by Paul Celan
His prehensile eye and senses, his staggered or stepped pages where poetry "does not impose itself but exposes itself (as he put it himself), his Mexican sacrificial stone knives, his withdrawals-attacks in the confrontation with language, his procedures, even the most excessive and disturbing ones, are always condemned to gravitate around a "sublime" identity, sublime in as much as empty, and sublime because null. Yet he always remained in the shadow cone of a verticalism, as "in the presence of," as opposed to what could have happened to others. But whatever the place one wants to assign him, it is certain that no one has equaled his poetic richness in our age. It is nearly impossible to follow Celan through the thousands of stations of a Calvary that blossomed into an infinity of seductions, over vast forest flares, over the bites of glacial concretions, disfiguring objectifications, through ambiguous vegetalizations, and a spellbinding history that exploded simultaneously into "parallel" dictions in devastating xenoglossias. But an obstinate force came to freeze every possible resolution around this verticalist non-nucleus, because what, in the final analysis, never lacked in Celan, was the violence of a love that was absolute exactly because it was ever more "without object." Celan could not extract himself from this powerful and terribly monochord attitude to enter into what must have seemed to him like a double-faced terrain playing fast and loose. He couldn't surpass himself (supposing that that would have been worth the while) in this drive towards a form of sublimity, one furthermore disavowed on many occasions, that can be located in the traditions alluded to above and that were "his," from the "Holderlinian" line and the Hebraic — specifically Hasidic — one, all the way to a "flattening" in the reality, even if the pursuit of "reality" was the task he had from the start imposed on himself voluntarily and had made his own to the point of the ultimate sacrifice of himself.
There remains only to listen to what Nelly Sachs said: "Celan, blessed by Bach and by Holderlin, blessed by the Hasidim," and to draw from this the arguments for a sincere and pious gratitude to which the whole of our century should pay tribute. And a tribute that should also have been paid to him by someone who had all the necessary titles allowing him to join the poet at the summit of shared knowledge. This admirer, however, buried Celan under a most disconcerting array of attitudes and discourses, wounding him by committing maybe the worst of his many major errors: I am speaking of Heidegger. The poem by Celan entitled "Todtnauberg" (the mountain village the philosopher used to retire to, and where Celan went in 1967 with "a hope, today/for a thinker's/word/to come,/in the heart/") carries the burden of what can be seen as a final disappointment. Even if we don't know much about the details of a conversation in which the fundamental problems of poetry had no doubt their place, he most certainly hoped to hear the philosopher speak his frank disapproval of the genocide or else make some declaration of remorse for having kept silent on the matter. But it was not to be. In the very beautiful and mysterious words of the poem there transpires a Heidegger locked into himself, close to autism, and a Celan enveloped in an anxious apprehension. There remains the feeling of a scission, of a stridence, and as if of a last treason committed by a whole culture against the confident and innocent poet who had risked everything in his writing to set himself beyond absolute despair, without however being able to admit it, and who ends up perishing because of it. There remains the feeling of a fracture at the heart of German culture, or rather of European culture as a whole, which unhappily even today, in a time moving toward a new cohabitation between men, still projects the indigestible traces of a shadow.
ON PAUL CELAN IN NEUCHATEL
FRIEDRICH DÜRRENMATT
Poems became important for me only when I got to know Paul Celan in Paris. We visited him in his Parisian apartment. A woman, painting; a child. He was melancholic, despairing, somber, believed he was persecuted, some German newspaper had criticized or misquoted him, but then when one day he and his wife visited us in Neuchatel and stayed with us for a few days, we got to know another side of him. We had lodged the couple in a hotel up on Chaumont. At first he was sad, just as I had known him in Paris, we felt oppressed just as we had in Paris, we tried to cheer him up, we just didn't know how to, just as we hadn't known how to in Paris. On the last day his melancholy suddenly cleared, like a sky clears after dark clouds. The day was hot, heavy, no wind, oppressively leaden. We played ping-pong for hours, he had an enormous, bearlike vitality, he played my wife, my son and me into the ground. Then he drank a bottle of Mirabelle, a strong schnapps, to accompany a leg of lamb, his wife and we had Bordeaux, he, a second bottle of Mirabelle, Bordeaux in between, in the pergola before the kitchen, summer stars in the sky. He improvised dark stanzas into the big-bellied glass, began to dance, sang Romanian folk songs, communist anthems, a wild, healthy, exuberant lad. When I drove him and his wife up to Chaumont, through the late night Jura forest, Orion was already on the rise, then dawn grew inexorably, Venus flaming up, he sang and bawled like a boisterous faun. Later we heard little from him. Once he sent a newspaper clipping, begging me to intercede, suspecting a surreptitious attack, I reread the article again and again, could not find anything, did not understand his suspicion, did not answer him because I did not understand and because I did not know how I could have calmed him without becoming his enemy, given that he saw enemies and suspected plots everywhere. Then he came one more time, from Paris or Germany, as if fleeing from something, sat in my studio between my paintings, was silent, and yet a conversation seemed to get under way, died down, my wife readied the guest room, I went down to the wine cellar, unhappy in the knowledge that I had made him unhappy, that he had sought help without finding it, returned with a few bottles, the studio was empty. Only now do I hear Celan's voice again. More than twenty years later. Suhrkamp Verlag has published two records. I listen to his voice. Celan reads his poems with urgency and accuracy, the tempo even, at times quickening. Word creations, associations, I see images as I listen. Images from Hieronymus Bosch, The Last Judgment, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Are these poems still sayable, not too esoteric to have an unmediated effect, hieroglyphs that reveal themselves only after long contemplation, poems of absolute loneliness, spoken behind soundproof sheets of glass, poems without time or tone, black wordholes, word-alchemical? The same helplessness overcomes me that I felt in front of Celan, the sadness he knew how to spread.
