of a large Jewish community.

There was anti-Semitism, for

Paul Celan: Exposing Poetry sure, but German culture was the pinnacle of Western
civilisation. It promised something better than feudal
sniping. Inspired by his mother's deep love for it's poetry,
"With a variable key he wrote lyric poems in the tradition of Hölderlin and
you unlock the house in which Rilke. It is said that as a youth he had a remarkable affinity
drifts the snow of that left unspoken. for it too. His taste moved him toward the contemporary
Always what key you choose symbolist and surrealist movements, and despite his
depends on the blood that spurts polylingual abilities, he always wrote his poetry in German.
from your eye or your mouth or your ear. Then war came. Celan was, by chance, separated from his
parents on the day the Nazis arrived and deported the city's
You vary the key, you vary the word Jews. He never saw his parents again. They were taken to a
that is free to drift with the flakes. Ukrainian labour camp. His father died of disease; his
What snowball will form round the word mother was shot. After this, as Hugo Gryn said, Celan was
depends on the wind that rebuffs you." in the position of being a writer in the language of his
This is a poem by Paul Celan translated from the German mother and of his mother's murderers. He could not
original by Michael Hamburger. The original was written renounce the latter's language without renouncing the
in the early 1950s. Its title is the first line. former's. Celan was robbed of his parents' death as well as
their lives. Bonnefoy implies the same goes for his
We assume a translation is second-hand and only the müttersprache.
original can provide definitive clarification. But We can say of Celan as of no other poet: his words did not
clarification of what? Isn't our sense of the opacity of recover his experience. The loss was felt, he says, like a
translation also the sense of the rebuffing wind in Celan's discharge without origin or end. And as a result: nothing
poem? Searching for the key to this poem, and being real could authentically respond to this flux or be its equal,
resisted, we sense the climate the poem reports. As we in the absolute, as referent: only the river itself … seems to
watch the snow gathering, pursuing an answer to explain fold in on itself (losing itself) like the only thing signified
why Celan chose this particular key - and there are grim on the scale of so much absence.
details one can point to - prompts only a return journey to
the poem. So for Bonnefoy another death becomes another metaphor
of hope. If his explanation is exemplary, we remain in what
It is an uncomfortable fact that the bar to a poem's key - Maurice Blanchot calls "the civilisation of the book",
this poem's key - is the key to the poem itself. Some might where literature takes possession of everything - that is,
dismiss this as tiresomely reflexive; a poem about poetry. It submitting it to a pre-established unity symbolised by the
is clear, I think, that this is an insensitive reading. The enclosing covers of a book. Even Bonnefoy's sensitive
metaphors are too close to experience to dismiss it as appraisal leaves too strong a trace of the dubious
abstract. Indeed, can they get any closer? correlation of life and art. Its presence allow us to keep the
discomposing reality at a distance, within the inexorable
Celan's friend, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, wrote: I logic of a narrative with a beginning, middle and, most
believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did so that once, importantly, an end.
at least, words and what is might join. He had drowned
himself in the Seine in late April 1970, six months before This article on Celan will tend toward that logic too.
his fiftieth birthday. What is Bonnefoy talking about? Perhaps it must. But whereas the industry surrounding
Surely death by drowning and words are as far apart as one Sylvia Plath, for example, regards the poetry as an expert
can get? Bonnefoy is alluding to his friend's peculiar witness to judging the case of her tormented life and
linguistic heritage and how it affected his life and poetry. suicide, with Celan, this would be to miss everything.
Celan was grew up in the city of Czernowitz, then part of
Rumania, now within Moldova. Its political geography Paul Celan: the potential of poetry
meant many languages were spoken among its inhabitants. Seamus Heaney begins his essay on Sylvia Plath by stating
In the poet's home, the language was High German, while the potential of poetry:
the wider community generally used the more latinate
Romanian. There were many others in circulation, "the poet's need [is] to get beyond ego in order to become
including Yiddish. The last is significant as Celan was part the voice of more than autobiography. At the level of poetic
1
speech, when this happens, sound and meaning rise like a
tide out of language to carry individual utterance away
upon a current stronger and deeper that the individual
could have anticipated." (Note the pervasive river theme!).
