“AFTER YOU PAUL AT PONT MIRABEAU” READING, WRITING, ADDRESSING AND TRANSLATING CELAN IN(TO) ENGLISH By Christine Frank *** The Montréal Review, April 2025 |
|||
I. Celan in English In a recent issue of this magazine, the German poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), widely known for his Holocaust poem “Todesfuge” – “Death Fugue”, was profiled by his American translator, Pierre Joris who reflects on a lifetime of work inspired by Celan's poems.1 Joris, having completed his secondary education in Luxembourg, subsequently relocated to Paris to pursue further academic studies. He began his study of Celan’s poetic works in the 1960s. This endeavor, which would persist throughout his lifetime, encompassed not only the role of a translator but also that of a writer and a poet in his own right. He later transferred to Bard College for his doctoral studies. Here he worked with Robert Kelly, translating Celan’s entire volume of poetry Atemwende, which had been published in 1967. Nevertheless, these translations were not permitted to be published since Celan had granted exclusive rights to the translation of his works into English to Michael Hamburger, a poet who had emigrated from Germany to England prior to World War II. Celan’s decision was also respected for an extended period of time by his heirs. Joris’s translation of Breath Turn was eventually published in 1994. Subsequently, he has published translations of all of Celan’s poems and prose texts, some of which have undergone multiple revisions over time. The most recent volume of Celan’s poems translated by Joris, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, was published in 2020, marking the centenary of the poet’s passing. It is noteworthy that no other language has seen a comparable level of translation of Celan’s works. Furthermore, with the exception of Joris, no single translator has translated the entirety of Celan’s poetry and prose. In addition to Pierre Joris’ translations, there are several other notable translations of Celan’s poems that have had a significant and enduring influence on American post-war literature. The most prominent of these is by Jerome Rothenberg, who introduced Celan to an American audience with several of his poems in his 1958 anthology, New Young German Poets. The slim volume made a lasting impression on an entire generation of American poets.
The initial English translation of Celan’s seminal poem “Todesfuge” – “Death Fugue” – was notably undertaken by the American art critic Clement Greenberg, who published it in the journal Commentary on January 1, 1955, shortly before Michael Bullock’s translation was released in the spring issue of The Jewish Quarterly. To date, at least twenty translations of the poem into English have been published. In addition to Michael Hamburger’s 1972 selection of Celan’s poems, which was subsequently revised and enlarged in 2001, John Felstiner has also translated a substantial portion of Celan’s poetic oeuvre. Additionally, Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky (1985), Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin (1986), Nikolai B. Popov and Heather McHugh (2001), and Susan H. Gillespie (2013) have published select translations. Meanwhile, complete translations of individual volumes of Celan’s poetry have been published by Ian Fairley (Fathomsuns and Benighted, 2001; Snow Part, 2007; Fairly is currently working on Sand from the Urns) and David Young (From Threshold to Threshold, 2010; Language Behind Bars, 2012; No One's Rose, 2014). The spectrum of Celan translators encompasses poets such as Michael Hamburger and Rosmarie Waldrop, who translated Celan’s Collected Prose (1986), as well as scholars such as John Felstiner, who has also authored a monograph on Celan’s work that remains authoritative (Poet, Survivor, Jew; 1995). It is noteworthy that a considerable number of the most significant studies on Celan were conducted within the context of American research. Lawrence Langer was the first who had dedicated a chapter to Celan’s “Todesfuge” in one of the earliest books to examine The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975). In the same year, George Steiner lauded Celan as “almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945” at the centre of his seminal study, After Babel (1975). Jacques Derrida conceived his thoughts on Shibboleth (Pour Paul Celan) for the first time in October 1984 at the International Paul Celan Symposium in Seattle. Subsequently, Werner Hamacher, during his tenure as Professor of German at Johns Hopkins University (1984-1998), further