The Bachmann poems, deeply inflected by Surrealism, are among the most moving of Celan’s early work. Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, the daughter of a Nazi functionary who served in Hitler’s Army. She later recalled her teen-age years reading forbidden authors—Baudelaire, Zweig, Marx—while listening for the whine of bombers. The contrast between their backgrounds was a source of torment for Celan. Many of the love poems contain images of violence, death, or betrayal. “In the springs of your eyes / a hanged man strangles the rope,” he writes in “Praise of Distance.” The metaphor in “Nightbeam” is equally macabre: “The hair of my evening beloved burned most brightly: / to her I sent the coffin made of the lightest wood.” In another, he addresses her as “reaperess.” Bachmann answered some of the lines with echoes in a number of her most important poems; after Celan’s suicide, she incorporated others into her novel “Malina,” perhaps to memorialize their love.
Most of Celan’s poems to Bachmann were written in her absence: in July, 1948, he went to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life. Even in a new landscape, memories of the war were inescapable. The Rue des Écoles, where he found his first apartment, was the street where he had lived briefly in 1938 with an uncle who perished at Auschwitz. During the next few years, he produced only a handful of publishable poems each year, explaining to a fellow-writer, “Sometimes it’s as if I were the prisoner of these poems . . . and sometimes their jailer.” In 1952, he married Gisèle Lestrange, an artist from an aristocratic background, to whom he dedicated his next collection, “Threshold to Threshold” (1955); the cover of Joris’s book reproduces one of Lestrange’s lithographs. The volume is haunted by the death of their first child, only a few days old, in 1953. “A word—you know: / a corpse,” Celan wrote in “Pursed at Night,” a poem that he read in public throughout his life. “Speaks true, who speaks shadows,” he wrote in “Speak, You Too.”
The poems in “Speechgrille” (1959) show Celan moving toward the radical starkness that characterized the last decade of his work. There are sentence fragments, one-word lines, compounds: “Crowswarmed wheatwave,” “Hearttime,” “worldblind,” “hourwood.” But “Tenebrae,” the volume’s most effective poem, is one of the simplest in syntax. Celan compared it to a Negro spiritual. It begins as a response to Hölderlin’s hymn “Patmos,” which opens (in Richard Sieburth’s translation):
There is no salvation in Celan’s poem, which reverses Hölderlin’s trope. It is the speakers—the inmates of a death camp—who are near to God: “We are near, Lord, / near and graspable.” Their bodies are “clawed into each other,” “windbent.” There is no mistaking the anger in their voices. “Pray, Lord, / pray to us, / we are near,” the chorus continues, blasphemously. The trough from which they drink is filled with blood. “It cast its image into our eyes, Lord. / Eyes and mouth gape, so open and empty, Lord.” The poem ends on a couplet, whether threatening or mournful, that reverses the first: “Pray, Lord. / We are near.” A more searing indictment of God’s absence during the Holocaust—a topic of much analysis by theologians in the decades since—can hardly be imagined.
Celan’s turn to a different kind of poetics was triggered in part by the mixed response to his work in Germany, where he travelled regularly to give readings. Though he was welcomed by the public—his audiences often requested “Deathfugue”—much of the critical reaction ranged from uncomprehending to outright anti-Semitic. Hans Egon Holthusen, a former S.S. officer who became a critic for a German literary magazine, called the poem a Surrealist fantasia and said that it “could escape the bloody chamber of horrors and rise up into the ether of pure poetry,” which appalled Celan: “Deathfugue” was all too grounded in the real world, intended not to escape or transcend the horrors but to actualize them. At a reading held at the University of Bonn, someone left an anti-Semitic cartoon on his lectern. Reviewing “Speechgrille” for a Berlin newspaper, another critic wrote that Celan’s “store of metaphors is not won from reality nor serves it,” and compared his Holocaust poems to “exercises on music paper.” To a friend from his Bucharest days, Celan joked, “Now and again they invite me to Germany for readings. Even the anti-Semites have discovered me.” But the critics’ words tormented him. “I experience a few slights every day, plentifully served, on every street corner,” he wrote to Bachmann.
Poetry in German “can no longer speak the language which many willing ears seem to expect,” Celan wrote in 1958. “Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts ‘beauty.’ It tries to be truthful. . . . Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.” The poems he wrote in the next few years, collected in “The NoOnesRose” (1963), are dense with foreign words, technical terms, archaisms, literary and religious allusions, snatches from songs, and proper names: Petrarch, Mandelstam, the Kabbalist Rabbi Löw, Siberia, Kraków, Petropolis. In his commentary, Joris records Celan’s “reading traces” in material ranging from the Odyssey to Gershom Scholem’s essays on Jewish mysticism.
