I will always remember this as the summer I
discovered Paul Celan. I was familiar with the name. If you spend much time at
all in the precincts of contemporary poetry you stand a very good chance of
hearing, seeing, reading, stumbling upon the name Paul Celan. It is like
hearing of an exotic country where a lot of painful and beautiful things have
occurred, a place at once alluring and frightening, hellish and paradisiacal. A
place where opposites are commingled in a blush of twilight air, where quivers
of the ineffable glimmer among the debris of the literal.
I came to Celan by an indirect route. My wife
Roberta had read an autobiographical account of meetings and talks with Paul
Celan by the French poet Jean Daive intriguingly titled Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, translated by Rosmarie
Waldrop and published by Burning Deck in 2009, and said that it was a beautiful
and moving book. That Paul Celan was a haunted figure who wrote a remarkably
intense and riddling poetry. That Paul Celan was from a Jewish family living in
a remote part of Europe called Bukovina, which at the time of Celan’s birth in
the 1920s was part of Romania and is now a part of the Ukraine. That Paul
Celan’s parents had been interned in a concentration camp after the Nazis occupied
Cernăuți. That Paul Celan had tried arguing his parents
into leaving the country but that his parents had insisted on staying at home
and that he’d gotten so angry that he went to spend the night at a family
friend’s house and it had been on that very night that his parents were
arrested and sent by train to an internment camp in Transnistria where his
father died of typhus and his mother, exhausted by forced labor and no longer
able to work, was shot dead. Paul, who had later been arrested and taken to a
labor camp in the Romanian Old Kingdom, learned of their deaths during an
exceedingly cold winter. That, partly as a result of immense survival guilt and
the pain of these events, Celan had developed a highly ambivalent relationship
with the German language. His mother had loved the German language and insisted
on speaking it in the house. The language became imbued with conflicting
emotions, conflicting values. German became a subject of joy and torture, a
thing to bend and distort, a hell and an illuminating energy, a monstrous
obstruction and an engine of deliverance.
Ultimately, the
pain would prove too overwhelming, too enduring. Paul Celan ended his life by
suicide, entering the Seine from Pont Mirabeau about April 20th,
1970, around Passover. A strong swimmer, he drowned unobserved.
Shortly after
Roberta finished reading Under the Dome,
another book appeared: Breathturn, poems
by Paul Celan translated by Pierre Joris. This was a small book, published by
Green Integer, on which Paul Celan’s face smiles amiably, his eyes peering out
deep and dark and penetrating.
These books
occupied the periphery of my consciousness for several years. Then, having
decided one day to go to Paris rather than buy a car, I began reading them. I
started with Jean Daive’s book, eager to get a view of Paris, acquaint myself
with the names of some of the places we might visit. I did not know how
powerfully the book would influence me, or how truly extraordinary Celan’s
poems would turn out to be.
Under the Dome is presented in fragments. There is no narrative chronology beginning with
their first meeting and continuing till his death in 1970. Paul Celan appears
and disappears at different times on different occasions so that there is a
feeling of a continuous present, a period of time roughly from 1965 to 1970,
Paul Celan’s last, increasingly dark years, recollected from a distance of 20
years in a different part of the world, a Greek Island “amid the still green
pears of a café set back from the sea…” Daive identifies the Aegean with an
elusive, intangible pain. “The Aegean Sea is in front of me. Against my table
and beyond my book, pines, waves breaking on the sand. The Aegean is a wound. I
never talk of it. It is blue, transparent, I see it. I don’t see the wound.”
Always nearby is a
donkey whose immobility serves to underline a spiritualistic distance of some
testimonial, unconquerable mass of time. “He does not eat. He does not work….
The donkey is all I think about. He augments a distance…. In the solitude of
the island, the donkey’s presence sometimes rends the air. He cries, he weeps,
he brays. I hear him. And I hear within me a still living mass fall into the
sea, into the Seine.”