He then goes on to examine how Plath developed her
poetry yet never moved beyond "the dominant theme of
self-discovery and self-definition". Nowadays, of course,
that theme is enough to launch ten thousand poems
beginning with 'I'. But what does moving beyond this
theme mean? Celan was ambivalent, to say the least, about
that rising tide out of language. Indeed, it caused him to
lose trust in his most famous poem, "Deathfugue". This is
how that poem ends; the subject, you will notice, is
explicit:
"Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and
we
drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master
from
Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith" (trans. Michael Hamburger)
If any help is needed, the line "a grave in the air" can be SPIKE quite rightly announces itself to be "violently
read as the smoke rising from the camp chimneys; plain
fact as much as metaphor. Overall, the poem emerged from poetry is an answer.
reports of small Jewish orchestras playing tangos within
concentration camp fences, often accompanying
gravedigging and executions. The poem mimics the pace
and rhythm of the dance that had captivated carefree
Europe between the wars. Its first title was indeed 'Death
Tango'. In placing such lightness within the realm of such Let us wash it,
darkness, an entire culture is incriminated. The change to
'Deathfugue' recalls the divine lightness of Bach, while
'Margarete' alludes to the tragic heroine in Goethe's Faust, towards heaven."
forgiven by God despite everything. (It is a bizarre but
telling fact that Goethe's famous oak tree outside Weimar
was protected by the SS as the Buchenwald concentration
camp went up around it.) Margarete is contrasted with
Shulamith, the female symbol of Jewish hope in the Song
of Solomon, who is not forgiven.
In post-war Germany the poem became part of the
curriculum for schools and was acclaimed by numerous
critics in the new Federal Republic. However, praise tended
to be for what was called the poem's "mastery" of what had
passed - the Holocaust; enabling a reconciliation of sorts.
Germany wanted to move on. It welcomed the rising tide
out of language as it bore guilt away. The worst was
confirmed when schoolteachers discussed the use of the
poem in class. They agreed it was excellent in teaching
how poetry might follow a musical pattern like a fugue but,
they felt, the teaching should not be side-tracked by talk of
the Holocaust. Celan's subsequent distress led him to refuse
to perform readings of the poem again. Perhaps he also felt
there was a tendency toward the dark romance of a 'terrible
beauty' in its aesthetic effects. Above all, it faced the
progressive movement of the civilisation of the book,
enveloping discordance like the resolving refrain of a
Beethoven sonata.
Where did Celan go after this? Does it matter? What does
poetry matter in our time anyway? If it is merely a means
of reminding us of what has happened and what it means,
then one wonders why the facts have not been enough.
Perhaps that is the point: the facts have never been enough.
Aharon Appelfeld, another writer-survivor, reminds us that
"the numbers and the facts were the murderers' own well-
proven means. Man as a number is one of the horrors of
dehumanisation."
Celan does not offer the facts. Poetry is something else,
something more than the facts. But, in general, that
'something else' remains under suspicion even more than
the dehumanising facts because 'something else' seems to
be only self-regarding gymnastics with a dictionary. Indeed
prejudiced" against poetry. What is the alternative? Celan's
Paul Celan: words, corpses
"A word - you know:
a corpse.
let us comb it,
let us turn its eye
This, the end of a poem, advocates the inversion of
literature's gaze. It moves in the opposite direction to most
post-war poetry and prose, which sought practicality,
matter-of-factness, accessibility. The quoted words come as
a dark reflection at the end of the poem Nocturnally
Pouting, itself a dark reflection on a bus journey over an
alpine road in Austria. The presence of those departed is
perceived in the landscape: in the "greyed moss", in the
2
"crossed and folded shafts of the spruces" and in "the
jackdaws roused to endless flight over the glacier". All are
keys to those who "stand apart in the world", each one
"surly, bare-headed, hoar-frosted", each one discharging
"the guilt that adhered to their origin … upon a word that
wrongly subsists, like summer."
The polemic is striking and memorable, but for that reason
perhaps begs the question: how does one turn a word
heavenward? Isn't this a rhetorical gesture? Celan's title for
the collection in which the two quoted poems appear is
"From Threshold to Threshold", and this just about sums up
the "failure" of these two poems to cross the threshold to
heaven. As readers we tend to grasp moments of manifesto-
like clarity such as these; but assertion is not enough.
Despite its practical matter-of-factness, it betrays failure.
This is not to criticise. Failure is central to the history of
modern poetry, although such failure is now usually
misunderstood.
To simplify, the concern of the Romantic-Enlightenment
poets of the 18th Century - the beginning of the modern age modern world. He believed that humanity had become
- was humanity's relation to nature. We are familiar with
this in Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the greater Europe,
Hölderlin's inspiration was also "To be one with all that
lives, and to return in blessed self-forgetfulness into the All set in motion by Plato.
of Nature". While he pursued it in poetry, others, such as
his friend Hegel, turned to philosophy. But where
philosophy feeds off distance, allowing the goal of the
Absolute - which would be the end of philosophy, the end
of history etc. - to be preserved indefinitely as a self-
aggrandising rhetorical device, poetry demands the end
without delay: if poetry remains, distance remains. Where
today's celebration of nature uses language in an unironic
slideshow of clichés (see any New Age CD, website or
poetry book made of recycled paper) the Romantics
recognised only failure: words, corpses.
