Anti-lyric: Translating the Ghost of Paul Celan (excerpt)

from Vallum Magazine

Line by line this translation reaffirms free verse traditions and embodies intelligent decisions about the ambiguities and multiple dimensionalities of Celan's text, but it's not Celan, on either side of the language divide. In comparison with it, a whole tradition comes to its end in Celan's poetry. The angelic flight of the lyric poem, bringing the Word of God into the world of human speech, spouting out of the fountains of the Baroque and washing through 19th Century art songs, finds its last gasp in the mass grave of Celan's verse. Along with it are buried the other broken children of German tradition, as it deconstructed itself generation by generation to a black hole and then swallowed itself inside: the exile, Heine, the divine madman, Hölderlin, the demonic junkie, Trakl, the cryptic symbolist, Rilke. The cultural road to Auschwitz was long. Closest of all these crippled dreamers to Celan and the sound of the next transport from Czernowitz was Rilke, who wrote the Duino Elegies secreted in a sunless castle above Trieste: the whispered introspections of a man past all belief in culture and humankind, reading faces in the fog, in a candle, in a tea leaf: "Who, if I raised my voice, would answer me from the spheres of the angels?" No-one. After that last whisper of the romantic age, Celan's family went up in smoke in Auschwitz. Celan wrote to the smoke. His words are what came after poetry.

The translation of the ghost of a lyric and cries that are ash drifting through the birch trees require at least the same attention as Celan gave to them: as a person not present, writing to dead ancestors in a language folding into itself in ever more violent constrictions. In Celan's self-portrait, for instance, written at the end of a lyrical tradition celebrating the individual, "the waltz of two words / made of pure fall, silk, and nothing," as Popov and McHugh put it, there is simply no individual left, only a "nothing" so insignificant that it is not even acknowledged within its own poem. If Celan had written this as a lyric, his missing mother would be waving good-bye to her small son as she boarded the transport. She is not. What Celan presents in her place is a 'what', a relative pronoun, which Popov and McHugh follow with "[what] spirited you away from language / with a gesture &emdash;" fine late American free verse lines, especially in the choice of "spirited" to capture the sense of an S.S. seizure in the middle of the night.

But it's just not Paul Celan. Whereas Popov and McHugh are writing a lyric, Celan actually wrote an anti-lyric, an utterance rising directly out of German grammar itself, fighting against it like Prometheus in his chains, and, ultimately, ending in failure, spitting out its final words, "pure fall, silk and nothing," in contempt for language and in self-disgust far greater than hinted at by Popov and McHugh's wistful strains. In this tragedy, Celan and his dead are depersonalized as "what" and "what." Remarkably, Celan survives this kidnapping by the language: in the intensity and unity of his utterances, his innovative syntax, his linebreaks, the missing Celan is everpresent, unwilling either to subjugate himself to the language or to entirely leave his creation and the last traces of a self. The poem harks back to King Lear's Gloucester, whose reward for loyalty &emdash; as is Celan's &emdash; is to have his eyes scratched out with thorns: "Go blind today already: / Eternity too is full of eyes," as Popov and McHugh put it, or, as the ghost of the lyric behind the lines might have been, "Why don't you just stick your eyes out with thorns now: / even Eternity is crammed full with eyes," with its image of boxcars and eyes staring accusingly out of darkness.

