Breathturn into Timestead Read online

  Freigegeben

  Bakensammler

  Aus Verlornem

  Was uns

  II

  Einmal

  Beilschwärme

  Vorgewußt

  Bei Brancusi, zu Zweit

  Wo ich

  Seit langem

  Todtnauberg

  Sink

  Jetzt

  Einem Bruder in Asien

  Angerempelt

  Wie du

  Highgate

  Blitzgeschreckt

  III

  Wurfscheibe

  Klopf

  Die entsprungenen

  In den Dunkelschlägen

  Streubesitz

  Der von den unbeschriebenen

  Schneid die Gebetshand

  Was es an Sternen bedarf

  Ich kann dich noch sehen

  Lauter

  Im Leeren

  Die lehmigen Opfergüsse

  Das Wildherz

  IV

  Die Ewigkeiten

  Herzschall-Fibeln

  Aneinander

  Ein Extra-Schlag Nacht

  Hinter frostgebänderten Käfern

  Die Irin

  Die mir hinterlassne

  Verworfene

  Fertigungshalle

  In der Blasenkammer

  Magnetische Bläue

  Vorflut

  Die Mantis

  Kein Halbholz

  Schwimmhäute

  Anredsam

  V

  Oranienstraße 1

  Brunnenartig

  Mit Traumantrieb

  Für den Lerchenschatten

  Der durchschnittene

  Fahlstimmig

  Schalltotes Schwestergehäus

  Wetterfühlige Hand

  Im Zeitwinkel schwört

  Auch mich

  Die rückwärtsgesprochenen

  Allmählich clowngesichtig

  Sperrtonnensprache

  Unter der Flut

  VI

  Wahngänger-Augen

  Sperriges Morgen

  Merkblätter-Schmerz

  Streu Ocker

  Schwanengefahr

  Schaltjahrhunderte

  Quellpunkte

  Treckschutenzeit

  Du sei wie du

  Wirk nicht voraus

  SCHNEEPART

  I

  Ungewaschen, unbemalt

  Du liegst

  Lila Luft

  Brunnengräber

  Das angebrochene Jahr

  Unlesbarkeit

  Huriges Sonst

  Was näht

  Ich höre, die Axt hat geblüht

  Mit der Stimme der Feldmaus

  In Echsen-

  Schneepart

  II

  Die nachzustotternde Welt

  Du mit der Finsterzwille

  Eingejännert

  Schludere

  Stückgut

  Von querab

  Holzgesichtiger

  Largo

  Zur Nachtordnung

  Mit den Sackgassen

  Etwas wie Nacht

  III

  Warum dieses jähe Zuhause

  Warum aus dem Ungeschöpften

  Mapesbury Road

  Der überkübelte Zuruf

  Hervorgedunkelt

  Mit dir Docke

  Auch der Runige

  Deinem, auch deinem

  Mauerspruch

  Für Eric

  Wer pflügt nichts um?