The donkey is a medium,
a meridian collapsing the barriers of time, the past from the future, the
future from the past. The donkey is assertively there, occupying space, yet
seems to be outside time, occupying a zone similar to that of a fundamental
plane marking an imaginary sphere of the present (a café on a Greek island) to
its counterpart in the past (Paris in the late 60s) and so creating the hemispheres of an imaginary
zone where events in the past appear to
be projected on the inside surface of a celestial sphere, lucid and phantasmal,
like images in a camera obscura, as if the mind were a lens and the sky were
the underside of a dome. Jean Daive peers across this horizon at events that
continue to occur in a living tableau of the past, in which chestnuts thud to
the earth and he and Paul Celan “walk side by side, the Seine black on our
right.”
We step over ladders, tables, chairs,
cross bridges, walk along façades, railings, more façades, walls, more walls.
Two voices. We are two voices. One low, the other toneless. Many juvenile
gestures. Complicit looks. Smiles. Lots of complicity. We linger under the mass
of a paulownia, then make for the chestnut trees farther on. Night. Moon. We
talk. Jubilantly. The “Aufklärung.” “Hung up on the inner corpse,” Paul Celan
quotes Artaud. “There are two ideal states for man: extreme simplicity and
extreme culture.” A remembered poster: “The One Alone exists.” We look down on
the moist leaves. Rustlings that we interpret. We advance into the swinging
night. The invisible.
“Syntax torments
the narrative that words cannot untangle,” writes Daive . “A story means
progression, means torment.” Daive’s fragments oppose progression. Each is a
dreamscape, a dream place, phantasmal and outside the limits and torments of
time. “The poet’s room is full of words,” observes Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Reverie,
words which move about in the shadows.
Sometimes the words are unfaithful to the things. They try to establish oneiric
synonymies between things. The phantomalization of objects is always expressed
in the language of visual hallucinations. But for a word dreamer there are
phantomalizations through language. In order to go to those oneiric depths
words must be given time to dream.
The news of Celan’s
death is trauma. It leaves a scar, a tear in the membrane of time, and causes a
break with the grounded and literal, with everything in fact. Even language:
“My distress afterwards. Lasts and lasts. A month of emptiness, of anguish. Of
no solid ground. Days absolutely empty. I feel his death in me as a break with
the human world. With language.”
The incidents
related in fragment are marked by the kind of vividness, the kind of lucidity
that accompanies a heightened sense of the transitory. “I may know that our
travels on earth are a dream. They must be. Interrupted by the flash of an
encounter.”
It is these sudden
bursts, these éclats of lightning-bright insight, the rush of lucidity into the
shadows and vague apprehensions of our consciousness, these profound
experiences of the unsayable, the ineffable, the that take our breath away.
That give a start. We pause. We reflect. We resume our breathing. But with an
augmentation. With an inhalation of fumes from an abyss, which we call
inspiration, a magnitude of excitement characterized by an acute sense of
otherness, particularly the inaccessible other in oneself. It is a species of
awakening that Celan termed “Atemwende,”
or “Breathturn,” and provided as
title to a collection of poetry published in 1967. “Poetry… holds its breath
before the problematic legitimacy of submitting the question of life to the
Question of Being, of life to Being,” observed Jacques Derrida in his book on
the poetics of Paul Celan, titled Sovereignties
in Question in English, Schibboleth in
French.
One imagines the
color red as a whisper emanating from jagged tear in the canvas of time.
Followed by silence. A deep, impenetrable silence, aphorisms of frost on the
bump of being. Furrows imprinted with the hooves of deer, which may also be the
dance of stars.
“Moderation is
never obscure, and excess is always captive of knowing,” Celan tells Daive on
one of their walks in Paris’s Contrescarpe. The Place de la Contrescarpe is in
the ancient Faubourg Saint-Médard and is the axis of a large, formerly working
class district, that spreads to the south on both sides of the market street
Rue Mouffetard. It is legendary for being a haven for outsiders. It is said
that François Villon and Rabelais frequented this neighborhood. The wine was
cheap and untaxed.
“By his side,”
writes Daive, “I feel enclosed in a dark knowing without unease, without
irritation. He is aware of it: no stranger to anything in the world.” “A
world,” Daive continues,
as in a dream,
nocturnal, unraveling around the paulownias of the Contrescarpe. Crates stained
with peach juice, crates full of half rotten tomatoes, black hands eating
almost liquid pears and bluish hearts of lettuce…. We walk down Rue Mouffetard…
The clouds scatter in the distant sky and beyond the sky.