The French writer Jean Daive, who was close to Celan in his last years—and whose memoir about him, “Under the Dome” (City Lights), has just appeared in English, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop—remembers him reading “the newspapers, all of them, technical and scientific works, posters, catalogues, dictionaries and philosophy.” Other people’s conversations, words overheard in shops or in the street, all found their way into his poetry. He would sometimes compose poems while walking and dictate them to his wife from a public phone booth. “A poet is a pirate,” he told Daive.
“Zürich, Hotel Zum Storchen,” dedicated to the German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, commemorates their first meeting, in 1960, after they had been corresponding for a number of years. Celan travelled to Zurich to meet Sachs, who lived in Sweden; she had received a German literary prize, but refused to stay in the country overnight. They spoke, Celan writes, of “the Too Much . . . the Too Little . . . Jewishness,” of something he calls simply “that”:
Celan told Sachs that he hoped “to be able to blaspheme and quarrel to the end.” In response, she said, “We just don’t know what counts”—a line that Celan fragmented at the end of his poem. “We / just don’t know, you know, / we / just don’t know, / what / counts.”
In contrast to “Tenebrae,” which angrily addresses a God who is presumed to exist, the theological poems in “The NoOnesRose” insist on God’s absence. “Psalm” opens,“NoOne kneads us again of earth and clay, / noOne conjures our dust. / Noone.” It continues:
If there is no God, then what is mankind, theoretically, as he is, created in God’s image? The poem’s image of humanity as a flower echoes the blood of “Tenebrae”: “the corona red / from the scarlet-word, that we sang / above, O above / the thorn.”
Some critics have seen the fractured syntax of Celan’s later poems as emblematic of his progressively more fragile mental state. In the late fifties, he became increasingly paranoid after a groundless plagiarism charge, first levelled against him in 1953, resurfaced. In his final years, he was repeatedly hospitalized for psychiatric illness, sometimes for months at a time. “No more need for walls, no more need for barbed wire as in the concentration camps. The incarceration is chemical,” he told Daive, who visited him in the hospital. Daive’s memoir sensitively conjures a portrait of a man tormented by both his mind and his medical treatment but who nonetheless remained a generous friend and a poet for whom writing was a matter of life and death. “He loves words,” Daive writes, recalling the two of them working together on translations in Celan’s apartment. “He erases them as if they should bleed.”
Reading Celan’s poems in their totality makes it possible to see just how frequently his key words and themes recur: roses and other plants; prayer and blasphemy; the word, or name, NoOne. (I give it here in Joris’s formulation, although Celan used the more conventional structure Niemand, without the capital letter in the middle.) As Joris writes, Celan intended his poems to be read in cycles rather than one at a time, so that the reader could pick up on the patterns. But he did not intend for four books to be read together in a single volume. The poems, in their sheer number and difficulty, threaten to overwhelm, with the chorus drowning out the distinct impact of any particular poem.
Joris, whose language sometimes tends toward lit-crit jargon, acknowledges that his primary goal as translator was “to get as much of the complexity and multiperspectivity of Celan’s work into American English as possible,” not to create elegant, readable versions. “Any translation that makes a poem sound more accessible than (or even as accessible as) it is in the original will be flawed,” he warns. This is certainly true, but I wish that Joris had made more of an effort to reproduce the rhythm and music of Celan’s verse in the original, rather than focussing so single-mindedly on meaning and texture. When the poems are read aloud in German, their cadence is inescapable. Joris’s translation may succeed in getting close to what Celan actually meant, but something of the experience of reading the poetry is lost in his sometimes workaday renderings.
Still, Joris’s extensive commentary is a gift to English readers who want to deepen their understanding of Celan’s work. Much of the later poetry is unintelligible without some knowledge of the circumstances under which Celan wrote and of the allusions he made. In one famous example, images in the late poem “You Lie Amid a Great Listening” have been identified as referring to the murders of the German revolutionaries Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and to the execution of the conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that the poem’s content was decipherable by any reader with a sufficient background in German culture and that, in any event, the background information was secondary to the poem. J. M. Coetzee, in his essay “Paul Celan and His Translators,” counters that readers can judge the significance of that information only if they know what it is, and wonders if it is “possible to respond to poetry like Celan’s, even to translate it, without fully understanding it.”
Celan, I think, would have said that it is. He was annoyed by critics who called his work hermetic, urging them to simply “keep reading, understanding comes of itself.” He called poems “gifts—gifts to the attentive,” and quoted the seventeenth-century philosopher Nicolas Malebranche: “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.” Both poetry and prayer use words and phrases, singly or in repetition, to draw us out of ourselves and toward a different kind of perception. Flipping from the poems to the notes and back again, I wondered if all the information amounted to a distraction. The best way to approach Celan’s poetry may be, in Daive’s words, as a “vibration of sense used as energy”—a phenomenon that surpasses mere comprehension. ♦
