I. BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Celan’s life is inseparable from the fate of the Jewish people in the twentieth century. The Shoah is indisputably the central event around which both the life & the work turn: he is a survivor of Khurbn (to use Jerome Rothenberg's "ancient & dark word"), & his work is a constant bearing witness to those atrocities. Born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina, in 1920, Paul Celan was raised in a Jewish family that insisted both on young Paul receiving the best secular education — with the mother inculcating her love of the German language & culture — & on his Jewish roots: both his parents came from orthodox &, on one side Hassidic, family backgrounds. In the summer of 1939, returning to Czernowitz after his first year as a medical student at the university of Tours in France, where he had come in contact with contemporary French literature, Celan started to write poetry & decided to study Romance literature. The next year Soviet troops occupied his home town, only to be replaced by Rumanian & German Nazi troops in 1941. Celan had to work in forced labor camps, where, in the late fall of 1942 he learned that his father, physically broken by the slave labour he was subjected to, had been killed by the SS. Later that winter the news reached him that his mother too had been shot by the Nazis. These killings, especially that of his mother, were to remain the core experience of his life. He was released a year later & remained for one more year at the now sovietized university of Czernowitz.  In April 1945 he left his hometown for good to settle in Bucharest, working as a translator & writing poetry, some of it in Rumanian. In December 1947 he clandestinely crossed over to Vienna, which in turn he left in July 1948 to settle in Paris, the city that was to be his home until his death by drowning in the Seine in late April 1970.  His first major volume of poems, Mohn und Gedächtnis, had been published in 1952 & had brought instant recognition as well as a measure of fame, due in no small part to what was to become one of the best known & most anthologized poems of the postwar era: the “Todesfuge.” A new volume of poems followed roughly every three years (with that rhythm accelerating, as we shall see, during the last years of his life), while four posthumous collections have come out, as well as two editions of his "Collected Works," including all the (poetry) translations he did from a variety of languages.

II. THE WORK

Let me try to show how the difficulties of the work arise from a biographical & poetological complex, by going back to the famous “TODESFUGE”: Celan, as survivor of the “univers concentrationaire,” cannot but bear witness, even though the mode of this witnessing differs vastly from that of most survivors, while simultaneously radically differing in relation to itself over time. Celan’s single best-known poem is his “Todesfuge / Deathfugue,” one of the paradigmatic poems of what came to be known as Holocaust literature. It was written at the latest in early 1945, but it was, in all probability, already completed in late 1944. When he published it for the first time, in a Rumanian magazine and in Rumanian translation, the poem was still called “Todestango / Deathtango.” When he gathers it in his first volume, Sand aus den Urnen, it appears as the closing poem of that book — clearly to mark its special place, though not its chronological situation. For various reasons, Celan pulled back this book, and when his first real book came out (Mohn und Gedächtnis, 1952) the “Todesfuge” is found at the very center, surrounded by poems in the main post-dating it.

We know Celan's later uneasy relationship to this poem: throughout the sixties he refused to have it anthologized any further and to read it at public readings. This refusal has several reasons: the most obvious one is that the poem, through its very “success,” had become endangered — in Germany it had become a pawn in the so-called "Vergangenheits-bewältigung-Prozess” (the “process of overcoming the past”) and its misuses. For Celan himself, it was, due to the hurt inflicted by the Claire Goll accusations of plagiarism, a kind of pulling back. Also, and more deeply, I believe, it was a question of refusing to be identified with that single, early work, and this on at least two levels: first, as a man, as a “survivor,” Celan was loathe to be made a mouthpiece for what by then came to be called Holocaust poetry, and he resisted speaking narrativizing his experiences during that period of his life. What some have called the ontological shame of the survivor also has an important role to play in this context.

