In the poet’s home, the language was High German, while the wider community generally used the more latinate Romanian. Its political geography meant many languages were spoken among its inhabitants.
Celan was grew up in the city of Czernowitz, then part of Romania, now within Moldova. What is Bonnefoy talking about? Surely death by drowning and words are as far apart as one can get? Bonnefoy is alluding to his friend’s peculiar linguistic heritage and how it affected his life and poetry. He had drowned himself in the Seine in late April 1970, six months before his fiftieth birthday. Indeed, can they get any closer?Ĭelan’s friend, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, wrote: I believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did so that once, at least, words and what is might join. The metaphors are too close to experience to dismiss it as abstract. It is clear, I think, that this is an insensitive reading. Some might dismiss this as tiresomely reflexive a poem about poetry. It is an uncomfortable fact that the bar to a poem’s key – this poem’s key – is the key to the poem itself.
As we watch the snow gathering, pursuing an answer to explain why Celan chose this particular key – and there are grim details one can point to – prompts only a return journey to the poem. But clarification of what? Isn’t our sense of the opacity of translation also the sense of the rebuffing wind in Celan’s poem? Searching for the key to this poem, and being resisted, we sense the climate the poem reports. We assume a translation is second-hand and only the original can provide definitive clarification. The original was written in the early 1950s. This is a poem by Paul Celan translated from the German original by Michael Hamburger. The latter, elucidated in notes to the poems, include references to other poets and to Celan's wide readings of everything from specialized dictionaries to other writers-what Roman Jakobson called their poetic etymology.Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan
Gillespie's translations are characterized by their ease of diction and their attention to the somatic and rhetorical aspects of Celan's lines-their sound, gait, tone, and gravity-as well as to their internal and external echoes. Without ignoring the poet's well-known work of memory and memorialization, it seeks to open a space for new appreciation of Celan's love poems, as well as his poems on political events, painful reflections on his stays in mental hospitals, and quasi-burlesque verse. The bilingual selection includes work from all of Celan's periods and genres. Undoing facile assumptions about Celan, Corona charts a more idiosyncratic and personal path through Celan's large oeuvre, choosing 103 poems from among the more than 900 Celan published. Paul Celan, arguably the mid-20th century's most important German-language poet, is commonly pigeonholed as a poet of the Holocaust-a term, however, he never used.
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