In the introduction to the new edition of Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard write, “At a moment when exceptionally grave sociopolitical and epidemiological crises haven’t so much translated as become one another, it’s hard to overstate the importance of Celan … We of course allude to the terrible crisis – at once political and health – of COVID-19 and ongoing racist violence consuming much of our world.” Paul Celan’s life was marked by crises, and his world was consumed with violence. His parents died in a concentration camp, and the tolling resonance of the Holocaust haunted him until his death. Because Celan’s art issues from trauma and his mode of expression is idiosyncratic, his work is inspiring many of our poets and writers who also create out of distress and precarity.
Celan scholar John Felstiner notes, “One writer compare[d] his lyrics [of “Deathfugue”] to Chagall, but then calls them ‘glittering arrangements,’ as if he were talking not of Chagall but of Whistler. Another, ‘enchanted’ by reading Celan, perceives in ‘Todesfuge’ its ‘removal of everything concrete, its absorptive rhythm, its romanticizing metaphor.’” Paul Auster reveres how Celan stares down the macabre, and how he transforms the horrible into the most somber forms of the lyrical. It is also the reason that J.M. Coetzee marvels at his work, and why Claudia Rankine in Citizen, according to Kaufman and Gerard, “has seized on the few recordings made of Celan reading his own work in public.”
November 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of Paul Celan’s birth, and April 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of his death. To memorialize these dates, Celan scholar and translator Pierre Joris has translated the first four titles of Celan’s oeuvre, spanning 1952-1963, in the compendium Memory Rose into Threshold Speech. Additionally, City Lights is re-releasing Jean Daive’s Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, a lyrical narrative comprising fragments. translated by Rosemarie Waldrop.
Born Paul Antschel, Celan was a German-speaking Romanian Jew. Fluent in five languages, but he nevertheless chose to write in German, the language of his parents’ murderers. Grace Schulman said of Celan, “He wanted a new German, partly to convey the horror of his torn world and partly because his mother tongue was the ‘death-bringing speech’ of the mass exterminator. He referred to the corrosion of existing language as the ‘horrible falling silent.'” His traumatic experience is starkly expressed in “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”), written in 1944-1945. “Todesfugue” is one of those neologisms and archaisms that one finds in Celan’s work. The poem was first published in the May 1947 issue of Contemporanul as “Death Tango” and later included in his 1952 collection Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory):
DEATHFUGUE
Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair
Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he
whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his Jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance
In this chilling stanza, spoken by a prisoner of a concentration camp, a German guard guns down Jewish detainees and commands others – entrapped behind wire fences – to dig the graves of Jews awaiting their fate. The guard demands that others entertain him musically, and if they do not, the guard’s dog will attack them. The archetypal snake is the evil guard, and Margarete is the heroine murderer in Goethe’s Faust. The dance is the tango of the Germans. Celan once told his Austrian lover, Ingeborg Bachmann, “‘Deathfugue’ is also this for me: a tombstone epigraph and a tombstone […] my mother too has only this grave.” Celan screams for his mother, father, and all Jewish victims. He is also dealing with his survivor’s guilt, which kept him in a depressed state. Readers of “Deathfugue” are sometimes reminded of Seamus Heaney’s “Requiem for Croppies,” a lament for the soldiers of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
After the war, Celan moved to Vienna and then to Paris in 1948 where he studied German philology and literature. He earned a living by translating the works of Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Marianne Moore into German. The pseudonym Celan is an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his last name. Because of his mercurial nature, and peripatetic and anguished life, Celan never shook his depression and PTSD. In the middle of an emotional crisis, he married French graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange in 1952. In 1953, his depression deepened when Yvan Goll’s widow, Claire, accused Celan of plagiarizing her late husband’s work. After Goll’s accusations, Celan grew paranoid, hindering his creative process. Over the next decade, Lestrange attempted to relieve Celan of his worries and sadness, but ultimately she could not stop him from throwing himself into the Seine in 1970. Felstiner says of the poet’s turmoil, “The scars from Celan’s recent past had not healed – in fact they never did, which gave his poems their cutting edge.” Proof of this assertion is found in “Aspen Tree,” also included in Poppy and Memory. It is a dirge in memory of his mother. According to Joris, “The form, a two-line stanza with nature opening, takes off from a popular Romanian folk song form, often with elegiac content.”
ASPEN TREE
Aspen tree, your leaves glint white into the dark.
My mother’s hair ne’er turned white.
Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine.
My fair-haired mother did not come home.
Rain cloud, do you linger over the well?
My quiet mother weeps for all.
Rounded star, you coil the golden loop.
My mother’s heart was seared by lead.
Oaken door, who ripped you off your hinges?
My gentle mother cannot return.
In 1958, he received the Bremen Prize for German Literature, and in 1960 he was presented with the Georg Büchner Prize. Five years later, he began seeing a Paris-based psychiatrist, the same year he met Belgian-French poet Jean Daive, 20 years his junior.
In Under the Dome, Daive offers a curbside view of Celan’s behaviors. Written two decades after Celan’s suicide, Daive’s lyrical fragments drift among the cafés and streets of Paris, and are oriented through his engrossed attention to Celan’s complex mind. The two stroll down Boulevard Saint-Michel, cross Boulevard Saint-Germain, and then move onto Place de la Contrescarpe, a square in the city’s Fifth Arrondissement where Celan lived and where chestnut and paulownia trees lined the street. “These trees and their leaves generate — and in turn offer the poet-translators a generative — dome” which inspires the book’s title. Yet such walks could be painful for Celan: “To recollect a Sunday we spent together. Took the bus as far as the Opéra. The Saint-Lazare area. The theater. Then went into a café where Paul notices a woman sitting among the crowd. Her face drawn. Pale. He falls back, as if frightened. Pushes me. We rush out. In the streets he tells me. ‘Her face reminded me of a friend who died.’”
But there are also moments of levity and wonder. One day (the days here are undated), Daive and Celan “discover gypsies with tambourines, a ladder and a monkey in red pants” entertaining passers-by at Place Furstenberg: “He seems really joyous. Delighted by the sound of the tambourine. — ‘Don’t you think that a drum is a bit like a mother’s heart?'”
It is during their walks that the poets also discuss craft and their own works. Celan parises Daive’s Décimale blanche, which Celan translated into German: “I have read you attentively. I have read Décimale blanche and loved its impalpable concrete-abstract nature. The tale is merciless, familiarly merciless.” Daive returned the compliment by translating Celan’s Strette & autres into French. In a later passage, Daive brings up Kafka’s K of The Castle who was new to his village and trying to gain access to the castle. Similarly, Celan is relatively new to his Paris and seems to reward it as a castle. In 1965, he and Gisèle start to drift apart, but Celan continues his work in “La Contrescarpe,” which appeared in 1963’s Die Niemandsrose (NoOnesRose). The poem was inspired by his time in the square.
LA CONTRESCARPE
Break the breathcoin out
of the air around you and the tree:
that
much
is asked of him
whom hope carts up and down
along the hearthumpway — that
much
at the curve
where he meets the breadarrow,
that drunk the wine of his night, the wine
of the misery-, the kings-
vigil.
This first two stanzas suggest that Celan was influenced by James Joyce’s Work in Progress sessions. The portmanteaus and neologisms – “breathcoin” and “hearthumpway” — are giveaways. Celan mentions the paulownia trees in the eighth stanza. They quelled his anxiety and seemed to offer some provisional protection. The square was one of Celan’s favorite places, and it was where he and his childhood friend, Ilana Shmueli, would meet when she visited him. Shmueli later translated Celan into Hebrew.
Daive’s keen ear and close relationship with Celan lead to a poignant fragment about Celan’s struggle with his demons:
I should talk of what was no longer Paul. Seeing him in the hospital. The long table of the refectory. Gisèle and me and a voluble Paul.
Paul’s wife, Gisèle. And the twin rings on their fingers.
The psychiatric hospital of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.
The refectory, the dormitory. Paul’s.
The refectory, the halls, the white metal gurneys on wheels.
Daive includes Gisèle’s descriptions of Celan’s body in the morgue: “’Paul was black. His head was all black.” And Daive “immediately visualized the Saviour’s dark head platted in thorns, for his presence always had the feel of a person possessed by intense spirituality.” Although Gisèle was not living with Celan at the time of his death, she had a premonition it would happen that day because “Paul always kept his watch on his wrist. He told me: the day I take off my watch I’ll have decided to die.” Following the identification of the body, Daive writes about the funeral: “Peals, fading peals of a bell above the hill, above the funeral procession rolling over the sand. Sandy Paul with a black head, and there already, visible above the crowd, the black hat of his friend.”
Pierre Joris says, “Reading a poem of Celan’s at any kind of depth that will honor the poem’s complexity, and translating it, are similar acts with a similar problematic … Anyone who has learned to read Celan’s text knows that it is not a question of deciding on any one meaning.” Celan’s poems may be suffused with grief, but they have no interest in turning that grief into a memoiristic monument. Their language is what remains, is all that remains, after trauma, and they encourage our most open and communal exploration of this disquiet.
[Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech, published by Farrar, Straus and Gioroux on November 24, 2020, 592 pages, $45.00 hardcover; Under the Dome: Walks With Paul Celan, published by City Lights Publishers, 200 pages, $15.95 paperback]