The tension surrounding his relationship with “Todesfuge” can be seen as emblematic of the tension in Celan with regard to two essential poles: on the one hand the need to witness, and on the other the desire not to speak out, arising out of a deep sense of the impossibility, the unsayability of the horror of the Shoah, played out throughout his work in the constant, obsessive problematic of the “Verstummen,” of falling silent, of being caught, surrounded, pervaded by an absolute absence, which constitutively endangers and questions the very act of writing. This tension, this question as to the necessity/ possibility of witnessing, could be traced schematically in Celan’s oeuvre if one were to look at the first part of the opus as an attempt to witness while considering the late work, starting with Atemwende, if not already with Niemadsrose, as essentially concerned with the very possibility or impossibility of witnessing, as a questioning of that possibility.

The reason why "Todesfuge," as against the late poetry, exercises such a fascination and is so "readable," is essentially that its poetics are still very traditional: the relationship between word and world, between signifier and signified, is not put into question. It is a poem that still, somehow, maybe desperately, believes, or wants to believe, or acts as if did believe, in the fullness of utterance, in the possibility of representation. This fullness of language presupposes a fullness of being, a being who speaks and in whom both language and what language talks about are grounded. As against nearly all of Celan's subsequent poetry, the one thing not questioned in “Todesfuge” is the one who speaks, and the place from which that one speaks.The poem is written/spoken by a “survivor” who adopts the persona of a “wir,”  who speaks in the name of a “wir” — the “we,” of the murdered Jews: “Schwarze Milch... wir  trinken sie abends, wir  trinken sie mittags, wir trinken und trin-ken...Wir  schaufeln ein Grab in der Luft...”

That the dead can speak, or that a “survivor” can speak for them, that there can be a witnessing to their death, this is what Celan is going to radically put into question. The poem “Engführung” written in 1958 is in many ways a rewriting of the “Todesfuge” — down to musical theme, as the word “Engführung,” which means stretto, literally a narrowing, comes from the technical vocabulary of fugal composition. In that poem, there is no longer any direct reference to the Shoah, no more “Meister aus Deutschland,” for example. The poem starts: “Verbracht” ins / Gelände /. mit der untrüglichen Spur: // Gras auseinandergeschrieben. Die Steine, weiß,...” “Brought into / the terrain/ with the unmistakable spoor:// grass written asunder. The stones, white.” We no longer know who speaks, who is being addressed; the landscape can be, and is, simultaneously, an inner and an outer landscape. On one level, we can read these opening lines as indicating the situation of the reader coming to this difficult poem, on a second level, it is the “inner landscape” of the poet's mind/psyche, while on a third level, it is also the landscape of his parents' death, the “Gelände” into which they were “verbracht” (“ver” as in “verbrechen” —  a crime). The same can be said for the opening verses of the next stanza: “The place where they lay, it has/a name — it has/ no name. They did not lie there....”

The problematics of the poem include, in an unstated way, the Holocaust, but in combination with another problematics, that of speaking, of saying itself, and by extension that of the possibility of the poem itself. The fourth stanza, for example, plays on the word “Wort” (word), which is the most often repeated and questioned (“heraufbeschwört” to use a Celanesque term) word in the Celan opus, and, contrapuntally the words “Asche” and “night.” Where the poet/narrator/reader of the “Todesfuge” had his mouth full of words, in the “Engführung”, what is most fully present is absence. Cosmically: “Partikelngestöber” — particle flurries, reminiscent of Celan's later coinage “Metapherngestöber.”

The only place/object the poet finds to address his speaking to is the stone: “there was time, to try it with the stone — it remained hospitable, it didn't interrupt (ins Wort fallen).” This stone that is addressed reappears in the opening line of another much discussed poem, “Radix, Matrix”   from the later NR (PC I 239). That poem opens, “As one speaks to the stone, as/ you, to me from the abyss...” The poem, as Werner Hamacher has stated, “describes the figure of an impossible dialogue”(Hamacher 1985, 294). The you and the I of the poem are caught in an unending, indeterminable interchange, they change places, inverting the direction of speaking, so that Hamacher can conclude:

The irreconcilable ambiguity of Celan's formulation — in which the absence of the you suspends the I, that of the I suspends the you, and along with it discourse itself is suspended — realizes on the level of composition what the apostrophe says of the you...that it is what is "in the nothing of a night... encountered." .... As one speaks to the stone, so speaks the stone: to nobody and nothing. (Hamacher 1985, 295-296)

“The poem —Hamacher goes on — a texture of interrupted illocutionary acts and muteness, thus becomes itself the mute discourse of a stone, a nothing encountered.” This most radically stated impossibility of speaking — and thus of witnessing — is linked in the third stanza to the murdered Geschlecht , race: “Who/ who was, that/ race, the murdered one, the one/ standing black in the sky: rod and ball —?” Celan answers this question in the following stanza — though he puts the answer between parentheses, indicating that this is somehow extraneous matter, finally not central to the poem, and yet it is there, stands centrally in the poem, this matter of, if I may permit myself to pun on the typographical symbol used by Celan, the parent thesis : “(Root./ Root of Abraham, Root of Jesse. No one's/ root — o/ ours.)”

The root of the Jews, Abraham's, Jesse's is also, now, after the Shoah, “no one's root.” That “no one,” that “niemand,” already given in the title of the volume in which the poem appears, as “Die Niemandsrose”, and encountered in many versions throughout Celan's work, is no longer simply the figure of a straight inversion: i.e. it does not simply mean the absence of someone. So here, in the late Celan, the language itself in stating, imparting, acting, the impossibility of speaking, becomes the very “stigma of the murder of European Jewry in the extermination camps of the Nazi regime.” Peter Szondi countered Adorno's well-known dictum by saying that “After Auschwitz no poem is any longer possible except on the basis of Auschwitz.” RADIX, MATRIX speaks out of that ground, but that ground, “Grund” has become an “Abgrund,” an abyss. Celan's “Niemand” is clearly not a simple negative, the negation of a “someone.” Rather it is the possibility of the impossibility of the poem itself, and that possibility of the impossibility of the poem is the only possibility that Celan will grant the poem after Auschwitz. It is from that no-place, that abyss, that the poem speaks. It is that “Niemand” who does the witnessing in the verse: “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen.” Nobody witnesses for the witness. The impossible/possible poem witnesses for the witness. What Celan — as a “survivor,” i.e. as someone who should be dead, because he comes/is there after death, as someone whose life is in suspension, is a mere supplement of death —  bears witness to, is another, a new way of speaking, the only way possible after the Shoah.

But this problematic of the witness has a further dimension, one I encountered first when attempting to translate the poem “Aschenglorie hinter”  (PC II 72), the final stanza of which reads:

            Niemand
zeugt für den
Zeugen.

When I first ventured to translate this poem, this sentence seemed semantically unambiguous and the stanza easily became:

            Nobody
witnesses for the
witness.

At the time this formulation seemed both straightworward and extremely pregnant to me, encapsulating a central concern in Celan's work — a work one can read as an ongoing witnessing, a life-long effort to bear witness to the horrors of Shoah — namely the concern that this tragedy would eventually, already in the second post-Shoah generation, become lost — not necessarily lost as a simple “forgetting,” but lost into mere story-telling, “mythos,” mythified.

Moving deeper into Celan's work, reworking the translations of AW and starting to translate later volumes, it became clear that the zeugen/Zeuge complex was much more semantically multilayered than I had at first perceived. The German word “zeugen” also has the meaning “to beget, to generate,” a meaning kept more or less alive in the English word “testify” via its Latin root “testis” which refers both to the “witness” and to “testicle” (as the ‘witness’ of virility). One also has to keep in mind  the “Rod and Ball,” the “Hode” from “Radix, Matrix”. Unhappily in English there is no synonym for “witness” based on the verb “testify” (the back-formation 'testifier' sounds odd and is unusable), and rendering the line as “nobody testifies for the witness”, while getting in some of the semantic richness of the “zeugen”-complex, ruins the poetics of the line and its use of repetition and internal rhyme, one of Celan's favorite and most pregnant technical devices.

