Customer Reviews

Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition, Revised Edition

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Poet and translator Michael Hamburger has done us an excellent service by giving us this book, which will certainly become the bilingual edition of choice for Paul Celan. A few words.

On Celan: Probably the second most important German-language poet of the 20th century after Rilke, but very different in style and mindset! Whereas Rilke provides incredible lyricism, Celan's poetry is jerky, raw, cut-off, even tortured. Struggling with how to write poetry in the German language after the Holocaust (Celan was a Jew), he chose to focus on the basics of language - prepositions, pronouns - and place the language under such pressure and in such tension that poetry could again speak. To Adorno's claim that there could be "no poetry after Auschwitz", Celan proved there was a way, but it was a very difficult one. If you have not yet come across Celan, I can heartily recommend him as one of the greats of the 20th century. His most famous poem is "Todesfuge" or "Death Fugue", but his other poems are also excellent. But be forewarned - this is no light verse. You'll get some heavy stuff, but you'll love it.

On Hamburger: he is a good poet in his own right and a wonderful translator, having already provided the best edition of Hoelderlin's poetry. Now that he has turned to Celan, we benefit very much from his efforts. Celan is incredibly difficult to translate, and the translator must make many choices and must try not to destroy the ambiguity in the German by reducing it simplistically into the English. Hamburger does a good job in this - in most cases a better job than Felstiner, who is the other main translator of Celan (and has a different collection). I would recommend Hamburger's translations over Felstiner. In most cases, he retains more, and there are fewer times when you will say "Eh? Why did he do that??" I suppose if you don't speak any German at all, this will make less of a difference, but if you're getting a bilingual edition you probably can at least read a little bit.

Well, a very good book of translations and a fantastic poet. What more could you ask for?

...have been for him to come across the words he found growing in himself in the tongue of the enemy:

Schimmelgrün ist das Haus des Vergessens.

Vor jedem der wehenden Tore blaut dein enthaupteter Spielmann.

Er schlägt dir die Trommel aus Moos und bitterem Schamhaar;

mit schwärender Zehe malt er im Sand deine Braue.

Länger zeichnet er sie als sie war, und das Rot deiner Lippe.

Du füllst hier die Urnen und speisest dein Herz.

------------------------------

Green as mould is the house of oblivion.

Before each of the blowing gates your beheaded minstrel turns blue.

For you he beats his drum made of moss and of harsh pubic hair;

With a festering toe in the sand he traces your eyebrow.

Longer he draws it than ever it was, and the red of your lip.

You fill up the urns here and nourish your heart.

---------------------------

I read these translations side-by-side with the originals, and find them to be about as ept as it gets -- German poetry is clunky enough put into English, but with Celan it gets completely out of hand -- his Deutsch reads like a patois of German and Martian -- twisting the sounds into shapes like a balloon-animal-maker before a birthday party of children, wringing meaning and context and consonance from consonantless animal cries, deep in the night, skinned on frost, in a crater of some prison moon, staring down at the earth very small and far away and jewellike from that distance...

He is such a poet of genuine Mystery -- each poem is like a game wherein he asks you, very nicely, to allow him to blindfold you; you assent to it, and then let him lead down through the scrub and over the cobbles and down to the riverbank and then you hear him jump in. By the time you get the blindfold off and figure out where you are, he has sunk from sight, shoes full of stones... All that is left is the poem, written on dry leaves with a stick dipped in mud, already coming apart in your paws...

Paul Celan stands as one of the most influential and visible poets of the second half of the 20th-century. The work he produced from World War II to his suicide by drowning in 1970 has been lauded by subsequent poets, taught in German history courses, and set to music by Berio, Birtwistle, and Rihm. The central theme of most of Celan's poetry is the slaughter of European Jewry in the Holocaust, as the poet was born in a German-speaking Jewish enclave in Bucovina and there lost his parents and his home, scars which even a successful new life in Paris could never erase. This volume of selected poems with English translations by Michael Hamburger is a fine introduction to his work.

Celan's poem "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue) is one of his earliest mature pieces and the most common introduction to his poetry. It's opening lines "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night / we drink and we drink it / we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined" are a powerful depiction of the death camps and fully repudiate Adorno's claim that poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Some critics have claimed that "Todesfuge" was Celan's only great poem and had it not been for that, then we would have never heard of him. That poem was certainly his break into the literary world, but other material in this volume is just as fine. "Einfuehrung" (The Straitening) is something of a rewriting of "Todesfuge" in considerably more desperate language and my favourite of Celan's poems. Here the motifs of the first poem are shattered into pieces ("Grass, written asunder. The stones, white / with the shadows of grass blades ... Ash. / Ash. ash. / Night. / Night-and-night.") which in turn are dissolved into their component atoms (Gales, / Gales, from the beginning of time, / whirl of particles.").

In "Tenebrae" Celan reverses the relationship of God and his people in Judaism and explicitly evokes the violence of the camps: "We are near, Lord, / near and at hand. // Handled already, Lord, / clawed and clawing as though / the body of each of us were your body, Lord." One of Celan's main concerns was how speech might remain meaningful when so much of life had become meaningless after the horrors of the war years. In "With a Variable Key" he writes: "With a variable key / you unlock the house in which / drifts the snow of that left unspoken ... You vary the key, you vary the word / that is free to drift with the flakes. / What snowball will form round the workd / depends on the wind that rebuffs you."

While much of Celan's work is haunting, I cannot make much of his last works. With the last collections he saw published in his lifetime ATEMWENDE (Breathturn) and FADENSONNEN (Threadsuns) his poetry became so hermitic and so obsessed with polysemy (multiple meanings) that it effectively means nothing. Take, for example, the poem "Coagula" which in its entirety reads: "Rosa, your / wound as well. // And the hornlight of your / Romanian buffaloes / instead of stars above / the sandbed, in / the talking, red- / ember-powerful / rifle butt."

Now, some of the linguistic games of these late poems are entertaining, but I cannot sketch them here because I'm assuming readers of this review have no German, and they indeed cannot be preserved in English. Hamburger has attempted to give the poems some intelligibility by basing his translations on our knowledge of Celan's life, but in doing so he collapses the possibilities inherent in the German text.

In reviewing this volume of selected poems, and consequently the poet's entire career, I'm not sure how to rate it overall and therefore have given it three stars. Celan is certainly a poet worth getting acquainted with, but I can't help feeling that he was going astray into irrelevance with the late poems that only the author himself would have understood. If you are a fan of modern European poetry, or interested in the Holocaust and its influence on literature, pick up Hamburger's translations if you cannot read the original German. John Felstiner's Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew also makes a good companion for those who might miss the Jewish symbolism found throughout the early poetry.

Adorno was wrong. There is poetry after Auschwitz, and this is what it looks like. Celan's short poems are compressed visions of horror. He tears at the fabric of language in order to render the torn fabric of reality. Reading Celan, I think of the best paintings by the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer, an artist who, like Celan, attacks his materials with fire, sometimes even burning gaping holes into his vast canvases. Art after Auschwitz must be prepared to show the damage, the tears in the fabric of what makes us human. Celan--and Kiefer, at his best--points toward a new way to be human. I cannot praise an artist more highly than that.

I first discovered Celan last November when I read "With A Variable Key" on the web page for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist." Curious, I checked out a book of his works from the university library and was immediately enthralled with Celan's world. I purchased this book soon after.
Celan gives new meaning to the idea of an artist putting his/her life into their work. His tortured existence replays itself over and over in his work and one can almost feel the agony Celan suffered through dealing with and ultimately losing the battle with his demons. Hamburger's introduction to Celan's life and his methods of translation were also insightful and ironic considering German was the language of Celan's own prison.
There is the darkness found in such sweeping works as "Death Fugue" and "Wolfs Bean." Then there is the subtle beauty which I personally find in "How You" and "Not Until." My favorite of his poems has to be "With A Variable Key."
Celan is hailed by some as one of the greatest poets of German literature and the 20th century. Hamburger's collection and translations do Celan's work justice.

'you were my death
you I could hold
when all fell away from me'

It may be something of romantic notion to consider the life of a poet as relevant as the work itself, or at least to it, but in the case of Paul Celan, it can scarce be avoided. In his work 'Poems of Paul Celan', Michael Hamburger wastes little page space on defining the poet through his own life, but rather allows the translations to stand as testimony to the man himself.

It's certainly important to know who Celan was in order to understand the context of the work - born in Czernovitz, Romania in 1920, Paul Celan was the son of Jewish immigrants living in the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This polyglot of nations each spoke their own language, therefore from an early age Paul was fluent in German, the regional tongue, Romanian, the language of the country and Yiddish, the common language of the Jewish community which he was a part of. He later became fluent in French, Russian and Ukranian - but because it was his first language, German remained his dominant tongue and the language he wrote his poetry in throughout the remainder of his life. This subtle irony would not be lost on him in later years of his life, nor to the literary world at large in the time of his greatest renown.

For the world was not a kind place in eastern Europe during the advent of the second world war, and certainly Romania was no exception. In the summer of 1942, both of his parents were interred in labor camps as the result of Nazi occupation. The whereabouts of Paul on that fateful evening are disputed, but it is certain that he was not present when his parents were arrested. Paul would also find himself a victim of the holocaust, but managed to be liberated after the soviet occupation. Tragically, neither of his parents would survive.

And it is here that the great work of Celan first begins to show itself through 'Todesfuge', translated literally as 'Death March', a reference to the accounts witnessed where fellow prisoners were forced to play music for the others waiting to die in the gas chambers. The piece itself is one of Celan's most memorable efforts, and Hamburgers translation does it more than justice by rendering an ineffable quality interweaving angst and terrible beauty within lines of winterdeath and movement without once distorting the original fugue rhythm and tone.

To be certain Hamburger expends 34-odd pages on delivering an effective historical background as well as more academic elucidations on the defense of islabeling Celan as 'hermetic'. The remaining 300-plus pages are entirely devoted to his exceptional translations of the work itself. An added bonus: the tome is bilingual and presents both the original German version as well as the translation itself.

Celan's poetry is far more than any isolationist melancholia, however deserved, at circumstance - rather, it is the work itself which bears the very aspect of the transcendence of human experience through words that renders it exceptional and of such merit. It is easy enough to wax and wane eloquent on the whys and wherefores, but words are often better left to speak for themselves. So be it.

'Go blind now, today;
eternity also is full of eyes-
in them
drowns what helped images down
the way they came,
in them
fades what took you out of language,
lifted you out with a gesture
which you allowed to happen like
the dance of words made of
autumn and silk and nothingness.'

This excellent edition of Paul Celan's major poetry (translated excellently by Michael Hamburger) provides the full scope of Celan's considerable genius. Included is the famous 'Death Fugue,' perhaps the most darkly beautiful and profound works of art about the Holocaust yet created. One is left with Celan's transitions; he began immersed in the syle of early 20th century German poets suck as Rilke, and later progressed in Breathturn and Threadsuns to reveal his capacity for highly creative and original linguistic play. The final poems are characterized by a deep morbidity and anguish; they are patently indicative of the poet's distrught spirits. He would later kill himself by drowning.

Celan is now written about intensively by the philosophers Derrida and Lyotard, he is probably as important to them as Holderlin was to Heidegger. The editor has included a poem that Celan did not intend for publication; but you can understand why it was included, as it is a magnificent triumph of expressive sorrow over the loss of his parents during the war. Celan was a very great poet, readers are still trying to catch up with his complexity and deep artistic insight.

"Led home into oblivion..."

This line, from the poem titled Below, says much about Paul Celan's creativity. He was led down into the subterranean depths of the psyche and he traveled under the guidance of Another, an always nebulous "you". Tortured by loss, unable to accept the slow superficiality of ordinary speech, he was compelled to enter the shadow-world, where extreme language was his only tool and only defense. Oblivion provided what the real world had not: a place where there was a chance to throw the dice with his own hand.

At home in Oblivion, halfway between irredeemable darkness and shattering light, he settled in--bed, desk, lamp, books, art. If the walls were papered with eyes, if the floorboards warped with unbearable mind-pressure, if the empty rooms resonated with voices of the dead, well, it was a Poet's home. From this location, he struggled, syllable by syllable, to describe Oblivion as he saw it through the window of his despair. What he perceived had the power to dispel hopelessness even as it bore profound witness to it.

This bilingual edition of his poems offers many views of Oblivion, but it is never a place of forgetfulness, but of memory and dark memorial. To acknowledge the darkness of his poems one also has to acknowledge the light--the penetrating, hallucinatory light of spirit that emanates off the page. Plato spoke of two forms of light: that from the outer source of the sun, and that from the inner source of a man's heart. Plato believed this light flowed out of the eyes as rays, until it came in contact with the particles emanating from an object, and in that intersection "vision" occurred. This seems a bizarre notion today, and yet when reading Celan it feels entirely possible that the eyes of his soul were illuminating what they encountered, even as the subtle particles of the ghostly objects and inhabitants of Oblivion rushed toward him in order to be seen. Vision occurred, visions occurred, visitations occurred.

In Michael Hamburger's excellent introduction there is a quote from Malebranche: "Attention is the natural prayer of the soul." These poems attest to that; they are reverent, intense, supplicating, anguished Attention. They are difficult to read, both emotionally--because they are profoundly moving and mysterious--and literally, because there are many obscure allusions.

The latter books, from ATEMWENDE on, are even more difficult to decipher. They have a cryptic and incantatory power that has more to do with raw utterance than immediate understanding. Exceeding the limits of experimental language, they function like sharp little tacks with which Celan affixes the amazed reader to his Sprachgitter, (Language Grid). Michael Hamburger puts it like this: "The hiatuses, the silences, the dislocations of normal usage belong to what he had to say and to the effort of saying it."

This isn't a book for casual poetry readers or those looking for the graceful lyricism of Rilke. But, with attention, there is great mystical depth and beauty, especially in the earlier work. If you like the Symbolists poets--Mallarme, Valery--and the Surrealists--Breton, Eluard, Char, Apollinaire--you will probably feel at home here too.

Here is a poem of this anthology that I could feel I understood and was moved by:

"Aspen tree, your leaves glance white into the dark.
My mother's hair was never white.

Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine,
My yellow- haired mother did not come home.

Rain cloud, above the well do you hover?
My quiet mother weeps for everyone.

Round star, you wind the golden loop,
My mother's heart was ripped by lead.

Oaken door, who lifted you off your hinges?
My gentle mother cannot return. "

Celan whose parents were both murdered by the Nazis is most famous for one poem 'Todesfuge'
It opens with the startling stranza"
"Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one liees unconfined
a man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden haired
Margerete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars fare flashing
he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commmands us strike up for the dance "

Celan is the poet who wrote poetry at the time and about the event of which Theodor Adorno said 'no poetry can be written'. He is the poet who took the language of his enemy and tried to rewrite it as his own, breaking its lines and syntax and finding for it new vocabularly by which to express the inexpressible. According to Michael Hamburger in his excellent introduction the early more accessible Celan was in his later years replaced by one more cryptic and hidden, one whose broken language revealed its beauties with greater difficulty.
I had trouble understanding much of this poetry. I do not know German well. I read only the English of this dual- language , original facing the translation, in the text book. But I could sense the music and the depth of meaning and the torment and the voice of the true poet.
Celan is the writer of the unbearable for whom his own life became unbearable. A legend of poetry Hamberger gave many years to translate his enigmatic meanings. They remain for me largely enigmatic in the translation but also resonate deep and true poetry I can voice and hear even if I do not always understand.