  Levkojen

  Du durchklafterst

  Für Eric

  Dein Blondschatten

  Die Abgründe streunen

  Dein Mähnen-Echo

  IV

  Das Im-Ohrgerät

  Der halbzerfressene

  Ein Blatt

  Playtime

  Aus der Vergängnis

  Offene Glottis

  Aus dem Moorboden

  Hochmoor

  Erzflitter

  Einkanter

  Mit Rebmessern

  Lößpuppen

  V

  Stahlschüssiger Sehstein

  Und Kraft und Schmerz

  Miterhoben

  Steinschlag

  Ich schreite

  Leuchtstäbe

  Ein Leseast

  Zerr dir

  Kalk-Krokus

  Es sind schon

  In den Einstiegluken

  Und jetzt

  Schnellfeuer-Perihel

  Wir Übertieften

  Hinter Schläfensplittern

  Bergung

  Das gedunkelte

  Die Ewigkeit

  ZEITGEHÖFT

  I

  Wanderstaude, du fängst dir

  Gehässige Monde

  Gold

  Von der sinkenden Walstirn

  Du liegst hinaus

  Das seidenverhangene Nirgend

  Die Weinbergsmauer erstürmt

  Erst wenn ich dich

  In der fernsten

  Eingeschossen

  Alle die Schlafgestalten, kristallin

  Zwei Sehwülste, zwei

  Vor mein

  Du wirfst mir

  Das Flüsterhaus

  Kleine Nacht

  An die Haltlosigkeiten

  Ich albere

  Dein Uhrengesicht

  Ich lotse dich

  Meine

  Ein Stern

  Kleines Wurzelgeträum

  II

  Mandelnde

  Es stand

  Die Glut

  Wir, die wie der Strandhafer Wahren

  Ein Ring, zum Bogenspannen

  Das Leuchten

  Du gleißende

  Komm

  Einen Stiefelvoll

  Die Posaunenstelle

  Die Pole

  Der Königsweg

  Es kommt

  Ich trink Wein

  Es wird

  Das Nichts

  Im Glockigen

  Wie ich

  Das Fremde

  Umlichtet

  III

  Fortgesalbt

  Ortswechsel

  Die Welt

  Was bittert

  Die gesenkten

  Krokus

  Rebleute

  COMMENTARY

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES IN ENGLISH

  INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES IN GERMAN

  COPYRIGHT

  Introduction

  Since his death in 1970, Paul Celan’s reputation, though already firmly established during his lifetime, has grown exponentially. He is now considered the major German-language poet of the period after 1945, and by some (George Steiner, for example) even as the major European poet of that period. Only Rilke, among last century’s German-language poets, can conceivably match his fame and impact on German and world poetry. Despite the difficulties the work presents (or maybe because of them), the usual postmortem eclipse, so often visited upon poets well-known and influential during their lifetimes, did not touch Celan: the flow of essays, commentaries, and books on his work has not only continued unabated, but has picked up speed and grown to flood-tide proportions—an informed guess would put it at some six-thousand-plus items worldwide by now. Translations of his work into a wide range of foreign languages are myriad. A benchmark of limit-possibilities for many younger poets in Europe, America, and beyond, Celan’s work has also proved a major attraction for contemporary philosophy. As Hölderlin functioned for the late Heidegger, so does Celan represent a lodestone pointing to directions “north of the future” for philosophers and thinkers as diverse as Otto Pöggeler, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean Bollack, Anne Carson, and Peter Szondi, who have all devoted at least one book to his work.

  At the same time, the publication of Celan’s work has progressed apace so that we now have the oeuvre available nearly in toto (with the exception, mainly, of personal diaries and notebooks) in a variety of forms. Thus the slightly fewer than a thous
and poems are distributed over eleven individual volumes, and are gathered in several collected works editions, including an annotated collected poems, different selected works volumes, and in two major critical-historical editions based on the individual volumes. Beyond the poetry proper, we have some two hundred fifty pages of prose available, and nearly seven hundred pages of poetry translated by Celan from eight languages and assembled in two volumes. To date, some fifteen volumes of correspondence have been published, if only a few of these in English translation so far. Though we do not yet have an official or reliable and exhaustive biography (except for Israel Chalfen’s Paul Celan: Biography of His Youth), the two-volume edition of the annotated correspondence between Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange1 can stand in for such a book (although available right now only in French and German—and in an updated 2008 Spanish edition—it is, however, in the process of being translated into English as of this writing). Besides several volumes that gather historical, archival, and critical materials—one on the Goll affair, others on his stay in Vienna and on his hometown, Czernowitz, as well as one on his activities as a translator—there is also an annotated volume of Celan’s philosophical library inventorying some five hundred books in six languages (German, French, ancient Greek, English, Latin, and Russian) and reproducing all the text extracts underlined or marked by Celan, as well as his handwritten marginalia. At the end of this book the reader will find a selected bibliography of critical texts on Celan’s work available in English.