“There are two
worlds,” Celan tells Daive, “the world and the world of the star. And I haven’t
yet mentioned the world of the shoelace.”
There is also the
world of the shell.
“Toward the end of
winter,” Daive writes, “Paul visits me on Rue Coquillière.”
He crosses the footbridge and notices
the three leaves carved in lead. He comes in, charmed by the place. “Your place
is a place of poetry. A poet’s place.” Too taken aback to reply, I wait for him
to finish his praise to announce: “You know, the meal will be just as simple.”
“Ah.” “Tomatoes with shrimp.” “Ah.” “Tomatoes with shrimp, the shrimp have been
shelled one by one by…” “Like my poetry, in short: every verse has been
shelled, every word.” “Yes.”
Daive is also a
photographer, has the eye of a photographer. “A first portrait,” he writes
midway into the book, “[Paul Celan] is waiting for me on the sidewalk of rue
d’Ulm. Against the light, I surprise him with his head inclined, listening, his
ear glued to an invisible wall: time. He is auscultating time.”
My intrigue mounts.
I ask Roberta if I can see her book of Celan’s poetry. She brings me Breathturn, Celan at his densest, the
poems published in 1967, translated into English by Pierre Joris, and published
by Green Integer in 2006. I flip to one
of the poems: “When I knead the lump / of air, our nourishment, / it is leavened
by the / letters’ shimmer from / the lunatic-open / pore.”
The brevity, the multilayered
density, the freakish syntax, the intensely metaphorical language carried to an
extreme of imaginative wildness, is characteristic of Celan’s remarkable
sensibility. This is the first time I have encountered a poetry of such
startling originality and energy since my first discovery of Rimbaud in 1966,
or Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont that same year. The poems are triumphs of the creative
spirit over psychological pain. It is unfortunate for me that they are written
in German, as I’ve spent the last several decades trying to learn French, and
haven’t mastered that language sufficiently to move on and learn another
language. Celan’s magnificent adventures in German, however, may tempt me to
wade into the language just a little bit. I do know that one of German’s more
droll and wonderful characteristics, and certainly a pull on my attention, is
an openness to neologism, the creation of new words by welding two or more
nouns together. The result is often a shiny amalgam of semantic juncture.
One of the more
remarkable words I have encountered in Breathturn
(German Atemwende) which is itself an
amalgam of ‘breath’ and ‘turn,” is “wortdurchschwommenen” which Joris
translates as “worddrenched.” Worddrenched is quite wonderful, which is how it
came to catch my attention, for one can imagine a being - a
poet -
dripping with words, or envision the work itself sodden with linguistic
possibility. I do have a pocketbook German dictionary, and access to any number
of online dictionaries and translation services, and so I did a little more
research into this word and arrived at a clunkier, more literal translation as
“word thoroughly swum through.”
It is a concept which
can be experienced, felt, perceived, explored as a pool of syllables, as a stream
rippling with semantic possibility, as a medium to engage physically, bodily,
and in which might also be found a deep silence. The poems do not move fluidly.
Quite the contrary: they halt, they stumble, they collide. If there is
swimming, it is that of the person who has waded into a rough stream, balancing
themselves very carefully over a series of jagged, slippery rocks until coming
to a deep interruption in the stream, a tranquil depth in which to immerse
themselves.
The word for ‘swim’
in German, ‘schwimm,’ is very close to English. Water, in German, is wasser. To
drink, trinken. One can hear glass in that word, a toast being made, glasses
clinked. Reading Celan one almost immediately begins sewing associations. One
could also say sowing associations. Scattering seed. In German, samen. Almost the
same as English semen. Because of his conflicted feelings about the German
language, Celan’s poetry imparts a visible agitation, a struggle that stresses
and strains his language as much as he plays with and inseminates it,
impregnates it with the capacity to dream, imagine, set oneself adrift in
reverie. As soon as we seem to connect with the sense of otherness the poem
incarnates, it slips away, disappears with a flick of its vowels. And we must
plunge deeper into that sea to find it again.