Worse, Enlightenment promises actually inaugurated the
manifold growth of science and technology that sought
(and still seeks) to conquer nature rather than to respect it. dominated Western thought for the last four centuries. But
The consequence of Enlightenment was at once to liberate the clearing depends on a temporal and linguistic aspect.
us of the fetters of medieval society and to destroy the
traditions by which society kept its body and soul together. to categorise it in language and so differentiate it from the
The contradiction remains with us, and the agitation of
modern culture can be summed up as the tension between
accepting the wilderness and our instinctive rejection of its disappears from view. We become blinded to the discourse
freedom. A Celan poem reflects the struggle:
"Should
should a man
should a man come into the world, today, with
the shining beard of the
patriarchs: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
againagain" (Trans: Michael Hamburger)
He speaks but only just. It is poetry with aphasia. How
might a man speak of this time, this 'destitute time', as
Hölderlin called it, without using destitute words? Celan
renews the question.
Paul Celan: Heidegger, anxiety
If for every Hölderlin there is a philosopher like Hegel,
then for Celan there is Martin Heidegger.
His analysis of the modern age had a profound influence on
Celan's work, offering a theoretical apparatus to his own
poetic one. Simplistically, Heidegger sought a new mode of
thought to counteract the mechanistic tendency of the
separate from its harmony with the rest of nature, as he
believed was in place in Homer's Greece. This separation
was due, he said, to the rise of dualistic ways of thinking
Concentrating on the concept of 'being', Heidegger argues
that 'human being' is not a thing like other things (objects in
the world as we know it) but a clearing (a non-thing, a
nothingness) in which those things are presented, where
they actually become things. And rather than this being an
argument for solipsism (the world as function of one's
mind), it means our knowledge of the world is not a
product of boxed-in consciousness. Instead of minds
making thoughts possible, it is the 'being' preceding mind
that makes it possible for us to regard ourselves as minds
having thoughts distant from 'the real world'.
This is a major challenge to the Cartesian tradition that has
Things appear in the three dimensions of time, enabling us
rest of the world. Such categorisation, however, is
restricted by our need for control, and so the thing
of the world; to what is revealed. The world becomes an
object. This is a necessary tendency but one that can and
must be counteracted by the function of the clearing.
Heidegger argues for the truth of the clearing by pointing
toward the mood of anxiety that seems to characterise our
everyday existence. We spend most of our time avoiding
3
this mood, of course. He says we try to become totally Elsewhere he wrote that "Language is the house of Being.
absorbed in 'the real world', as defined by such dead In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who
language, in order to avoid facing up to our mortal create with words are the guardians of this home." If that is
nothingness as revealed in anxiety. So, rather than the case, and poets tend to feel it is, then it means,
liberating us, the techologocally-advanced modern world following the catastrophe of the Holocaust, language would
opens a rift between the public self - the one in which we have to change in order to rebuild the tainted home.
have in order to live without becoming paralysed by
anxiety - and the 'anxious' self in the so-called clearing. In the post-war era, this was an imperative for Celan as he
Heidegger says that opening ourselves to anxiety by giving was now living in Paris as a translator and tutor, physically
up our need for egoistic certainty will reveal the world in and metaphorically exiled from his homes: Czernowitz,
its abundant nature. It will set one free. The French under Soviet rule, and German, under the weight of
existentialists of the post-war era adopted this theme from "murderous speech" as he called it. It was an imperative
Heidegger, although their 'absurd' freedom was foreign to because, as his Paris contemporary Samuel Beckett put it:
him. A French philosopher more in tune with Heidegger, one writes not in order to be published, one writes in order
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, sums up the condition for the to breathe. Celan could not breathe in the old language. The
present era: old language was saturated with the conditions by which an
entire culture was able to produce the greatest art and
"Today, everywhere … remaining reality is disappearing in thought in history and then produce death camps with the
the mire of a "globalised" world. Nothing, not even the efficiency of a factory. No wonder Adorno said that to
most obvious phenomena, not even the purest, most write lyric poetry after Auschwitz was itself barbaric.
wrenching love, can escape this era's shadow: a cancer of
the subject". What Adorno didn't say, and this has been ignored too
often, is that poetry could still be written only not as we
This is not a conspiracy of others but a runaway part of our had known it. The new language, the new poetry, would be
need to live in the world rather than be imprisoned by a way of turning us toward that which is absent in our
autism. Selflessness, of course, while admirable in most everyday world, that which "stands apart in the world".