  1. “DEATH IS A MASTER FROM GERMANY”

  Celan’s life is inseparable from the fate of the Jewish people in the twentieth century. The Shoah is thus core to the life and work, even if Celan did his best to make sure that neither would be overdetermined by or become reducible to those events. He is a survivor of khurbn (to use Jerome Rothenberg’s “ancient and dark word”), and his work is a constant bearing witness to those atrocities; even when it imagines a world beyond those historical limits, it remains eingedenk (to use Hölderlin’s word), that is, mindful, conscious of said events. Born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi, in Ukraine), the capital of the Bukovina, a province of the Habsburg Empire that fell to Romania in 1920, the year of his birth, 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 and culture—and on his Jewish roots: both his parents came from Orthodox and, on one side, Hasidic family backgrounds. The languages were multiple: besides the usual Czernowitz languages—Romanian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish—the family at home spoke High German, somewhat different from the Czernowitzian dialectical German with “its Austrian informality and Slavic breadth, and interwoven with Yiddish idioms.”2 Following his father’s Zionist ideals, young Paul attended the local Hebrew grade school, Safah-Ivriah, for three years, though moving eventually to the Romanian high school, where he showed great interest in botany and French. Because of growing anti-Semitism, he moved to another state high school, where he added Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek to his studies. As a German-speaking student, he studied primarily the classics of German literature, supported in this by his mother and from 1937 on by his friend Edith Horowitz, whose father, a scholar of German literature, had a library very rich in this field. After his Bar Mitzvah Paul stopped studying Hebrew and began distancing himself from his father’s ideological leanings. At this time he also began to take part in meetings of communist youth groups, got involved in antifascist activities, and read intensely in the classics of socialist literature.3

  Celan, always reticent of speaking of private matters, left little autobiographical information, and the only somewhat expansive statement concerning his homeland occurs in the so-called Bremen speech, where he writes:

  The region from which I come to you—with what detours! but then, is there such a thing as a detour?—will be unfamiliar to most of you. It is the home of many of the Hassidic stories which Martin Buber has retold in German. It was—if I may flesh out this topographical sketch with a few details which are coming back to me from a great distance—it was a landscape where both people and books lived. There, in this former province of the Habsburg monarchy, now dropped from history, I first encountered the name of Rudolf Alexander Schröder while reading Rudolf Borchardt’s “Ode with Pomegranate” … Within reach, though far enough, what I could aim to reach, was Vienna. You know what happened, in the years to come, even to this nearness.4

  On November 9, 1938, the night that came to be known as Kristallnacht and that saw the first major Nazi pogrom against Jews in Germany and parts of Austria, Paul Celan traveled by train through Germany, an occasion remembered in the poem “La Contrescarpe,” where he writes: “Via Kraków / you came, at the Anhalter / railway station / a smoke flowed toward your glance, / it already belonged to tomorrow.” He was on his way via Paris to Tours, France, to study medicine at the local university, obedient to his parents’ wishes. During this year in France he came in contact with a range of contemporary French literature and, in fact, spent much time on literary matters while slowly turning away from his premed studies. He had already started to write poetry a few years earlier, and in the summer of 1939, after returning to Czernowitz, and unable to return to Tours and his medical studies because of the outbreak of the war, Celan decided on a major career change, enrolling in Romance studies at his hometown’s university. The oldest surviving poems date from 1939 but would be published only posthumously.

  The following year Soviet troops occupied his hometown, only to be replaced in 1941 by Romanian and German Nazi troops—specifically, Einsatzgruppe D, led by SS-Brigadeführer Ohlendorf, which reached Czernowitz on July 6. The SS had one essential job to fulfill—“Energisch durchgreifen, die Juden liquidieren” (to energetically liquidate the Jews), as they didn’t trust the Romanians to do the job thoroughly enough. On July 7, the Great Temple went up in flames and for the next three days the hunt was open: 682 Jews were murdered. By late August, Ohlendorf triumphantly reported to Berlin that more than 3,000 had been killed. On October 11, the ghetto was created—the first one in the history of the Bukovina and of Czernowitz. Then began the Umsiedlung (relocation) of most Jews to Transnistria. The Romanians managed to argue with the Germans and to retain 15,000 Jews in Czernowitz to keep the city functioning. The Antschel family were among those who, at least for the time being, remained in the ghetto. Paul was ordered to forced labor on construction sites. Then, in June 1942, a new wave of arrests and deportations began, taking place primarily on Saturday nights. With the help of his friend Ruth Lackner, Paul had found a large and comfortable hideout, but his parents refused adamantly to take refuge there, preferring to remain in their own house—where Celan’s mother did prepare rucksacks in case they should be deported. On one of those nights, disobeying his parents’ orders, Paul left the house and decided to spend the night in the hideout. When he returned the next morning he found his home sealed off: his parents had been deported.

