Transience reaches through us, thus proving that our bodies, and not only them, are not as solid as we sometimes think. This reaching-through-us of transience also has something of the heavy-handed, merciless clampdown of a tyranny or its authorities, the poet feels exposed to in real life. But even this powerful transience (whose power however consists only in passing and in making past [im Vergehen und Vergehenmachen]) has no sense or purpose. It reaches through us “perplexedly.” Through us. It is a poem about being exposed, but not a loneliness poem. The “us” does not stand for a collectivity, not for many, but obviously for two. For two deeply connected humans …

  His analysis of the poem as a complex love poem about a complex, at times contradictory situation goes on for another page or so and concludes: “The poem means so much to me, because it says all this in an incomparably shorter, simpler and more complex way than my explanation is able to do.”

  zähl meinen Puls | take my pulse: Shmueli indicates that she and Celan had discussed the following lines from the sixth of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets: “The widest land / Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine / With pulses that beat double” (IS, p. 56).

  “Umlichtet” | “Illuminated”

  January 22, 1970, Paris, avenue Émile Zola. The last poem written during Ilana Shmueli’s stay in Paris, it also concludes the second, or “Jerusalem,” cycle of the book.

  III

  “Fortgesalbt” | “Salved away”

  February 6, 1970, Paris, rue d’Ulm.

  Stein- / weizen | stone- / crop: A mainly Austrian nam
e for various plants of the genus Sedum, having fleshy leaves and variously colored flowers, here possibly sedum acre, wall pepper.

  Skabiose | scabious: Knautia arvensis, commonly known as field scabious, a species in the genus Knautia, is a perennial plant that grows between twenty-five and a hundred centimeters tall. Its tincture is used in homeopathy as a blood purifier.

  “Ortswechsel” | “Place change”

  February 8, 1970, Paris, avenue Émile Zola.

  “Die Welt” | “The world”

  February 8, 1970, Paris, avenue Émile Zola. Among the last poems Celan sent to Shmueli, writing in the letter of February 16, 1969: “Meanwhile you will have received the poems—all these days I reproached myself for having sent you that terrible poem, ‘Welt’; today I know that I was allowed to, that you’d understand it in all its pain, in its full dimension of love” (IS, p. 68).

  “Was bittert” | “What bitters”

  February 7–10, 1970, Paris, avenue Émile Zola.

  Hörrinden-Hymnus | auditory cortex-hymn: See reading traces (BW, p. 878) in Reichert/Bleichert book on human physiology, here speaking of the auditory cortex and the neuronal pathways to it.

  Daumenschrauben | thumbscrews: See reading traces in the seventeenth-century Spanish baroque writer Baltasar Gracián’s writing as translated into German by Schopenhauer, and in which Celan underlined the word Daumschrauben in the sentence: “A strange malice often puts such temptations in the path of reason on purpose, to make a voyage of discovery into the interior of the mind, and similarly uses thumbscrews of the secrets [Daumschrauben der Geheimnisse] that are able to push even the most reasonable head to extremes.”

  Zählkammer | counting chamber … Ringe | rings: Wiedemann locates further reading traces in Reichert/Bleichert, concerning a process of counting blood cells: “A whetted cover glass is pressed on the cleaned counting chamber until at the contact points Newton’s rings appear (p. 397)” (BW, p. 878).

  “Die gesenkten” | “The lowered”