Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan

Celan “invention.” The effect of this manipulation of vocabularies is to create a linguistic minefield through which the reader—and a fortiori the translator—has to move with extreme care (and great delight at the poet’s endless inventive and combinatory powers). I have put the word “invention” between quotation marks with respect to Celan’s own reported claim: “At bottom my word formations are not inventions. They belong to the very oldest layers of language.” This statement may be philosophically true for its author, but it does not bring philological solace to the translator.
    One also has to take into account the influence of other languages, as Celan’s early acquisition of and familiarity with a number of these has inflected his own writing. Romanian would be one example, though it is likely that Russian will eventually be shown to have had a more conscious influence, not the least through Celan’s very strong identification with Osip Mandelstam—one commentator speaking of the “slavification” of certain grammatical moments in Celan. French, which was the language environment Celan functioned in during the last twenty-two years of his life, has in all probability had some influence. However, little work has been done on this as yet, except for a few commentators pointing out some rather obvious homophonic occurrences. The most often cited of these examples comes from a poem where the German word Neige (decrease) sees its French homonym meaning “snow” appear as the German Schnee in the next line. Another concerns Celan’s use of the word Kommissur in a poem that plays on the German meaning that refers to an anatomical aspect of the brain and on the French expression commissure des lèvres . In English the word “commissure” happily carries both meanings and for once the polysemy is not lost in the translation.
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    If knowledge of these and similar complexities in Celan’s language has anything to tell the translator it is essentially this: Celan’s language, though German on the surface, is a foreign language even for native speakers. Although German was his mother tongue and the Kultursprache of his native Bukovina, it was also, and in an essential way, his other tongue. Celan’s German is an eerie, nearly ghostly, language: it is both mother tongue, and thus firmly anchored in the realm of the dead, and a language the poet has to make up, to recreate, to reinvent, to bring back to life. One could say that Celan raids the German language—and I use the military metaphor advisedly, for there seems to me to run through Celan’s life if not a desire for assault on Germany and revenge for the death of his parents (or of his mother before all), then at least a constant, unrelenting sense of being on a war footing, of being under attack and needing to counter this attack. The Celanian dynamic is, however, not simpleminded or one-directional: it involves a complex double movement—to use the terms of Empedocles—of philotes (love) for his mother(’s tongue) and of neikos (strife) against her murderers, who are the originators and carriers of that same tongue.
    This profound alienation in relation to his writing language is the very ground upon which and against which Celan works, or, to use the Heraclitian formula: Celan is estranged from that which is most familiar. In his answer to the questionnaire sent out by the Librairie Flinker, he wrote: “Reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won.” Reality for Celan, maybe more so than for any other poet of his century, came to its deepest richness in the word, in language, while, to deturn Marx’s line that “all that is solid melts into air” (including the bodies of the Jews gone up in smoke in the extermination camps), only what is caught in, (re)created by, a purified, reconstructed