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  From Hölderlin’s hallucinatory walk to the Bordelais and back, to von Horvath’s strange death (a branch severed by lightning killed him on the Champs-Élysées), France has always proved a point of focal, not to say fatal, attraction—and certainly often enough, a point of rupture—for poets and writers of the German language: suffice it to add in this context the names of Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin. For most of these, their stays in France were limited, and freely chosen. But often also they were a matter of political and/or intellectual exile. Few of them, however, had as symbiotic and long-term a relationship with France as Paul Celan. The latter clearly had not found what he was looking for in Vienna, and after less than a year—and even before his first book came out—he left Austria to head for Paris, where he arrived in July 1948. The city by the Seine, the ville lumière, was to remain his home until his death in late April 1970. It was not easy for him to adapt and make a living at first, but while doing this he never lost sight of his and poetry’s aim: he worked tirelessly at getting his poetry published and known in the German-language areas, be it Austria or Germany. In early 1952 he was invited by the already well-known Gruppe 47 to read in their yearly gathering in Niendorf, and this started a pattern of forays into Germany that would continue until just a few months before his death. His first major volume of poems, Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and memory), was published later that year by the German publisher DVA (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt) in Stuttgart, and 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 and most-anthologized poems of the post-war era, the “Todesfuge.” A new volume of poems followed roughly every four years, with that rhythm accelerating, as we shall see, during the last years of his life.

  In Paris, he made contact with the literary scene and soon met a number of writers who were to stay important for him. Among them was the poet Yves Bonnefoy, who recalls Celan in those days:

  His gestures, above all in the first years after Vienna—at the time of the room in rue des Ecoles, of the cheap university restaurants, of the archaic typewriter with a Greek-temple peristyle, of destitution—had nonchalance, and his head had a graceful movement towards the shoulder: as if to accompany, for a stretch, along the summer streets after a lively night’s conversation, the friend being left for a whole day.9

  It was Bonnefoy who introduced Celan, on the latter’s insistence, to Yvan Goll in November 1949. This encounter would much later produce terrible results: festering throughout the fifties, the “Goll affair”—in which Claire Goll, the poet’s widow, falsely accused Celan of plagiarism, and, shockingly, a range of German newspapers and reviews uncritically accepted and spread those false accusations—broke in 1960 and does indeed mark a traumatic turning point.10

  Celan does not seem ever to have seriously thought about moving elsewhere, and certainly not after meeting the French graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange in the fall of 1951, and marrying her in late 1952. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1955, and it was as a French citizen and a Parisian literary person that he spent the rest of his life, employed as a teacher of German language and literature at the École Normale Supérieure on the rue d’Ulm, summering from 1962 on in the little farmhouse the Celans bought in Normandy. A first child, François, died shortly after birth in 1953, but 1955 saw the birth of his son Eric, with whom Celan would be very close. The last years brought a separation from his wife and son, and from 1967 to 1970 Celan lived alone in Paris.

  During this final decade of his life, his latent psychic troubles had come to the fore, exacerbated by the false accusations of plagiarism leveled by the widow Goll. Celan the survivor’s already tenuous psychic health was seriously endangered, and would increasingly necessitate medical attention. He had been in self-imposed psychiatric care sometime around May 1965, and was forcibly put in psychiatric confinement in November 1965 after a life-threatening knife attack on his wife. Further hospitalizations followed from December 1965 to early June 1966. The following year started ominously with the chance encounter on January 25 at a literary event at the Paris Goethe Institute with the widow Goll, triggering deep psychic turmoil. Five days later, on January 30, Celan, after threatening the life of his wife, who then demanded a separation, tried to kill himself with a knife—or a letter opener—that missed his heart by an inch. Saved by his wife in extremis, he was transported to the Hôpital Boucicaut and operated on immediately, as his left lung was gravely wounded. He was in and out of psychiatric institutions from February 1967 to October of that year, even though by the middle of May he had started teaching again at the École Normale. These stays involved drug and shock therapy, and old friends who saw him during or after those days reported major changes in the man. Thus Petre Solomon, visiting Paris that summer, found Celan “profoundly altered, prematurely aged, taciturn, frowning … ‘They are doing experiments on me,’ he said in a stifled voice, interrupted by sighs.”11 One can hear this “stifled” voice, deeper though no less resonant—and perceive behind it the psychic pain probably muffled by medication—by listening to the 1967 recordings of poems from Threadsuns.12