developed a post-structuralist interpretation of Celan’s work. Currently, Vivian Liska and Michael C. Levine are among the most prominent researchers in the field of Celan studies. While these theoretical discussions of Celan’s poems attracted considerable attention far beyond the discipline, the voices of American authors for whom Celan had become a pivotal influence in their own development have been largely overlooked. These authors were the first to recognize the significance of Celan's poetry, which had a profound and productive impact on their own writing. Moreover, since the 1980s, a number of anthologies have been published, containing the testimonies of these authors. The inaugural issue of the journal Studies in 20th Century Literature was devoted to a number of these authors, and was entitled “Encounters: American Poets on Paul Celan” (Vol. 8, No. 1, 1983). In 1988, Benjamin Hollander edited a volume entitled “Translating Tradition: Celan in France”. Among the most prominent voices in this project was that of Paul Auster, who resided in Paris for a number of years in the early 1970s. Auster composed several poems about Celan, including “White,” which commences with the following dedication:
It was in his Bremen Literary Prize speech, that Celan had employed the now-famous metaphor of composing a poem as being akin to sending a message in a bottle – an image that subsequent poets have been swift to adopt. In his ‘confessional poems’, “Horizon” and “Fore-Shadows”, there is a distinct aura of intimacy with which Auster’s poetics engages with Celan’s use of breath imagery:
In the special issue “Encounters” (1983), an extensive essay by Paul Auster, entitled “The Poetry of Exile”, is included at the beginning. Here, Auster also offers a commentary on his experience of reading Celan’s poems:
American authors have incorporated the work of Paul Celan, the poet of the Holocaust, who originated from Bukovina, the easternmost crown land of the Habsburg Empire, into the canon of American modernism. The traces left by Celan’s poems in American poetry since 1955 are incalculable. They have hardly been systematically recorded. Yet it should be emphasized that the majority of American authors have primarily read Celan in translation. Furthermore, until the 1990s, they could only access a limited selection of his poems in translation.
II. Harmonizing With Paul Celan
The Celan they encountered was not the poet who consistently and exclusively writes in his murderous mother tongue of German, but rather a poet who has been converted to American English. Even so, in this linguistic arena, Celan’s idiom has been the source of a remarkable number of resonances. One illustrative example of Celan’s influence within the domain of New American Writing is the following poem by Elizabeth Robinson:2 Lorine Niedecker Harmonizing With Paul Celan
This is but one of numerous texts by American authors dedicated to Paul Celan that are particularly noteworthy for their haunting quality. These include poems, prose, and memoirs that were collected in the 2011 anthology Homage to Paul Celan by Ilya Kaminsky and G C Waldrep. Upon first encountering the book in 2017, I was permitted only limited contact, and it was presented to me in a manner that suggested a degree of reverence. It was somehow ‘served’ to me in white gloves on a pillow with a lead band in a supervised reading room at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a location where access to valuable and rare books was permitted solely for reading purposes, with no possibility of borrowing. Accordingly, the books were treated with the utmost care. Nevertheless, Homage to Paul Celan is not an exceedingly rare book, yet it may be regarded as a document of contemporary American literature that is deemed to be somewhat exclusive. It was conceived by a group of writers and translators who are dedicated readers of Paul Celan’s poetry. And, in the spirit of Celan, it is addressed to a ‘counterpart’ (“Gegenüber”), to the unknown reader in the future, as Osip Mandelstam put it. A mere few days after my initial examination of the volume in a reading room at one of the United States' most esteemed universities, I received my own copy via amazon. Subsequently, I have placed multiple further orders and was happy to present the volume as a gift on several occasions…
