~ Honouring our poetic ancestors ~
I Can Still See You
By Paul Celan (1920-1970)
I can
still see you: an Echo,
to be
touched with Feeler-
Words, on
the Parting-
Ridge.
Your face
softly shies away,
when all
at once there is
lamp-like
brightness
in me, at
the Point,
where
most painfully one says Never.
I knew
little of Paul Celan and his work until a friend posted something of his on
facebook and I was moved to investigate further. I had always thought he was
French, because of the name, and also because I had imagined him to be a surrealist poet and connected him in my mind with Andre Breton and co.
But in some hasty research for this post I discovered that he was not a surrealist, and that he was Romanian by birth and also wrote in
German, his mother's language.
He did
eventually settle in France, married there, and became a French citizen. That
was after some horrendous experiences during World War II, because he was
Jewish.
A succinct account of his life says:
Paul Antschel (changed to Ancel, then Celan in 1947) was Jewish,
born in Bukovina. Celan studied medicine at Tours. In the summer of 1942 his
parents were shipped to a concentration camp in Transnistria, where his father
died of typhus, and his mother was shot in the neck and killed. Celan was
conscripted to road-labour in Moldavia until 1944. In 1945 he was in Bucharest
and traveled via Vienna to Paris in 1947. He became a lecturer at the École
Normale Supérieure and married Gisèle Lestrange. Deeply troubled by the
Holocaust and his parents’ deaths, he committed suicide, by drowning in the
Seine.
More details are in the Wikipedia article about him, which also
quotes him as saying:
Only one thing remained reachable, close and
secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it
remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers,
through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous
speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went
through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.
After the War, he wrote in German. Some commentators think he felt it as a kind of triumph to write about the horrors experienced under
Nazi Germany in the German language. Others feel that German was too limited a language for his innate lyricism.
He may not have been a surrealist, but his work is often considered difficult to understand, even allowing for the fact that many of us read it in translation, not the original. As
witness this statement by one of his translators:
'' in order to experience
the poetics of Paul Celan as rendered in English, one must understand that no
one translation will ever be adequate enough. Though each translator
successfully identifies elements of Celan’s discomfort, no single one fully
encompasses all three.
A reader wishing to fully intake Celan’s words in
English must become a comparative reader, a critical reader, and most
importantly a reader
who understands that perhaps one of Celan’s most
discomforting elements is that he didn’t always wish to be understood. ''
[Goodrich,
J., Rhyme or Reason? : Successfully Translating the Poetry of Paul Celan,2008]
At
Poetry Foundation there’s a fascinating discussion of Celan’s language – and
poetic language in general – by the celebrated Ilya Kaminsky, who seems to
question the accessibility so many of us strive for. Perhaps it’s fair to say, at least, that some poems (some
works of art in any form) are worth persevering in the attempt to understand,
and may be all the more rewarding for that perseverance.
To me, in much of Celan's work it is not so much that the language is unclear, but that where it leads is mysterious, not fully explained. This is perhaps because of what is described at Poetry Foundation:
As his career continued, Celan worked to “purge his poems of readymade
contexts - whether historical, traditional or explicitly religious. The late
poems still abound in allusions - private, hermeneutic, esoteric - but
increasingly each poem becomes and creates its own context and the context
within which Celan's other poems must be read.”
The
poem above is not difficult, however, and I think it's very lovely.
You can find a free download of 25 poems here, or browse them online. (This is where I found the succinct account of his life quoted above.) There is a different collection at PoemHunter.
And you can find many books by and about him at his Amazon page,
including poetry in the original German, and bilingual editions with English translations.
And now, because the one I chose is short, here is another short one for you. I find this one a little harder to fathom. But with some poems, perhaps the only thing to do is surrender and let the images wash over you.
This Evening Also
more fully,
since snow fell
even on this
sun-drifted,
sun-drenched sea,
blossoms the ice in
those baskets
you carry into
town.
sand
you demand in
return,
for the last
rose back at home
this evening also
wants to be fed
out of the
trickling hour.
Material shared in 'The Living Dead' is presented
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the copyright owners, where applicable (older poems may be out of copyright)
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