  Despite all this, Celan’s last years were extremely active ones: the writing—contrary to a widespread belief that he came close to a Verstummen, a falling silent—kept on unabated with long productive periods that saw the composition of poems on a near-daily basis, with a number of days that brought several poems. He kept traveling: to Switzerland for holidays and meetings with old friends; to Germany for readings, recordings, and encounters (with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others); and to Israel in 1969—though he broke that trip off after two weeks to return precipitately to Paris.13 He had moved from his small studio apartment on rue Tournefort in the fifth arrondissement to an apartment on the avenue Émile Zola in late 1969, and on the night of April 19–20, 1970, he succumbed to his psychic demons: the Pont Mirabeau, close to his apartment at the end of avenue Émile Zola, is probably where he decided to put an end to his life by going into the Seine. His body was found farther downstream on May 1. He was buried in the Thiais cemetery on the outskirts of Paris, where his son François already rested and where his wife, Gisèle, would join him in December 1991.

  * * *

  On his desk Paul Celan had left Wilhelm Michael’s biography of Hölderlin, Das Leben Friedrich Hölderlins, lying open to page 464. He had underlined the following sentence from a letter by Clemens Brentano: “Sometimes this genius goes dark and drowns in the bitter well of his heart.”

  2. “LESESTATIONEN IM SPÄTWORT”

  In the early sixties, that is, midway through Paul Celan’s writing career, a radical change, a poetic Wende, or turn, occurred, later inscribed in the title of the volume Atemwende | Breathturn, heralding the poetics he was to explore for the rest of his life. His poems, which had always been highly complex but rather lush, with an abundance of near-surrealistic imagery and sometimes labyrinthine metaphoricity—though he vehemently denied the critics’ suggestion that his was a “hermetic” poetry—were pared down, the syntax grew tighter and more spiny, and his trademark neologisms and telescoping of words increased, while the overall composition of the work became much more serial in nature. That is, rather than insisting on individual, titled poems, he moved toward a method of composition by cycles and volumes.

  Borrowed from a poem in the volume Lichtzwang | Lightduress, the title of this section—Lesestationen im Spätwort—translates as “reading stations in the late-word.” I have written elsewhere14 on the idea of the individual poem as being, for the reader, a momentary stopping point, a temporary “station” in a (though not religious, even if the term is used in both Christian and Sufi thinking) circumambulation of marked spaces. In Celan’s late work, individual poems are such markers in the ongoing flux of the cycles and volumes, and the reader is well counseled to keep eye and ear on the continuity of this flux, while homing in on, or honing, individual poems as “reading-stations,” as necessary stops
at the knotty difficulties the work presents, yet also and simultaneously as restorative moments of rest, of refreshment and nourishment. The place suggested by Celan as such a point of entry, maybe the one most immediately visible and available to the reader is, in fact, infra-poem, that is, a smaller unit inside the individual poem: it is in front of the word that the poet tells us to stop and knock—or beg—for entry. To grasp what is at stake we have to hear what has been erased and simultaneously kept alive in the neologism “Spätwort,” “late-word,” namely the term Spätwerk, “late work.” To get to the “late work,” we have to stop in front of the “late-word,” we have to come to terms with the development away from a poetry of flowing musical lines and lyric melody, as they reign supreme in the early collections, to one consisting of terse, often single-word or -syllable verse structures, thus from a predominantly horizontal to an ever more vertiginously vertical axis. It is singular words, extracted, it is true, from a vast array of rich language-veins that now carry the weight of the poem. George Steiner suggests that “such words must be quarried from far and stony places. They lodge in the ‘wall of the heart’ … Their authority is, in the true sense, radical, of the root (etymological). Or it springs from fusion, from the poet’s right and need to weld neologisms.”15

  Celan seems to have signaled as far back as 1958 that a change in his poetics was taking place, when he suggested that for him poetry was no longer a matter of “transfiguring” (verklären). The statement came in a short text written as a reply to a questionnaire from the Librairie Flinker in Paris, and needs quoting more fully, as it shows Celan already thinking through changes that will be implemented only in the poetry of the sixties, and which the volume Sprachgitter | Speechgrille, to be published the following year, foreshadows without fully developing. Given “the sinister events in its memory,” writes Celan, the language of German poetry has to become “more sober, more factual … ‘grayer.’” This greater factuality checks a core impulse of the lyrical tradition—in German the common word for poetry is Lyrik—and its 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.”16

