Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan Page A

language becomes real and is simultaneously able to retain its relationship to the actual world. Radically dispossessed of any other reality, Celan had to set out to create his own language—a language as absolutely exiled as he was himself. To try to translate it as if it was current, commonly spoken or available German—that is, to find a similarly current English or American Umgangssprache , or vernacular—would be to miss an essential aspect of the poetry, that of a linguistic undermining and displacement creating a multiperspectival mirroring that reticulates the polysemous meanings of the work.
    Celan’s “language,” as I have tried to show, is really a number of dismantled and re-created languages. This dismantling and rewelding, this semantic and syntactical wrenching, uses as its substratum a German language that offers itself relatively willingly to such linguistic surgery. Other languages do not have that flexibility, or else have it to a much lesser degree. French, for example, basically does not permit such word creations and is also resistant to the syntactical wrenchings so characteristic of late Celan—which is why, despite his many years in France and his relations with some of the best French poets of his generation, it took so long to have good translations of Celan in that language. In English, the telescoping of multiple words, though more available than in French, remains problematic at a number of levels. Noun-composita of two elements, such as “Wortwand” | “wordwall” or “Eisdorn” | “Icethorn,” often can be rendered as such in English, while those made up of more than two root words, such as “Rundgräberschatten” | “roundgraveshadow” or “Knochenstabritzung” | “bone-rod-incisions,” tend to be unwieldy and inelegant and often demand to be broken up. The major formal problems posed by Celan’s verbal grafts, however, concern his play with prefixes and affixes, especially the use of spatial adverbs and prepositions. Word formations such as “weggebeizt” | “eroded” and “weggesackt” | “sagged away,” which sound quite natural in German, or those like “auseinandergebrannt” | “asunder-burned” and “hinüberdunkeln” | “darken over,” which sound clearly artificial, invented, even in German, usually cannot be rendered by an English compound word and require circumlocutions or simplifications, that is, entail loss in translation. There are a number of more complex and stranger-sounding word creations, such as “verunewigt” or “unentworden,” that are so artificial in the original that they both give permission for and require similar constructions in English: “de-eternalized” or, possibly, “diseternalized” and “undebecome” try to approach the oddity of the German. Many of Celan’s neologisms employ verbal or adjectival root elements that are turned into nouns. The capitalization of nouns in German helps the reader identify such formations much more easily than is possible in English. There are, finally, no hard and fast linguistic rules the translator could apply across the board concerning these word formations. Solutions will tend to be local and dependent on context and on the eventual readability of the English term.
    Even more problematic than the vocabulary, however, are certain syntactical possibilities of German lacking in English, foremost the fact that in German it is possible to have nouns preceded by complete qualifying clauses. In the late poems, many of which are made up of long single sentences, Celan makes ample use of this possibility, thereby giving the poem a structure of suspense by deferring resolution of what or who is being addressed or modified until the end of the sentence. In a poem from Breathturn [p. 28], consisting in all of two sentences, this