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  #1  
Unread 08-10-2006, 07:51 AM
MacArthur MacArthur is offline
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Paul Celan

I do not know much about poetry in continental Western Europe after World War II. Like most well-read Americans it is pretty much limited to E. Montale, Paul Eluard, René Char and Transtromer. And Paul Celan.

Not much of a list. Montale and Eluard were established poets before WWII, and virtually national shrines afterwards. (Montale actually didn't publish anything from the '30s til the '60s?)Char worked in a style - surrealism - well established in France before the war. Transtromer is essentially a contemporary.

Paul Celan alone holds the esteem of an American readership as the quintessentially post-war European poet. Not only did his publishing career only begin after the war, but nearly all of his canonical poems were written post-1945. The war itself was a transformative experience for Celan, both personally as a young camp-survivor, and artistically in his switch from his native Roumanian to the more "universal" German.

One is struck by how much his poetry changed in succeeding books. Here is a very early example:

TALLOW LAMP

The monks with hairy fingers opened the book: September.
Now Jason pelts with snow the newly sprouting grain.
The forest gave you a necklace of hands.
So dead you walk the rope.

To your hair a darker blue is imparted; I speak of love.
Shells I speak and light clouds, and a boat buds in the rain.
A little stallion gallops across the leafing fingers -
Black the gate leaps open, I sing: How did we live here?

And here is a later (I think, rather less successful) effort:

I HAVE CUT BAMBOO:
for you, my son

This hut to
be dismantled tomorrow, it
stands.

I did not join in the building: you
don't know in what kind of vessels I put
the sand from around me, years ago, thus
commanded and hidden. Yours
comes from the open places - it stays
open.

The reed that takes root here, tomorrow
still it will stand, wherever
in the unbound your soul may
play you.

There is a LOT to dislike here, and it is generally conceded that Celan's poetry declined over the years. What is less often conceded - although it should be - is that continental poetry declined over the same period, and Celan was no worse than his generation.

After a revolutionary re-founding in the aesthetics of Symbolism, and after the sky-rockets of Dada and Expressionism in the '20s, Surrealism in the '30s, post-War European literature wasn't much about poetry anyway. Certainly the Existentialists - who held sway over literary fashion until around the mid-Sixties - could've about cared less. (Sartre, in his "What Is Literature?" virtually dismissed it as an un-literary art.) And the young Marxists who followed were clueless.

It is clear from the "Tallow Lamp" cited above that Celan began as some kind of Surrealist…a BETTER kind of a Surrealist, inasmuch as he's conversant with other aesthetics and free of Breton's self-conscious pedantry. Some artistic movements are founded by geniuses, and others find their geniuses after the foundation.

Clearly the later seems the case with Surrealism. Most of its founders are scarce worth reading for themselves. I have been perusing an anthology: Arp and Tsara (more properly considered Dada-istes); Artaud and Reverdy (two eccentrics - and not so good - often typed as Expressionist and Cubist, respectively); Césaire (a Negritude poet) ; Apollonaire and Lautreamont (perennial "precursors"); finally the actual movement - Breton and Peret, Desnos and Aragon, Soupault and Prévert…and not that much to like here.

Paul Eluard concocted a sort of accessible Pop version of the style, plus - as with Neruda and Aragon - his very conspicuous politics (Resistance writer and ardent Stalinist) sorta placed him beyond criticism.

René Char genuinely mastered a legitimate Surreal approach and demonstrated what can be done with it. He continued to practice it through a period when it could not have been less fashionable, and his integrity rebounds to his enduring reputation.

Celan, unmistakeably a poet of true genius, was an altogether less secure human being and artist. Just witness his daffy "friendship" with Martin Heidegger, Nazi philosopher and world-class creep.
(Marty prob'ly despised the little Jew...but NEVER shunned a celebrity.)

His stylistic evolution follows what I take to be the drift of poetry in Europe for most of two generations after the war: increasingly terse and crabbed, riddled with neo-logisms and nearly misanthropic, shifting from musical rhythms to hokey enjambments. It's a trajectory that likely as much as anything else ultimately took Celan to his suicide.

Many of his later poems seem to veer painfully between a tedious hermeticism and a kinda buck-eye Social Concern - one of his more famous (at the time) late efforts protests the downing of some ancient trees in the Black Forest. It is poetry from a time and a place where poetry was not much esteemed, and not very good. It illustrates how costly it can be to be "of the moment".

Although "I Have Cut Bamboo" is actually quite a bit longer than "Tallow Lamp" it feels infinitely more cramped and claustrophobic. Would he had remained a Surrealist.

He was too good not to do something fine from time to time:

I HEAR THAT THE AXE HAS FLOWERED,
I hear that the place can't be named,

I hear that the bread which looks at him
heals the hanged man,
the bread baked for him by his wife,

I hear that they call life
our only refuge.



[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited August 10, 2006).]
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  #2  
Unread 08-10-2006, 09:23 AM
Clive Watkins Clive Watkins is offline
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Alas! There are such crucial errors of fact here (about Celan and Montale, for instance), so many facile and sweeping judgements and – apparently – such a dependence on translation that I really can’t think where to begin. Not to mention the "fuzzy” expression on display…. Well, fortunately, I really don't have the time…..

Clive Watkins
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Unread 08-11-2006, 01:58 AM
MacArthur MacArthur is offline
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Here is a translation issue with Celan that has puzzled me for years, although I find it hard to believe I'm the only one to spot it.

It comes from what is undoubtably Celan's most famous poem, Todesfuge. (Death Fugue, for those who don't read German.)

Many passages in the poem are either parallel, or repeated verbatim. (It IS a fugue, after all.) In context a German officer - the death-camp commandant - is waving a pistol at a group of Jewish prisoners, and you are lead to assume that eventually he shoots them, as he is having them dig their own graves.

The first occurrence of a parallel phrase is in the line

"er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau"

Which Michael Hamburger translates (quite reasonably, I suppose) as

"he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue"

The next occurrence of the phrase - or a similar one - comes near the climax of the poem:

"der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau"

Here Hamburger translates

"death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue"

Which is wrong, if the German text is correct.

A plural appears to change to a singular. "his eyes are blue" to "his eye is blue". See what I mean?

It could make some sense - preparing to execute his captives, the officer may have closed one eye to take aim. A good way to speed events to the climax.

Apart from whatever issues there may be with Celan's estate, I think few translators have been apt to follow Hamburger - at least in the poems he chose to tackle. Because everyone knows he worked closely with Celan, who (I take it) spoke and wrote passable English himself. The texts are more or less "authorised". Hard to believe such a conspicuous oversight could occur.

I have considered whether there could have been a typo in either the German or English versions - but I have found the same in three succeeding editions of Hamburger's translations. Over the years Hamburger has confided that Celan was an extremely difficult author to work with: highstrung, morbidly suspicious and given to tantrums. That he got along more or less in English appears to have made matters worse rather than better.

So maybe something fell through the cracks.

Whattya think, Clive?



[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited August 11, 2006).]
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