While Paul Auster’s “lyrical I” in his aforementioned poems addressed the poet, the more recent poem by Elizabeth Robinson does not employ the same direct address. Instead it reverts to the "we" of the “Todesfuge” – “Death Fugue”, obviously recalling words and images from Celan’s poems. As is characteristic of many of them, Robinson’s poem also addresses a ‘counterpart’, sometimes even in a stern imperative tone. In her poem, Robinson contrasts “knowledge” with a “hermetic correspondence” that was forsaken prior to the “exchange.” The poem oscillates between buoyancy and sinking, exploring the existential implications of writing, translating, and re-writing. In the interpolated imperatives, “Scrub the floors./ Chew the sleepcorn,” a neologism of Celan’s from his poem “Hohles Lebensgehöft” – “Hollow Lifehomestead” from the volume Atemwende interweaves with an image evoking the poet Lorine Niedecker. In Celan’s poem, the neologism reads as follows:
Does Robinson’s poem thus engage with the “snow-/conversations” of Celan’s poem, and does she continue this engagement with contemporary readers? Celan’s poem has been accessible in English translations for a considerable period of time. Joël Golb was the first to offer an interpretation of the poem in an American publication. He uses the term “sleepgrain” (Word Traces, 1994, 185). Similarly, John Felstiner (2001, 253) translated it in this manner, while Michael Hamburger (2002, 219) employed the term “sleep grain”. Susan Gillespie selected the term “sleepseeds” (2013, 113). Pierre Joris is credited with coining the term “sleepcorn” (Breathturn 1996), which is subsequently referenced in Robinson’s: “Chew the sleepcorn”. Here, it is mingled with a phrase from another poem of Celan’s, “Mit den Sackgassen/sprechen” from the collection “Schneepart” (1971), wherein it is rendered thus:
Here, too, Celan speaks in the translation by Pierre Joris. In contrast, the phrase “scrub the floors” evokes the other poet referenced in the poem’s title, Lorine Niedecker. Born in 1903, she experienced a period of financial hardship during the 1930s, during which she was employed as a cleaning woman at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital while simultaneously pursuing her literary aspirations. At that time, she was in close contact with Louis Zukofsky, who provided support for the publication of her poems. Another close associate was Cid Corman, the editor of the influential poetry magazine, Origin. In 1969, Corman facilitated the introduction of Niedecker to the works of Jean Daive, a young French poet from Paris who, at the same time, was closely acquainted with Paul Celan, one of his most esteemed poetic colleagues. Celan translated Daive’s inaugural significant work, the extended poem Décimale blanche from 1967, into German (this translation was only published posthumously). Corman, for his part, undertook the task of translating White Decimal into English and subsequently published it in Origin 13 (Third series, April 1969). Daive’s text constituted a pivotal experience for Niedecker. A few months later, in October of the same year, Corman published a sequence of poems by Paul Celan in his translation in Origin 15, albeit without authorisation. This prompted the poet in Paris to immediately hire a lawyer to take action against Corman.
Did Niedecker ever get to read Celan’s poetic works? In any case, a web can be spun around Niedecker – as Robinson does in her poem – that connects Celan, American and French poetry of the post-war period in a variety of ways. It seems noteworthy that in contrast Daive perceived Celan as a gateway to American poetry: “Jean Daive had first heard about Creeley in 1965, from Paul Celan who had given the American poet ‘the momentum of an event,’” as Abigal Lang found out (2016). Daive commenced the process of translating Creeley's work and later undertook a visit to the United States himself, thereby further extending the network. It took approximately half a century for these underlying connections within American poetry to emerge. Lang identifies 1970 as the pivotal year for the intertextual network linking Creeley, Niedecker and Celan in Daive's mind, given the deaths of all three in that year. John Steen also perceives a close connection, which he characterises as “Stuttered Orientations. Robert Creeley and Paul Celan via Jean Daive” (Steen, 2017). And there was still another translator active during this period: Rosmarie Waldrop, who had already translated Celan’s Collected Prose in 1986. On her part, Waldrop translated Jean Daive’s precious recollections of the discussions and excursions he had with Celan in the final years preceding the laters suicide, Sous la coupole (1996), and published them in English under the title Under the Dome. The memoir was republished in 2020, coinciding with the centenary of Celan’s birth.