cases, can also descend into what we called inhumanity. This formulation, like Heidegger's clearing, betrays a
One of the terrible ironies of this story is Heidegger's own religious sensibility. After Auschwitz, however, God was
descent. In the early 1930s, he saw the Nazi party as a under radical question. The space left by Him, on the other
political movement capable of mediating the needs of the hand, was not:
modernity with authentic existence, making Germany a Psalm
modern-day equivalent of ancient Greece. In 1933, the No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
Rector of Freiburg University, where Heidegger was a no one conjures our dust.
renowned young professor, resigned in protest at Hitler's No one.
anti-Semitic laws. Heidegger took his place after an Praised be your name, no one.
election among the Aryan lecturers. He soon resigned in For your sake
disaffection but never revoked his party membership and we shall flower.
referred to his regret for the Holocaust only in what Towards
Maurice Blanchot called 'scandalously inadequate' fashion. you.
Such facts make Celan's interest in his work more
compelling. Heidegger represents the dangers inherent in A nothing
the Romantic project. Another example would be the terror we were, are, shall
following the French Revolution. What does this mean for remain, flowering:
poetry? Well, in his isolated time after the war, during his the nothing-, the no one's rose.
denazification, Heidegger came to believe poetry was the With
means to open up the world; it could rouse the revelation of our pistil soul-bright,
things in the clearing. In fact, it was the revelation itself. with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
His intense meditations on Hölderlin's poetry is our corolla red
summarised by an essay title taken from a poem: "… with the crimson word which we sang
poetically man dwells …". over, O over
the thorn. (Trans: Michael Hamburger)

4
One can draw neither comfort nor despair from this poem, your irreversible witness
or rather, neither of them alone. It is a psalm and an (trans. Michael Hamburger)
antipsalm; sacred and bitter. What stands apart is palpable
only in its absence; a void saturated by void, to use The difficulty is that language depends on generality; the
Blanchot's phrase. Celan's biographer John Felstiner has more specific a word the harder it is to reach across time;
brought out the allusions within 'Psalm' to Jewish and we will not connect to the "altogether other" trapped in
Christian mysticism, both of which has to be bypassed time's crevasse. In fact, it could not be language anymore.
here. But, to repeat Eliot on Dante, I think it communicates Yet if it can connect despite risking such isolation, it would
before any of these allusion are understood. be all the more richer. In this respect, Celan requires a
certain amount of patience on behalf of his readers. For
example, a late untitled poem in full:
Paul Celan: a crossing through danger
It may seem paradoxical that the writer of such a poem as Illegibility of this world.
'Psalm' has a biographer (Heidegger says the author of All things twice over.
every masterful poem is unimportant) and Felstiner's book The strong clocks justify the splitting hour hoarsely.
does indeed concentrate on the poems. Despite this, he You , clamped into your deepest part, climb out of yourself
uncovers the probable origin of the title of his 1959 for ever. (trans. Michael Hamburger)
collection "Sprachgitter" - Speech Grille.
This is puzzling, but such puzzlement does not matter much
Celan's mother-in-law retreated to a convent and when the once one sets the need for facts or conclusive harmony
family visited her, she would remain behind a grill. Such a aside. Less sympathetic critics dismiss his work as
barrier holds also for poetry's revelation. One must accept 'hermetic', sealed from approach. They say only the writer
the limit for it to work; the limit is part of the experience. could know what such a poem is about. Why is the world
Or non-experience. Lacoue-Labarthe's brief and powerful illegible? What is a strong clock?
book on Celan is actually called "Poetry as Experience". It
characterises the poem as something always returning to its I have no answers. Perhaps the lack of a title necessitates a
source, approaching the inaccessible, and, necessarily, certain blankness in the initial response. The moment one
inaccessibility. The poem returns to the experience itself - titles an experience the dangers lessen. Would a biography
the revelation in the clearing - not 'the stuff of anecdotes' help us understand this? Probably not. Celan was adamant
but the etymological origin of 'experience': a crossing that his poetry was accessible: "As for my alleged
through danger. It is a crossing resisted only in what the encodings" he said "I'd rather say: undissembled
poem lets us consume as readers: "a poem has nothing to ambiguity. I see my alleged abstractness and actual
recount, nothing to say; what it recounts and says is that ambiguity as moments of realism." It seems odd that a poet
from which it wrenches away as a poem." so keen - perhaps even desperate - to reach across time, to
provide us with such realism, should do so by writing
So what, exactly, remains before and after this wrenching? wilfully unreadable poems. Perhaps we shouldn't be so
Celan names it himself, in a speech upon receiving the quick to assume it is the poetry's problem.