From Turmbau: Stoffe IV-IX (Zurich:Diogenes Verlag, 1990), 769-77.
THE MEMORY OF WORDS
EDMOND JABÈS
I have never spoken of Paul Celan. Modesty? Inability to read his language? And yet everything draws me to him.
I love the man who was my friend. And, in their differences, our books meet up.
The same questioning links us, the same wounded word.
I have never written anything on Paul Celan. Today I take the risk of doing so. I did not make this decision all alone.
To write for the first time on Paul Celan, for German readers, tempted me.*
To write for the first time on Paul Celan and to give my writing as destination the place opened by his language, by his very words, has convinced me to say "yes" —as one says "yes" to oneself, in silence or in solitude. While thinking, however, about the missing friend. And as if, for the first time, serenely, I accompanied him there where we had never penetrated together, into the very heart of the language with which he had battled so fiercely and which was not the one in which we spoke to each other.
*Asked to do so by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Edmond Jabes, La mimoire des mots (Paris: Fourbis, 1990).
To whom to speak when the other no longer is?
The place is empty when emptiness occupies all of the place.
Paul Celan's voice reading in my house, for me, some of his poems, has never fallen silent. I hear it, at this very moment when, pen in hand, I listen to my words going toward his. I listen to his words in mine, as one listens to the heartbeat of a person one has not left, in the shadow where, henceforth, he stands.
/> This voice is at the center of the reading I do of his poems; for I can read Paul Celan only in translation; but through the means I have given myself to approach his texts, helped by the poet's unforgettable voice, most of the time I have the sense of not betraying him.
Paul Celan himself was an admirable translator.
One day, when I told him I had trouble recognizing the poems he was reading to me in the French translations I was looking at — there were few of them in 1968 — he said that on the whole he was satisfied with those translations.
"Translation" — as the poet Philippe Soupault wrote in his preface to Prince Igor — "is treason only when it pretends, like photography, to reproduce reality. It would mean to decide beforehand that a text has neither relief, nor harmonics, nor colors, nor, before all, rhythm."
It's true; but what then happens to the original text?
The satisfaction Paul Celan expressed concerning the translations, published or about to be published, puzzled me. "It is difficult to do any better," he would add. Is it because, deep inside himself, he knew, better than any other writer, that he was an untranslatable author?
Behind the language of Paul Celan lies the never extinguished echo of another language.
Like us, skirting before crossing at a certain hour of the day the border of shadow and light, the words of Paul Celan move and affirm themselves at the edge of two languages of the same size — that of renouncement and that of hope.
A language of poverty, a language of riches.
On one side, clarity; on the other, obscurity. But how to distinguish between them when they are blended to such a degree?
Glorious morning or mournful evening? Neither the one nor the other, but — inexpressible pain — the vast and desolate field wrapped in fog, of what cannot express itself alone, outside and in time.
Neither day nor night, then, but by means of their conjugated voices, the undefined space, left vacant by the retreat of the dispossessed language at the core of the refound language.
And as if that word could raise itself only on the ruins of the other, with and without it.
Dust, dust.
Silence, as all writers know, allows the word to be heard. At a given moment, the silence is so strong that the words express nothing but it alone.
Does this silence, capable of making language tilt over, possess its own language to which one can attribute neither origin nor name?
Inaudible language of the secret?
Those who have been reduced to silence, once, know it best, but know also that they can hear it, can understand it only through the words of the language they work in.
Uninterrupted passage from silence to silence and from word to silence.