III. Relating to Celan via trans-lation
The network that is spun from the poems of Paul Celan, of course, does not only concern the texts of this one author. It concerns dialogues and resonances, as well as readings, translations, and rewritings of Celan’s poems. And it encompasses several generations of American and French poets since the end of World War II. Surprisingly enough, it obviously has remained productive to this day. It is evident that the mediating function of translation is an indispensable aspect of this process. A defining feature of this network is the ‘revitalisation’ of Celan’s poems in contexts that extend far beyond Germany, its history, its language, and the established measures and conventions of German-language literature. And it can be traced back to the American avant-garde of the early 1950s. However, when Celan is read in English and in the context of the English language, his poems consistently reveal nuances that are often subtle and may not be immediately apparent when reading them in the original German. To give but one example: One of the recurring themes in the perception of Celan’s poems in English is the presence of echoes of Shakespearean works. For instance, Anne Carson recognizes Shakespeare’s King Lear in Celan’s poetics of negation (Carson 116). Tom Mandel continues Celan’s translations of Shakespeare in his own work, Twenty One Sonnets, in which he translates Celan’s translations of Shakespeare text for text:
Mandel’s approach to translation as a form of reference to the text of the other, as a way of ‘relating’ among ‘relatives’, a ‘siblings’ juxtaposition, takes up Celan’s poetics from a point where he himself recognizes and simultaneously questions the comparability and kinship between the two. He seeks dialogue and, in doing so, demonstrates the singularity of his speech, experiencing closeness as a productive-estranging phenomenon. Ultimately, Mandel lets Celan speak, in German, in the wording of his sole published prose narrative, “Gespräch im Gebirg” (Conversation in the Mountains). Mandel leaves the wording untranslated and uncommented upon. In this passage, Celan speaks for himself directly, in a way that is untranslatable. He does so from a point that is central to his history, his memory, and his speaking. This point defines his speaking.
IV. Resistance through language
In his introduction to the second volume of the series Poems for the Millennium edited together with Pierre Joris, Jerome Rothenberg names Paul Celan and Charles Olson as the forerunners of post-1945 poetry: “it was the writers of the postwar as such—Celan & Olson the first presented here—who offered a resistance through language & through a poetry driven back into the body (...), to issue therefrom in a poetics of the breath (‘projective verse’—Olson) or of a ‘breathturn’ (Celan)” (Rothenberg 1998, 406). Both Rothenberg and Joris played a pivotal role in enabling Celan to occupy a unique position in American post-war poetry, through their contributions as translators. In the preface to his anthology Word Traces (1994), Aris Fioretos draws attention to the significant impact that Celan has had on the poetry and literature of subsequent generations. He further argues that Celan’s poems only began to be received in the United States after they had been studied in France, that is, in the 1990s. The period of intensive scholarly engagement with Celan's poetry and poetics reached its zenith at that time. This period also encompasses Felstiner's translation work and, ultimately, his monograph. Nevertheless, it can be argued that this engagement was in some way anticipated by the long-standing presence of Celan's poetry at a number of prominent academic institutions and in various poetry groups. There have been networks of authors before who have been in contact with each other since the days of Black Mountain College and the San Francisco Renaissance. These networks have been instrumental in disseminating the work of Celan among such writers as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley at an early stage in their careers. From this point onward, the networks extended to associated authors based at Bard College, such as Robert Kelly, as well as those at Brown University in Providence, RI, where, on the other hand, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop operated their publishing house Burning Deck, which exerted considerable influence over an extended period. The interconnections between the mutual readings and translations of Paul Celan, Robert Creeley, Jean Daive and Rosmarie Waldrop serve to illustrate this point. An additional interconnection emerged around Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly and Pierre Joris. Or consider Robert Duncan, who was also a member of the aforementioned network. In a recent book chapter entitled “Poetry After ‘Poetry After Auschwitz’,” Robert Kaufman illuminates Robert Duncan’s remarkable correspondence to Celan, using the example of Duncan’s poem “A Song From The Structures Of Rime Ringing As The Poet Paul Celans Sings” (Kaufman 2022). Duncan wrote the