Paul Celan: when reading is difficult

Breathturn Into Timestead:  The Collected Later Poetry,  A Bilingual Edition.  By Paul Celan. Translated by Pierre Joris  Farrar Straus Giroux

A recent vogue in Canadian and U.S. newspapers calls for writer interviews consisting of fanciful questions: If you could have dinner with someone who is dead, who would it be? Which author are you most embarrassed to admit you have not read? To the latter question writers cough up a variety of heavy hitters they’ve avoided. Henry James. Leo Tolstoy. Marcel Proust. 

Among readers interested in 20th-century Jewish literature, Paul Celan might be a common source of readerly embarrassment. He is routinely mentioned as a major postwar poet. His 1947 poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue) is among the few well-known poems responding to the Holocaust. Translated into many languages, it, along with Celan’s other work, has guided major European critics and artists, including the influential German painter Anselm Kiefer, who drew inspiration from Celan. But where does the poet fit in the lives of readers?

This question is made timely by the publication in English translation of Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, with a substantial introduction and commentary by the American-based translator Pierre Joris. Joris’ introduction reminds readers of the biographical milestones in Celan’s life. Born in 1920 in multicultural Czernowitz on the borderlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was raised speaking many languages, including German, Yiddish and Romanian. In 1941, he was incarcerated in the city’s ghetto with his parents, who were murdered in 1942 in a German labour camp. 

After the war, Celan made his reputation almost immediately with the unsettling mixture of lush and grim imagery in Todesfuge. The poem went on to become an archetypal literary rendering of the Holocaust. It was at this point that the poet let go of his last name, Antschel, in favour of Celan, which is an anagram of Ançel, the Romanian spelling of his birthname. 

In 1948, Celan arrived in Paris, where he made his way among the postwar avant-garde. His later life was marked by emotional and psychological troubles, which ended with his suicide in April 1970. With this act – Celan jumped from a bridge into the Seine – he added his name to the sad litany of major postwar writers whose suicide often preceded their literary reputation: Jerzy Kosinski, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski.

This biographical distinction is not the only challenge to our reception of Celan’s work. Breathturn Into Timestead suggests the importance of Celan in literary discussions through its size – its bilingual treatment of his six final volumes is 645 pages. The bilingual approach is valuable for a poet like Celan, whose use of his home language is uniquely idiosyncratic. 

Even the non-German speaker gains by moving the eye from one facing page to the next. The volume’s first lines in English are: “You may confidently/ serve me snow,” which, in the original, begins “Du darfst mich…” The curious reader who knows a bit of Yiddish might consider that darfst, in that German dialect, almost always means should. Here the dividing line between similar languages highlights the shaky ground one is on when reading work translated into a largely unrelated language.

Joris argues fiercely for the unusual demands of Celan’s German. His poetry raises the major questions of postwar German culture: what to do with the language of the killers; how can one fashion a life, a literature, using the words that justified and organized mass murder? Celan’s German, Joris tells us, “distances itself from any use the language was put to, both in literature and as a vehicle for spoken communication.” How, Joris asks, can Celan “cleanse” his language “of historical political dirt”?

The answers to these questions are by no means obvious in the poems’ English translation. Celan sought out what might be called untainted sources, mining “politically uncontaminated vocabularies… such as those of botany, ornithology and entomology, but also geology, mineralogy, geography, chemistry, crystallography, nuclear physics, contemporary and space age technology, hunting, anatomy, physiology and medicine.” 

As well, Celan turned to the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the Brothers Grimm’s guidebook to the life of German as a medieval language. 

Celan, of course, was not the first poet to read the dictionary. But the pressures associated with his language hunts are among the most particular kind. His German, Celan’s translator tell us, “is a foreign language even for native speakers.” It is an “eerie, nearly ghostly language… a language the poet has to make up, to recreate, to reinvent, to bring back to life.”

How great this challenge for the writer, for the translator, for readers in any language. And it is here that we face the possibility of a major figure’s unreadability. Maybe one does not expect to read Celan; rather, one knows or has heard of Todesfuge and recognizes its author’s place in the sad academy of Holocaust survivor suicides.

This is not, of course, the outcome Celan’s translator wants. Nor is it the expectation of Farrar Straus Giroux, the excellent American literary publisher that presents English-language readers with the author’s Collected Later Poetry.

Joris’ commentary on the poems is rich in biographical information. He points to Celan’s strong literary influences – among these are the Hebrew Bible, Psalms, Shakespeare, Gershom Scholem, and the Germans Friedrich Holderlin and Georg Büchner. Joris highlights friendships and personal struggles that underlie specific poems. Sometimes travel – a first return to Germany, a visit to Jerusalem late in life – haunts the work. The commentary often pinpoints the day and place where a poem was written, along with the book or personal letter Celan read at the time of writing. In the case of the late poems, ongoing treatment for what Joris refers to as Celan’s “latent psychic troubles” lurks in the background.

At times, the facts presented in Joris’ commentary have greater impact than what we read in the more indirect and oblique poems. This relationship between commentary and text, one could argue, is a familiar form of Jewish reading, as the tradition of rabbinic commentary routinely reopens difficult canonical texts for contemporary relevance.

Ironically, it is an early poem, La Contrescarpe, included in the translator’s notes and not in the collection proper, that most readily opens itself to the reader’s imagination. It provides an account of the train ride Celan took in late fall 1938, which ended in Berlin on the eve of Kristallnacht: 

 

Via Kraków

You came, at the Anhalter

railway station

a smoke flowed toward your glance,

it already belonged to tomorrow.

 

Here one feels the full impact of poetic language as it conjures the past. Celan offers the sort of recognition we rarely experience in more prosaic writing, and, momentarily, the veil of poetic difficulty lifts.