The Zeugen-complex appears on only six occasions in the poems, but the concept of bearing witness is all-pervasive, and central to it is that familiar Celanesque two-step, one look back, one look forward, both actions taking place in the same word or in the repetition of that word. “Zeugen” is very clear on this: in Celan it always carries the meaning of looking back, of bearing witness for the Dead, those ever-present “they” of his poems, but at the same time it looks forward, in the above case in desperation and gloom, and “zeugt” engenders the future or at least the present — the poem.

III. THE NOMADIC WARMACHINE

  

Celan's  life, mapped out spatially, describes a movement of encirclement of Germany, originating in Czernowitz and moving through Bucharest and Vienna to Paris, with a dozen or two quick, short raids across the borders into that country for readings & meetings with a few friends and some enemies (Heidegger). The real close friends or allies that Celan had were in fact strategically situated on those "meridians" he himself couldn't be on & which helped surround Germany: Osip mandelstham in Russia & Nelly Sachs in Sweden. (His one trip outside was in 1969 to Israel -- a happy event, though maybe one that could not lead out of, or break the circle of the reprisals that was his life). I use the military metaphor advisedly, for there seems to me to run through Celan’s life if not a desire for assault on Germany and revenge for the death of his parents (or of his mother rather, as shall become clear) then at least a constant, unrelenting feeling of being on a war footing, of being under attack and needing to counter this attack. The Celanesque dynamic is, however, not simple-minded or one-directional: it involves a complex double movement — to use the terms of Empedocles — of philotes  (love) for his mother(’s tongue) and neikos  (strife) against her murderers who are the originators and carriers of that same tongue.

He is caught in this love/strife dynamic, the common base-line or ground of which (as Grund  but also, and simultaneously, as Abgrund ) is the German language, irrevocably binding together both the murdered and the murderer, a dynamic which structures all of Celan’s thinking and writing. Because of this ground and despite the fact of spending all his adult life in France, despite his active and profound multilinguism — there can be little doubt that he could have written succesfully in Rumanian (and did so to a minor extent) or in French — Celan never seriously entertained the possibility of becoming a “French” writer in the image of, say, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco or, more to the point, E.M. Cioran or Gherasim Luca, or even of composing a part of his oeuvre  in that language, as Rilke did. His harsh, nearly hysterical, strictures against poets attempting to write in a language other than the mother-tongue are to the point here. This total identification with, and adoration of, the mother’s tongue go back to his youth in multilingual Czernowitz.

Chalfen, for example, points out Celan’s strong dislike of and  irritation with Yiddish. Except for a small poem by Steinberg, “Rabbi Leiserl, der Kleine,” which he is reported by Ruth Lackner to have enjoyed reciting, he was never heard using Yiddish. (another source quotes hearing him sing a Yiddish song with great pleasure -- a childhood remembrance, more to do with Czernowitz maybe than with the language) According to Chalfen  he considered Yiddish as “verdorbenes Deutsch” — “rotten German” — and held all writing in that language in low esteem. The love of the Muttersprache  as the mother’s tongue is a literal given and the central vortex of Celan’s life: it was the mother who loved the German Kultursprache, Hochdeutsch,  and cultivated that love in her son. Like most women of her day and age, she had only limited formal schooling, but she had always been a great reader, especially of classical German literature. She was adamant that only High German be spoken in the household and, although the Antschel family was not well off, insisted that the young Paul should go to the best Jewish kindergarten — which was the only one that had kept German as its teaching language. Though the father seems to have been more interested in having his son schooled in the Jewish religious traditions, the mother prevailed and that part of his education was put off for later.