  Celan underscores this turning point, this Wende, when he uses the word in the title of the volume that incarnates the turn and opens the book underhand: Atemwende | Breathturn—an unusual title in the general economy of the naming of his books, at least until this period. Contrary to the titles of the previous volumes, it is neither a phrase, such as Mohn und Gedächtnis | Poppy and Memory, nor a compound word extracted from a poem and set above the whole collection as title, such as Sprachgitter | Speechgrille. Unable to link the title directly to a specific poem in the collection, one finds it difficult to determine or control its meaning by contextualizing it thematically or tropically within the book—hence the sense that the title is programmatic for the poetics of the work rather than evocative of 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, October 22, 1960), which is his most important and extended statement on poetics. It is here that we have to look for the theoretical base of the changes from the early to the late work.

  In the speech, Celan addresses the question of art through the work of Georg Büchner, specifically the play Danton’s Death and the prose novella Lenz. He defines Lucile’s final exclamation in the play—“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 “counterword,” and thus the word of poetry. But, he goes on, there is an even fiercer Gegenwort, and 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 falling silent, it takes away his—and our—breath and words.” It is in the next sentence that Celan introduces the term Atemwende:

  Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route—also the route of art—for the sake of such a breathturn? Perhaps it will succeed, as the strange, I mean the abyss and the Medusa’s head, the abyss and the automatons, seem to lie in one direction—perhaps it will succeed here to differentiate between strange and strange, perhaps it is exactly here that the Medusa’s head shrinks, perhaps it is exactly here that the automatons break down—for this single short moment? Perhaps here, with the I—with the estranged I set free here and in this manner—perhaps here a further Other is set free?

  Perhaps the poem is itself because of this … and can now, in this art-less, art-free manner, walk its other routes, thus also the routes of art—time and again?

  Perhaps.17

  I have quoted this passage at length not only because it may be the one that 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—and 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 series of rhetorical pointers, the ninefold repetition of the word vielleicht, “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 speech 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 (and art in general) has to submit to today if it wants to be of essential use. Gerhard Buhr, in an essay analyzing the Meridian speech from exactly this 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.18

  Celan, a careful poet not given to rhetorical statements or linguistic flourishes, who in his late poems will castigate himself and 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.

  * * *

  The last book published before the Meridian speech had been Sprachgitter, which had come out the previous year and already points to some of the directions the late work will take. For the first time Celan uses a single compound word as a title, something he will do for all subsequent volumes; for the first time it contains poems, albeit only five, devoid of individual titles—something that will become the norm in the late work; the language has now given up nearly completely the long dactylic lines and the rhymes of the first three books, while the brief, foreshortened, often one-word lines have become more frequent. Most important, some of the poems are clearly what has been called Widerrufe: attempts at retracting, countermanding, disavowing previous poetics—those of other poets, but also his own earlier stance. The poem “Tenebrae,” for example, is a carefully constructed refutation of Hölderlin’s “Patmos” hymn, which, as G
ötz Wienold has shown,19 negates the (Christian/pagan) hope for salvation expressed in Hölderlin’s lines “Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch” (Close / and difficult to grasp is God. / But where danger lurks, that which saves / also grows); simultaneously the poem inverts and negates the (Judaic) hopes regarding God’s promises as expressed in the psalms, specifically Psalm 34, and in other places in the Bible that are alluded to, mainly Isaiah 43:20 and Leviticus 17. In a similar vein, the title poem, “Sprachgitter,” takes issue both with Gottfried Benn’s famous essay Probleme der Lyrik and with the optimism of Psalm 126.

  However, Celan’s Widerrufe are not only addressed to German poetry and the scriptures. He also calls into question his own earlier poetics. One can thus read “Engführung,” the great poem that concludes Sprachgitter, as a rewriting with different poetics of the “Todesfuge,” as Hans Mayer20 and others have done. This critical stance toward his early poetics remains perceptible in several poems of the late work and is thematized in the opening stanza of a poem in Breathturn: