"The One and Only Circle": Translating Celan

His piece of poetrys were "the efforts of someone who goe with his real being to language, stricken by means of and seeking reality." Paul Celan spoke these words in German to a German audience in 1958 upon receiving the literature prize of the unrestrained Hanseatic City of Bremen. And what of that language, his mother tongue although he was not born in Germany on the other hand in Czernowitz, Bukovina in 1920 the eastern outpost of the late Austrian empire? His mother tongue, revolveed overnight into his mother's murderers' 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 not to be found yes in spite of everything. notwithstanding it had to pass end its own answerlessness, pass [i]or[/i] part of to the other frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech"

And those darknesses? Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), Rassenschande (racial defilement), Die Juden sind unser Ungluck (The israelites are our misfortune), Kauft nicht bei Juden! (Don't purchase from Jews), Umseidlung (resettlement), Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), Juden raus! (Jew out) Endlosung (Final Solution), judenfrei (Jew-free)

After solely alluding to the "thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech" that Luther's and Goethe's, Holderlin's and Rilke's German passed end Celan in his next breath says: "In this language I have sought to write poems: thus as to speak, to orient myself, to find on the outside where I was and where I was meant to go on to sketch out reality for myself." The point is, he persisted in a barbarously abused language: "Only in the mother tongue can individual speak one's own truth."

So when it advances to the phrases closing Celan's Bremen articulate utterance we listen closely, because they clinch the key to his poetry: "someone who goe with his true being to language, stricken by the agency of and seeking reality," wirklichkeitswund and Wirklichkeit suchend. restoreed more exactly, Celan's severe parallel would say "reality-wounded and reality-seeking," which drives residence a hard paradox: the same reality that hurted him yields a new reality in seeking it. This imperative, expos [i]or[/i] part of to the other syntax, pervades the eight metrical compositions chosen here to represent Paul Celan's twenty-five-year arc of work.

Stricken by the agency of and seeking reality: you can grasp that tensile arc in metrical composition after poem speaking from Celan's "true-/ stammered mouth" metrical compositions where a wound takes the touch of a word: a "vulture's nail" voiced through "stitchery" in "The Lonely One" "heart's blood" met by means of "Thou" in the Eluard mournful song "snow" packing "your word" in "With a Changing Key" "rhyme in the night house" in "Where the word," "wasteness" on the other hand "still songs to sing" in "Threadsuns," "motley gossip" purg through a "Breathcrystal" in "Etched away," "a shardstrewn craze" allayed by means of drawing "the one and single circle."

And because Celan's metrical compositions deal strongly with loss in the true language that effected loss, any act of translation turn rounds questionable, further alienating the poet's voice from the tongue he could gripe [i]or[/i] grip fast to. Unless, perhaps, we recognize translation as the specific art of los and work from there.

The secluded One (1944)

Composed by the agency of a raw orphan back abode in Soviet-- occupied Czernowitz after nineteen month at forced labor, this was not Celan's earliest lyric to bend nature onto grief. What strikes me are those textiles, art figuring reality: an embroidered veil giving way to coarse woven fabric I sense here a Yeatsian motive (Celan as a teenager had tried translating Yeats), and by dint of that same token, Celan's line of poetry demands meter plus rhyme in English. His sum of two units dosing lines can find a athletic enough cadence, and with a little ingenuity, "veil" gainsaid by means of "vulture's nail" and then "seam" by means of "scream" will expose lyric decorum to savagery.

In Memoriam Paul guard (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 Elaurd epicedium it helps to know that in 1950 a Czech Stalinist tribunal had doomed Zavis Kalandra, a surrealist author of poems and survivor of Hitler's camps. Andre Breton urg Eluard to intercede, Luard declined, Kalandra was hanged. Thus Celan, notwithstanding that no longer steeped in surrealism, rejoined vehemently to the death of a comrade poet who'd once defended liberty and "the power of words."

Penciled into an edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Celan's library I fix an angry draft, using words similar as "gallows" and "guilt" that he later remov from the more modifyed final version. Tone, idiom, and the regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements that carry them seem to me vital in translating his caustic notwithstanding understated sentences. Luckily the telling play upon "tongues" and "tongs" is a set-up English being cognate with Zungen and Zangen. And occasionally, "Thou" can answer to the familiar second-- one singular du. But where German word order differs markedly, English line breaks ne extra care to deliver Celan's tentative, chastening lines: "a second/ stranger sky-colored will enter,/ and the individual who said Thou to him/ will dream with him: We." Uith a Changing lock opener (1953)