That Bukovina dialect or Umgangssprache, with its inevitable Yiddish strains, a genuine Rotwelsch,  must have been associated by the young Celan with his father, at that time making a living as a broker in firewood — just as he associated Hebrew with his father and the latter’s Zionist leanings, thwarted, tragically so, by the mother. As an adolescent, Celan seems to have talked much with Ruth Lackner about the question of multilingualism, and, as Chalfen reports:

Immer wieder betonte Paul, er werde trotz seiner guten Kenntnis mehrerer Fremdsprachen und dem Vermögen, neue leicht hinzuzulernen, Gedichte niemals in einer anderen als in seiner Muttersprache schreiben. (Chalfen 1979,101)

This insistence on the mother tongue as the only possible language in which to write poems is of course a near-cliché of romantic poetics, but this is not the place to analyse the presuppostions and philosophical underpinnings of this “truism” in any depth. Celan would come back to this theme several times in his life, the strongest formulation being reported by Ruth Lackner and consigned by Chalfen:

Nur in der Muttersprache kann man die eigene Wahrheit aussagen, in der Fremdsprache lügt der Dichter.  (Chalfen 1979, 148)

Although we do not know the exact date of this quote, it seems plausible that it came at the one moment of his life when he was investigating the possibility of writing in another language, namely in Rumanian. During the first two years following the war, Celan lived in Bucharest and one of his close friends, the Rumanian poet Petre Solomon, convinced him to write in that language. It is clear that the temptation to decide to write in a language other than German must have been there in some form or other, and the vehemence of Celan’s defense of his own decision to write in German, in the face of accusations that he was writing in the language of the murderers, should not simply be taken as a guarantee that the temptation did not exist for him. What is certain at least is that Celan did pose the question to himself, made attempts, even if only half-hearted ones, at using another language and went back to writing in German. He was to stay with his decision throughout his life, and later, in 1961, he formulated the quandary one last time, as an answer to a questionnaire concerning ‘The Problem of the Bilingual’ from the Flinker Bookshop in Paris:

I do not believe there is such a thing as bilingual poetry. Double-talk, yes, this you may find among our various contemporary arts and acrobatics of the word, especially those who manage to establish themselves in blissful harmony with each fashion of consumer culture, being as polyglot as they are polychrome.

Poetry is by necessity a unique instance of language. Hence never — forgive the truism, but poetry, like truth, goes all too often to the dogs — hence never what is double. (Celan 1986, 23)

Much could be made of that “double” — that “Zweimalige,” dismissed out of hand as a generative possibility for “true” poetry — and the disappearance of the murdered father, the other of his genesis,  from the “Toten-gedenken” that dominates the work in favor of the mother. Chalfen’s nostalgic and idealized narrative of Celan’s family romance makes it difficult to get any deep insight into the psychic makeup of young Paul. There are, however, enough veiled allusions to difficulties in his parents’ marriage and to a weak father figure (physically a head smaller than his wife Fritzi), rather unsuccessful in his worldly undertakings and at home dominated by his wife, who compensated by being extremely authoritarian in relation to his son (being beaten and/or locked up for long periods in a room were a regular feature of Paul’s upbringing). We have until now only a few rare essays cautiously approaching the work from a psychological or even psychopathological angle (Janz 1976; Lyon 1987b; Schwerin 1981), and no attempt at a full-blown psychoanalytical approach to Celan’s life (either in relation to the early Freudian family romance or in terms of Celan’s later mental illness) has been made. It is, however, clear from the little information that can be gleaned, that a strong oedipal conflict was in all likelihood left unresolved by the time the tragedy of the war destroyed the family — and that Celan’s later psychic troubles may have their roots as far back as those pre-Shoah days. Cioran, in his little memoir on Paul Celan, suggests as much when he writes: “Something within him must have been broken very early on, even before the misfortunes which crashed down upon his people and himself.” (Cioran 1988, 153)

The Celan opus is eloquent on these matters: the dead mother is (doubly) omnipresent — directly as the remembered addressee or indirectly through the mediation of the German language — while the father is conspicuously absent. One example will suffice here: Celan had heard of his father’s death in a letter from his mother in the autumn of 1942, and a poem written shortly afterward, entitled “Schwarze Flocken,”  is the only occurrence in his work that makes specific mention of the father’s death:

                                    ....wenn schneeig stäubt das Gebein
deines Vaters, unter den Hufen zerknirscht
das Lied von der Zeder.... ( PC III,  25)

But even on this occasion, Celan’s mention of his father’s death — which, we should not forget, was of the same horrendous nature as the mother’s — is put into a double parenthesis. The poem “Schwarze Flocken” is addressed not to the dead father, but to the mother (line 16: “Blutete, Mutter, der Herbst mir hinweg...”), and the mention of the father’s death is only given between quotation marks, as part of a letter from the mother to the son, recreated by the poet. Celan’s concern, and the complaint of the poem, is for the mother: what stays with him from the letter is the mother’s need for a shawl in that cold winter, which in the last line the poet says he is weaving for her. The father’s death is neither commented on nor mourned; in fact, its mention in the (restructured? faithfully transcribed? — we don’t know) letter from the mother is relegated to the status of a subordinated clause: it functions linguistically as a trope that aims at qualifying and intensifying the harshness of the winter weather and thus the mother’s need for a shawl. The second parenthesis excluding the father’s death is not textual but contextual: the poem in question was first published in Celan’s ill-fated early volume Der Sand aus den Urnen . When Celan selected those poems from that volume he wanted to keep for inclusion in the first major book, Breathturn, “Schwarze Flocken” fell by the wayside.

If I insist so strongly on this relationship, it is because in it can be located the dynamic core of Celan’s work, what, in Benjamin’s terminology, drives Celan’s “Intention auf die Sprache,” namely a vortex in which “Mutter” and “Sprache” are inextricably and actively linked, so that with his mother dead, the language too is dead: all his life Celan wrote in the dead (mother’s) tongue, a tongue killed and simultaneously kept alive in and through her murderers, with the intention — a magic “Beschwörung” — of raising the dead (mother) via the poetically (re-alived) language: “alived, after all,” as he puts it in a poem from Breathturn.  It has often been said that all poets write in a foreign tongue, or that “poetry” as such is a foreign language, but for Celan the language of poetry is even further estranged: it is a dead language he has to write in, so as to keep alive the memory of the mother. His poetry then is not so much a necrology as a necrography. Paul Celan, in that sense, is not a “German” poet, but a poet writing in the (dead) (German) language of his (dead) mother.

IV. THE WENDE

One can therefore say that midway through his writing career, a radical change, a poetic "Wende" or turn, occured, later inscribed in the title of the volume Atemwende / Breathturn, heralding the poetics he was to explore for the rest of his life. The poems, which had always been highly complex but rather lush with an abundance of near-surrealistic imagery & sometimes labyrinthine metaphoricity were pared down, the syntax grew tighter & more spiny, his trademark neologisms & telescoping of words increased, while the overall composition of the work became much more 'serial' in nature, i.e. rather than insisting on individual, titled poems, he moved towards a method of composition by cycles & volumes.

Celan seems to have signaled that a change in his poetics was taking place as far back as 1958, when he suggested that for him poetry was no longer a matter of “transfiguring” (verklären). Given "the sinister events in its memory" writes Celan, the language of German poetry has to become "more sober, more factual...'greyer'." This greater factuality checks a core impulse of the lyrical tradition, it's relation to the 'lyre,' to music: "it is... a language which wants to locate even its 'musicality' in such a way that it has nothing in common with the ‘euphony’ which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors." The direct effect of giving up this ‘euphony’ is to increase the accuracy of the language: “It does not transfigure or render ‘poetical’; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible.”