prestigious Büchner Prize: "the poem has always hoped …
to speak also on behalf of the strange - no, I can no longerProfessor John Carey of Oxford would disagree. He is
use this word here - on behalf of the other, who knows, Britain's foremost opponent of difficulty. In his best-selling
perhaps of an altogether other." book 'The Intellectuals and the Masses', he argues that
(translated by Rosemary Waldrop) Modernism - the epitome of difficulty - was invented by
intellectuals in order to alienate the so-called masses, who,
Perhaps the 'strange' can be used no longer because it is newly emancipated from illiteracy, were seen as muddying
already too familiar, too homely. He had to seek another the pure waters of literature. Celan indicates other reasons.
word or phrase: "the altogether other". His speech, as much In fact, the 'enjoyment' Carey demands is really a means of
as his poetry, has to be attuned to the demands of retaining a dualistic attitude to literature; of 'talking eyes
experience. Celan also refers to the attempt to give each into blindness', to use Celan's phrase. Of course, many
poem its own date, its own unique time, so that it speaks Modernists were proto-fascists, yet this doesn't mean
with supreme accuracy. difficulty equals Totalitarianism. It means, instead, a
'crossing through danger' is not mere rhetoric. The dangers
Deep in Time's crevasse led Heidegger to his great error.
by the alveolate ice waits,
a crystal of breath,
5
Paul Celan: Todtnauberg Nazi ideology perhaps. He hopes for a word in the heart of
the great man. Did the word reveal itself? The remaining
It troubled Celan that the man he saw as one of the greatest
five stanzas are:
of modern thinkers, so close to his own work, was a Nazi.
One cannot even say 'had been a Nazi' because he never woodland sward, unlevelled,
said anything that amounted to a renunciation. Late in life, orchid and orchid, single,
Heidegger became interested in Celan's work. He
recognised him as the only living equal of Hölderlin. He coarse stuff, later, clear
attended public readings given by the poet, and in 1967 in passing,
even invited him to his famous Black Forest retreat at
Todtnauberg. Celan accepted. This was a significant move he who drives us, the man,
as Celan had developed an intense sensitivity (one might who listens in,
say 'anxiety') toward anti-Semitic tendencies in post-war the half- trodden fascine
Europe. When his dedicated publishers re-issued the work walks over the high moors
of a poet popular in the Nazi years, he left for another, and dampness,
when German literary authorities exonerated him over much.
plagiarism charges, he regarded it as a humiliation to be Almost certainly not. The two men walked across
even under investigation. Yet here he was meeting a man in woodland each in his isolation: an orchid and an orchid.
his most intimate home, a home in which, it is said, he had And the poem remained isolated as far as Heidegger was
once run Nazi indoctrination sessions. Perhaps Celan never concerned. He displayed his special copy of the poem
knew the full extent of Heidegger's culpability. proudly to subsequent visitors to the cottage, seemingly
Generally, not much is known about Celan's reasons for unaware of its implications. Perhaps this is enough to
accepting the invitation, nor what happened during the indicate the blindness of a man, even one with genius,
visit, but very soon after Celan wrote a poem called rooted in his familiar landscape - brought out here in
'Todtnauberg'. The title reference is explicit; the place Hamburger's translation of log-paths as 'fascine', a word so
name is synonymous with the philosopher. This is the first close to 'fascist', the etymological origin coming, as Joris
half: says, from the Latin 'fasces' - a bundle of wooden rods - the
symbol of fascism.
Arnica, eyebright,
the draft from the well 'Todtnauberg' , therefore, cannot be regarded as a coded
with the star-crowned die above it, accusation, or as a shy expression of bitterness, or
In sentimental regret, or of pompous self-definition in contrast
the hut, to a supposed intellectual superior, but rather the very
the line openness Heidegger apparently lacked. As Celan once said:
- whose name did the book "Poetry does not impose itself, it exposes." The lack of a
register before mine? -, second 'itself' in this sentence exposes.
the line inscribed in that book about
a hope, today,
of a thinking man's
coming
word
in the heart, (trans. Michael Hamburger)
As Pierre Joris points out in his exceptional analysis of the
various translations of the poem, 'Todtnauberg' is barely a
poem than single sentence divided into eight stanzas. The
first of the three above display Celan's extraordinary eye
for nature, as noted earlier in "Nocturnally Pouting".
Arnica and Eyebright are flowers noted for their healing
qualities, so right from the start there is the sense of what
the meeting is all about. In the third, the poet signs the
visitors book and makes plain his awareness of who might
have signed it before - Germans being indoctrinated into
6