poem, according to Kaufman, “sometime in ‘76 or ’77, possibly in his San Francisco home but probably in Paris during an extended working visit; the poem subsequently appeared in his book Ground Work: Before the War, published four years before his death in 1988” (and thus well before the intensive academic engagement with Celan’s poems in America, which, according to Fioretos, did not begin until around 1990): A SONG FROM THE STRUCTURES OF RIME RINGING Something has wreckt the world I am in I think I have wreckt Nothing has wreckt the world I am in. the possibility of no thing so It is totally untranslatable. […] Duncan does not aim at addressing Celan or composing a tribute to the revered poet. Instead, the poem is an exploration of the impact of Celan’s unique poetic ‘sound’, characterized by its use of rhyme and structure, on the reader’s understanding of his own existence. The poem is concerned with what is perceived as the utmost essential – the poetic and, at the same time, the existence. It is this, the coincidence of both, which proves to be true, and in this instance – “totally untranslatable”. Translation would remain the crux of the encounter between American poets and the poems of Paul Celan. In his writings, renowned L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Charles Bernstein asserts: “No poet cracks open the possibilities for translation more than Paul Celan. With Celan, translation is not a supplemental activity but a hermeneutic necessity.” (Bernstein 2010) Bernstein has also addressed Celan in his own writing and translations. Taking a commentary by Pierre Joris on his translation of Celan’s Heidegger poem “Todtnauberg” as a starting point, he proceeded to compare several translations of the poem into English, compile them, and produce a quasi-homophonic translation of his own. This translation further intensifies the sense of the uncanny conveyed by the poem in German by inserting German terms not present in the original. In this instance, the sound element is able to transcend the semantic content of the original text without any loss of meaning. Conversely, the homophonic translation appears to accentuate the poem’s intention (in the sense of Walter Benjamin) to a greater extent. The following are the concluding verses of the poem in Bernstein’s version (placed first in print) and in Celan’s version (second):
IV. Poems after Paul Celan
Ilya Kaminsky, one of the two editors of the volume Homage to Paul Celan (2011),calls the American trans poet, writer and translator Jos Charles, who was born in 1988, “a cousin of Niedecker and Celan and Valentine, a maker of silences that speak, of grievances that lyric us.” It was only years later that Charles refers to Paul Celan explicitly in the acknowledgements of her award-winning volume of poetry, feeld (2018). In the volume a Year & other poems (2022), several poems remember Celan, including “December”:
When Charles refers here to the Pont Mirabeau as the site of Celan’s presumed suicide in April 1970 in Paris, she is taking up one of the most common topoi in the literary legacy of Celan. However, the reverence for the historical figure of the poet – "after you, Paul at Pont Mirabeau" – also represents an understanding of one of the fundamental principles of his poetry in the context of contemporary poetry: “The poem is not only ‘after’ Celan insofar it comes after him (bearing his influence)’, as Bradley Trumpfheller writes in an article in the „Cleveland Review of Books, “but it is also ‘after’ him in the sense of chasing, going after him. The depth of the correspondence between Celan’s writing and Charles’ poetry is, I think, thrilling […] I’m interested in holding up what resonates between a Year & other poems and Celan’s idea of “ein ansprechbares Du,” an approachable you, an addressable you—literally, to-speakable.“ (Trumpfheller 2022) From today’s perspective it becomes increasingly evident that upon their arrival in the Americas in the form of English translations, Celan’s poems have exerted a profound influence. This impact can be apprehended in the poems composed by American writers that resonate with Celan’s essence, his search for a counterpart, an ‘Other’. In his review of Jos Charles’s volume of poetry, Trumpfheller makes a pertinent reference to Paul Celan, as well as to Lorine Niedecker's 1934 calendar poems, which were sent as an intimate gift to Louis Zukofsky. “Poems are gifts for the observant,” Celan memorably said in 1960. It seems that his poems found a particularly large number of observant recipients among American poets and writers of his time, as well as those of today. ***
***
*** References
*** FROM THE ARCHIVES ***
By Pierre Joris The Montréal Review, December 2024 *** KAFKA TEACHES ME HOW TO TEACH KAFKA By James Martel The Montréal Review, March 2025 *** “VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL’D”: TEACHING WALT WHITMAN By Stephen Haven The Montréal Review, August 2024 *** TEACHING MILOSZ: THE EVOLUTION OF A POET by Ira Sadoff The Montréal Review, February 2025 *** |
|
||
The Montréal Review © All rights reserved. ISSN 1920-2911
