Reading Paul Celan
According to George Steiner, reading Paul Celan will change your life and it has to be said that this is not an outrageous claim. In the last decade of his life Celan produced a body of work that many consider to be the finest poetry of the 20th century. The poems are usually short, invariably terse but packed with meaning and contain some of the most startling images ever written.
Celan was a German speaking Romanian Jew who survived the Holocaust. His work can be seen as a response to this event but also contains a profound struggle with language.
Reading Celan is not a comfortable experience, the poems deal with fundamental issues and demand that we consider our mortality and the problem of a God that seems to have gone away. Meanings are always elusive and readers often sturggle (even in German) with the deliberately compressed ambiguity of each image.
This isn't altogether a miserable experience, the work shows us, like no other, what poetry can and should achieve. Set out below is 'Go Blind' published in the 'Atemwend' collection in 1967:
Go blind now, today:
eternity also is full of eyes -
in them
drowns what helped images down
the way they came,
in them
fades what took you out of language,
lifted you out with a gesture
which you allowed to happen like
the dance of the words made of
autumn and silk and nothingness
I can't claim to have a full understanding of this but it is a poem that has stuck under my skin for the last forty years. I find it beautiful, terrifying and compelling and I don't want anyone to tell me what it may 'mean'. This is just one of many intense experiences that I've had with Celan and when reading him I know (as with Milton) that I'm in the presence of greatness.
Starting to read Celan
For those of us that aren't fluent in German, the choice of translator is very important. Celan had a keen interest in the origins of words and the way that meanings change over time, he also used double and treble meanings to maintain a level of ambiguity in his work. Whilst it is important to recognise that each translation in effect creates an entirely new poem, there is a need with Celan to try and maintain this level of ambiguity and to reflect the way the lines sound in the original. Michael Hamburger and Pierre Joris a have probably managed this with the greatest skill but it is up to individual readers to select the translations that they are most 'comfortable' with.
For a specific example of the translation dilemma, please see the Celan in translation page.
Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe has identified 4 key strands that inform Celan's work-
- The German cultural belief that the German language is somehow closer to Ancient Greek and that German identity is thus bound up with this privileged link to the founding civilisation;
- Celan was born in Bukovina which was occupied by the Soviet Union, by Germany and Romania and then again by the Soviet Union. Even though Celan's mother tongue was German, he was always at the edge of 'Mitteleuropa' and was always the 'Other';
- Celan's work can be seen as an attempt to engage with the German culture and ideas of utopia that led directly to the Holocaust;
- The poetry can also be seen as an attempt to address the possibility of existence in the 'shadow' of the Holocaust.
Celan and ambiguity
The ambiguous nature of Celan's work has been the subject of much debate. 'Todtnauberg' is one of Celan's best known poems and yet the critics are divided as to its meaning. The title is the name of the village where Martinn Heidegger had his famous hut and the poem commemorates Celan's visit there in 1966. The debate is about whether this is a poem of reconciliation or of continued disappointment. Celan was a keen reader of Heidegger's work yet was deeply troubled by his membership of the Nazi party and the poem refers to his hope that Heidegger would address this troubling connection. Both sides of this divide have put forward strong arguments but the poem remains stubbornly elusive.
This level of ambiguity pervades all of Celan's later work and readers perhaps need to accept that meaning can operate at two or three levels at the same time.
Celan likened his poems to messages in a bottle stating that only the few readers that found them would be able to fully grasp their meaning, he also rejected the charge that they were hermetic.