Celan's creation is not that lyrical poem, however, but the edges of it; Celan's self does not inhabit its words but their outlines, building up to a final personal gesture in an ultimate dismissal of both language and self. Celan gets there by framing each line with directional marks and gestures: a colon, a dash, isolated relative pronouns, a series of phrases without a verb, mimicry of a command, phrases with cascading references expanding outwards in geometrical series, building in intensity with the dual purpose of drawing in all possible interconnections and isolating the ending's "nothing." German can get away with that. Relative clauses are rife in German, and they often begin with pronouns: only context differentiates the "which" and "what" of the language from its identical "who" and "him" and "her." Lacking such reliance on relative constructions, English grammar can't move as subtly between the personal and the impersonal. The result, as Popov and McHugh demonstrate, is often a translation that loses Celan, while retaining the language he threw away in an attempt to get out from under its weight. For example, whereas Popov and McHugh write "there the fire goes out of / what spirited you away from language / with a gesture you let happen / like the waltz of two words," compressing Celan into a (typically English) long nominative phrase, Celan threw his weight instead on the myriad opening and closing doors offered by his German: isolating "darin" (in which), on a line by itself, and relativising "was auch dich aus der Sprache / fortnahm" ("what spirited you away from the language") to the verb "erlischt" (extinguishes, dies out). English is not German, of course, and these effects are very subtle, but when the author has buried himself within them, their loss is a betrayal of the spirit of the poem: without them, the poem can never resolve itself.

Such subjugation and sublimation are not the only use Celan makes of German grammar: he also employs its capabilities of compression to build adjectival phrases, which read, in English, as phrases embedded within phrases, for example: "jeder mit einem / Teil des noch / zu versenkenden Zeichens / im geierkralligen Schlepptau." (literally: each with a part of the still-to-sink sign in vulture-clawed tow). Popov and McHugh translate these embedded adjectival phrases with their prepositional and nominative building blocks as a participial phrase subjugated to a noun, and add a verb as well, in: "each / with a vulture-claw / towing a part / of the still- / unsunken sign." English, with its greater reliance on linearity and action, provides few other options, but when played straight like this it does completely subvert Celan's intentions.

The most dramatic and revolutionary use Celan makes of language is to create new compound words &emdash; "heavenleaf", "thought-beetle", "blood-bloom", "breathturn." In any use of German less intense than Celan's this common trick of word-compounding is reserved for compounds that compress two nouns in predictable series, or a closely related adjective and noun. Some of these formations, such as "Handschuh" ("glove", literally "handshoe"), are permanent in the language, while others come and go, formed when needed and just as soon discarded &emdash; powerful examples of grammatical compression in a language that does not aim for linear action but for singularity and gnomic unity. In keeping with the spirit but not the practice of this grammatical device, Celan achieves intense, startling creations, further compressing the work of his embedded adjectival phrases. The result of his "daygorge" and "wordmoon" and "breathcrystal" is a series of miniature imagist poems, set within the language he so distrusts: a revolutionary path out of the trap of a language that led to Auschwitz and did not lead out of it again. The effect is entirely transparent within German, and leads to utterances of great evocative power.

In translation, however, the effect is unveven. Here are two examples from Pierre Joris, who has the most success at these compounds in English: "Strahlenwind" (beamwind), and "Zeitenschrunde" (timecrevasse). In German, "Strahlenwind" actually beams, like the sun breaking through clouds or like wind pouring through a wind tunnel at Peenemünde. It carries, as well, a lyrical charge, by echoing the participle "strahlend" (beaming). The effect is mixed in English, as it is unclear whether a beam of light or of wood is indicated. Similarly, "schrunde" splits "time" quite viscerally in German, like an earthquake in spacetime, whereas in English "crevasse" and "time" are equals: either can modify the other. In effect, in English, the success of such constructions relies on the unexpectedness of the neologisms to throw the reader out of expected language into a world of metaphysical contemplation: the end is the Word of God separated from, as opposed to revealed within, the world of man. Once again, no space is allotted for Celan, the self-confessed "outline" of a man; once again readers are given the impression that Celan is a far more difficult poet than he is. Whereas Celan escaped from the prison of tradition, these translations return him to it, and achieve what all the ovens of Auschwitz failed to do: to remove him from his creations.

Paul Celan, glottal stop, tr. Nikolai Popov & Heather McHugh

Wesleyan University Press

2000, 147 pp 6x9" hc

ISBN 0-8195-6448-6

 

Paul Celan, Breathturn, tr. Pierre Joris

Sun & Moon Press

1995, 270 pp, 6x8" pb

ISBN: 1-55713-218-6

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