  Celan continued to work in forced labor camps, where in the late fall of 1942 he learned that his father, physically broken by the slave labor he was subjected to, had been killed by the SS. Later that winter the news reached him that his mother too had been shot. These killings, especially that of his mother, were to remain the core experience of his life. He was released in February 1944, when the labor camps were closed. In April, Soviet troops occupied Czernowitz without a fight. Celan was put to work as a medical auxiliary in a psychiatric clinic and made one trip as an ambulance assistant to Kiev. He remained in Czernowitz for one more year, enrolled at the now Ukrainian-Russian university there, studying English literature while working as a translator for local newspapers. In February 1944 he had put together a first typescript of poems, expanding it in the fall of that year to include the poems written during his labor camp days. He entrusted this manuscript to his friend Ruth Kraft, who took it with her to Bucharest to present it to the poet Alfred Margul-Sperber. (This book would be published
posthumously in 1986 as Gedichte 1938–1944, with a foreword by Ruth Kraft.) In April 1945 he left his hometown, Czernowitz, never to return. But the Bukovinian “meridian” (to use one of his favorite lines of orientation) would always be present; he mentioned “my (Czernowitz) meridian” in a letter to Gideon Kraft as late as 1968,5 as he spoke of Gustav Landauer and Leon Kellner, two elder Bukovinians who had been important to him. As one commentator put it: “Celan’s poetry transforms the main characteristic of Bukovina’s culture into a structural principle. It is the legendary Bukovinian receptivity to heterogeneous ethnic traditions with which Celan infuses the rich intertextuality of his entire oeuvre.”6

  * * *

  For two years he settled in Bucharest, making a living as a translator (mainly from Russian into Romanian) and working at becoming a poet, remaining true to his mother’s language, German, as he would do all his life, but also trying his hand briefly at poems in Romanian. He was clear about this choice, stating on a number of occasions that there is no such thing as bilingual poetry, that the poet has to write in his mother tongue. The strongest formulation of this conviction was reported by Ruth Lackner, to whom he said: “Only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s own truth, in a foreign language the poet lies.”7 It is, however, in Bucharest and in a Romanian translation by his friend Petre Solomon that the poem that would make his fame—“Todesfuge” (Death-fugue)—was first published in May 1947, in the magazine Contemporanul, as “Tangoul Mortii” (Tango of death). It is also here that Paul Antschel, who signed many of the translations of that time with various pseudonyms, decided to change his name and anagrammatically transformed the Romanian spelling of Antschel, Ançel, into Celan.

  But Vienna, the old Hapsburg capital, which the German-cultured Bukovinians and Czernowitzians had always looked up to as their cultural center, beckoned, and in December 1947 Celan clandestinely crossed over to Austria via Hungary—from the little information we have, an arduous journey but one made necessary by the tightening of the Iron Curtain. The only German-speaking place the poet was ever to live in, the Vienna of those years8—Orson Welles’s The Third Man comes close to what it must have felt like to Celan—was relatively hospitable to the young poet, though the minimal and superficial denazification program it had submitted itself to must have left the survivor uneasy, to say the least. Through an introduction from Margul-Sperber he met Otto Basil, the editor of the avant-garde literary magazine Der Plan, in which he would publish a number of poems, and at some point he went to meet Ludwig von Ficker, who had been a close friend of Georg Trakl’s, and who celebrated the young Bukovinian poet as “heir to Else Lasker-Schüler.” A meeting with the surrealist painter Edgar Jené led to the writing of the first essay by Celan that we have, “Edgar Jené and the Dream of the Dream,” composed as a foreword to a Jené exhibition catalogue. He also met a number of people who would remain lifelong friends, among them Nani and Klaus Demus, and maybe most important, the young poet Ingeborg Bachman, who even after their early love affair faded was to remain a close friend and a staunch defender in the later, darker days of the Goll affair. It was also in Vienna that Celan readied his first book, Der Sand aus den Urnen (The sand from the urns), for publication—though he would recall the book and have it destroyed, judging that the many typos and mistakes lethally disfigured his work.