But the question remains: is the language of silence that of the refusal of language or, to the contrary, the language of the memory of the first word?
Didn't we know it? The word which is formed by letters and sounds keeps the memory of the school book or of any other book that revealed it to us one day, revealed it, by revealing it to itself; keeps the memory, also, of all the voices that over the course of years — and even centuries — have pronounced and spread it.
Words discovered or transmitted by foreign or familiar hands, by distant or close voices, voices from yesterday, sweet to the ear or cruel and feared.
There is, I am certain, no history of the word; but there is a history of the silence every word narrates.
The words saying only that silence. Theirs and ours.
To interrogate a writer means first of all to interrogate the words of his memory, the words of his silence; to tunnel down into their past as "vocables" — the words are older than us and the text has no age.
For Paul Celan the German language, though it is the one in which he immersed himself, is also the one which for a time those who claimed to be its protectors had forbidden him.
If it is indeed the language of his pride, it is also that of his humiliation. Isn't it with the words of his allegiance that they had tried to tear him from himself and to abandon him to solitude or errancy, not having managed to hand him over to death immediately?
There is something paradoxical to stand suddenly alien to the world and to totally invest yourself in the language of a country that rejects you, to the point of claiming that language for yourself alone.
As if the language belonged truly only to those who love it beyond anything else and feel riveted to it forever.
Strange passion, which has for itself only the strength and determination of its own passion.
Stephane Moses notes in his analysis of Conversation in the Mountains that in this poem Celan's use of certain expressions borrowed from Judeo-German could well be on his part a challenge to the executioner.
This does not seem evident to me.
The challenge to the executioner lies elsewhere. It resides in the very language of the poetry. A language he has lifted to its summits.
The constant battle that every writer fights with the words to force them to express his deepest intimacy, no one lived it as desperately in his own body, lived it doubly, as did Paul Celan.
To know how to glorify the word that kills us. To kill the word that saves us and glorifies us.
The love-hate relationship with the German language led him toward the end of his life to write poems of which one can only read the tearing.
Hence the reader's difficulty to approach them straight on.
In his first poems Paul Celan is carried by the words of the language of his thought and of his breath: the language of his soul.
He is in need of this language in order to live. His life is written, in the language of his writing, with the words of his life itself and with those of death, which is a further word.
In his last poems the relentlessness he musters against it reaches its peak. To die at the heart of his love.
To destroy what tries to say itself, before saying it; as if now silence alone had the right to be there: this silence from before and after the words, this silence between the words, between two languages, arrayed one against the other and yet promised to the same fate.
All his poetry was a search for a reality. The reality of a language? The real is the absolute.
To confront his executioners in the name of the language they share with him, and to force them to their knees.
That was the major bet, held.
If to translate is, truly, to betray, do I dare admit that, in order to hear Paul Celan better, I have taken the road of treason?
But isn't every personal reading in itself an act of treason?
Incapable of reading directly in German, I read Paul Celan in his various translations: French, English or Italian. All acceptable. All insufficient but permitting a better comprehension of the original text.
What one lacks, the other helps me to grasp better.
I read these translations without ever losing sight of the German text, trying to discover in it the rhythm, the movement, the music, the caesura. Guided by the accurate voice of Paul Celan. Hadn't he himself initiated me into this reading?
All the languages that I know help me enter into his, which I don't know. By this rare, unusual detour I come as close as possible to his poetry.
Have I ever read Paul Celan? I have listened to him for a long time, I listen to him. Each time his books renew a dialogue the beginning of which I can't remember, though nothing has come to interrupt it since then.
Silent dialogue through words as light as free and adventurous birds; all the world's gravity being in the sky; like stones laid by nostalgic ghosts on the marble of nonexistent tombs; all the world's pain being in the earth; and like ashes of an interminable day of horror of which there remains but the unbearable image of pink smoke above millions of burned bodies.
A nothing rose
a Noone's Rose
A nothing
were we, are we, will
we remain, blossoming:
the nothing —, the
> noonesrose.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF AND ON PAUL CELAN
BY PAUL CELAN
IN GERMAN
Gesammelte Werkf infiinfBanden. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983.
Gedichte aus dem Nachlass. Herausgegeben von Bertrand Badiou, Jean-Claude Rambach und Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997.
Der Meridian, Endfassung, Vorstufen, Materialien. Herausgegeben von Bernhard Boschenstein und Heino Schmull. Tiibinger Ausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999.
Die Gedichte: Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe. Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003.
IN FRENCH
Paul Celan, Gisele Celan-Lestrange, Correspondance. Edited et commence par Bertrand Badiou avec le concours de Eric Cclan. 2 vols. Paris: Le Seuil, 2001.