John Felstinerexcerpt from "The One and Only Circle": Translating Celan
His poems were "the efforts of someone who goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality." Paul Celan spoke these words in German to a German audience in 1958, on receiving the literature prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. And what of that language, his mother tongue though he was not born in Germany but in Czernowitz, Bukovina in 1920, the eastern outpost of the late Austrian empire? His mother tongue, turned overnight into his mother's murderer's tongue in 1941, was literally all he had left after the war: no parents, no possessions, no homeland, no cultural or Jewish ambience. "It, the language," Celan said in 1958--but since die Sprache is feminine, he might have been saying "She, the language"--"remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. Yet it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."
And those darkenesses? Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), Rassenschande (racial defilement), Die Juden sind unser Ungluck (The Jews are our misfortune), Kauft nicht bei Juden! (Don't buy from Jews), Umseidlung (resettlement), Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), Juden raus! (Jews out), Endlosung (Final Solution), judenfrei (Jew-free).
After merely alluding to the "thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech" that Luther's and Goethe's, Holderlin's and Rilke's German passed through, Celan in his next breath says: " In this language I have sought...to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself." The point is, he persisted in a barbarously abused language: "Only in the mother tongue can one speak one's own truth."
So when it comes to the phrases closing Celan's Bremen speech, we listen closely, because they hold the key to his poetry: "someone who goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality," wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend. Rendered more exactly, Celan's severe parallel would say "reality-wounded and reality-seeking," which drives home a hard paradox: the same reality that wounded him yields a new reality in seeking it. This imperative, exposed through syntax, pervades the eight poems chosen here to represent Paul Celan's twenty-five-year arc of work.
Stricken by and seeking reality: you can grasp that tensile arc in poem after poem speaking from Celan's "true-/ stammered mouth," poems where a wound takes the touch of a word: a "vulture's nail" voiced by "stitchery" in "The Lonely One," "heart's blood" met by "Thou" in the Eluard elegy, "snow" packing "your word" in " With a Changing Key," "rhymes in the night house" in "Where the word," "wasteness" but "still songs to sing" in "Threadsuns," "motley gossip" purged by a " Breathcrystal" in "Etched away," "a shardstrewn craze" allayed by drawing "the one and only circle."
And because Celan's poems deal strongly with loss in the very language that affected loss, any act of translation turns questionable, further alienating the poet's voice from the tongue he could hold fast to. Unless, perhaps, we recognize translation as the specific art of loss and work from there.
The Lonely One (1944)
Composed by a raw orphan back home in Soviet-occupied Czernowitz after nineteen months at forced labor, this was not Celan's earliest lyric to bend nature onto grief. What strikes me are those textiles, art figuring reality: and embroidered veil giving way to coarse cloth. I sense here a Yeatsian motive (Celan as a teenager had tried translating Yeats), and by that same token, Celan's verse demands meter plus rhyme in English. His two closing lines can find a strong enough cadence, and with a little ingenuity, "veil" gainsaid by "vulture's nail" and then "seam" by "scream" will expose lyric decorum to savagery.In Memoriam Paul Eluard (1952)
By 1952, self-exiled in Paris, Celan had begun teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieure, seen his first collection appear in Germany, and married Gisele de Lestrange, a graphic artist. About the Paul Eluard elegy, it helps to know that in 1950 a Czech Stalinist tribunal had condemned Zavis Kalandra, a surrealist poet and survivor of Hitler's camps. Andre Breton urged Eluard to intercede, Eluard declined, Kalandra was hanged. Thus Celan, though no longer steeped in surrealism, responded vehemently to the death of a fellow poet who'd once defended liberty and "the power of words."Penciled into an edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Celan's library I found an angry draft, using words such as "gallows" and "guilt" that he later removed from the more tempered final version. Tone, idiom, and the rhythms that carry them seem to me vital in translating his caustic yet understated sentences. Luckily the telling play on "tongues" and "tongs" is a set-up, English being cognate with Zungen and Zangen. And occasionally, "Thou" can respond to the familiar second-person singular du. But where German word order differs markedly, English line breaks need extra care to deliver Celan's tentative, chastening lines: "a second, / stranger blue will enter, / and the one who said Thou to him / will dream with him: We."
John Felstiner's Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (W.W. Norton) is coming out this fall. He teaches in the English department at Stanford.