Celan underscores this turning point, this Wende, when he uses the word in the title of the present volume: Atemwende/Breathturn —  an unusual title in the general economy of the naming of his books, at least until that period. Contrary to the titles of the previous volumes, it is neither a phrase, such as Mohn und Gedächtnis, nor a compound word extracted from a poem & set above the whole collection as title, such as Sprachgitter. Unable to link the title directly to a specific poem in the collection, it is difficult to determine or control its meaning by contextualizing it thematically or tropically within the book. Thus the sense that the title is programmatic for the poetics of the work rather than evoking a specific poetic content. And indeed, the word “Atemwende” does occur elsewhere in Celan’s writings — namely in the Meridian speech (delivered on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize in Darmstadt, 22 October 1960) & which is his most important & extended statement on poetics. It is here that we have to look for the theoretical base of the changes from the early to late work.

In the speech, Celan addresses the question of art through the work of Georg Büchner. He defines Lucile’s final exclamation “Long live the king!” as “a word against the grain, the word which cuts the ‘string,’ which does not bow to the ‘bystanders and old warhorses of history.’ It is an act of freedom. It is a step.” In short it is what Celan calls a “Gegenwort,” a counter-word, & thus the word of poetry. But, he goes on, there is an even fiercer “Gegenwort,” & that is Lenz’s silence: “Lenz — that is, Büchner — has gone a step farther than Lucile. His ‘Long live the king’ is no longer a word. It is a terrifying silence. It takes his — and our — breath and words away.” It is in the next sentence that he introduces the term “Atemwende:”

Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way — the way of art — for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and  Medusa’s head, the abyss and  the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction — is it perhaps this turn, this Atemwende,  which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa’s head shrivels and the automatons run down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free?

Perhaps after this, the poem can be itself... can in this now artless, art-free manner go other ways, including the ways of art, time and again?

Perhaps.

I have quoted this passage at length not only because it may be the one which most closely defines Celan’s thinking about poetry, but also to give a sense of its rhetorical texture, its tentative, meditative, one could say groping, progress. The temptation — & many critics have not resisted it — would be to extract from the passage the definitive, affirmative statement “poetry is a breathturn,” but in the process one would have discarded the whole series of rhetorical pointers, the ninefold repetition of the word “vielleicht” (the English translation gives only seven “perhaps”) which turns all the sentences into questions. The passage is, however, not an isolated rhetorical formula in the speech; indeed, one could argue that the whole of the Meridian is a putting into question of the possibilities of art, in Celan’s own words, “eine radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst,” which all of poetry (& art in general) has to submit to today, if it wants to be of essential use. Gerhard Buhr, in an excellent essay analyzing the Meridian speech from exactly that angle, comments on Celan’s expression “eine radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst” as follows:

The phrase "radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst" (radical putting-into-question of art) has a double meaning given the two ways the genitive can read: Art, with "everything that belongs and comes to it"... has to be radically questioned; and it [art] puts other things, such as man or poetry, radically into question. That is exactly why the question of poetry, the putting-into-question of poetry is not exterior to art —: The nature of art is rather to be discussed and clarified in connection with the nature of the question itself.  (Buhr 1988, 171) 

Celan, a careful poet not given to rhetorical statements or linguistic flourishes, who in his late poems will castigate himself & his own early work for an overuse of such ‘flowers,’ needs to be taken quite literally here: he is groping, experimenting, questioning, trying to find his way to a new possibility in poetry. It is a slow process: the term “Atemwende,” coined in this speech of 1960 will reemerge as the title of a volume only seven years later.

Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Todesfuge / Deathfugue Pierre Joris & Paul Celan (Small Orange Import, 2024), Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final volumes of Paul Celan translations came out: Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG) & Microliths They are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose (CMP). In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil published Arabia (not so) Deserta (Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi literature). Other recent works include A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with P. Cockelbergh & J. Newberger, CMP, 2020), earlier: Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018) & The Book of U (poems, with Nicole Peyrafitte, Simoncini 2017). Forthcoming are Diwans of Exile: A Pierre Joris Reader, edited by Pierre Joris  & Ariel Resnikoff (CMP 2025), & Poasis II (Selected Poems 2000-2024), Wesleyan University Press, 2025. He lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, pluridisciplinary artist Nicole Peyrafitte.

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