Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan Page B

problem arises several times:
    Ãœ BER DREI im meer-
    trunkenen Schlaf
    mit Braunalgenblut
    bezifferte Brust-
    warzensteine
    stülp deinen sich
    von der letzten
    Regenschnur los-
    reißenden Himmel.
    Und laß
    deine mit dir hierher-
    gerittene Süßwassermuschel
    all das hinunter-
    schlürfen, bevor
    du sie ans Ohr
    eines Uhrschattens hältst,
    abends.
    Standard English syntax for the first sentence (making up the first two stanzas) would suggest a fourfold reversal of Celan’s construction, and would read something like this: “Clap your sky which is breaking away from the last raincord over three breast-nipple stones that are ciphered with brown-algae blood in sea-drunken sleep.” Trying to keep the movement of Celan’s sentence alive, so that “sky” can appear as the last word in the sentence, produces the following translation:
    O VER THREE in sea-
    drunken sleep
    with brownalgae-blood
    ciphered breast-
    nipplestones
    clap your
    from the last
    raincord breaking
    loose sky.
    There is no doubt that the twisted syntax sounds more strained in English than in German, especially the clause qualifying the sky in the second stanza. One could try to make the stanza more readable in English by altering the visual organization of the lines, possibly as follows:
    clap
    your from the last
    raincord breaking loose
    sky.
    But this does not remove the strain completely while falsifying the dense rhythmic movement of the original. The third stanza presents a similar though even more intractable problem. Keeping Celan’s syntax would give the following translation:
    And let
    your ridden with you to this place
    freshwatermussel …
    This is clearly nonsensical in English and needs to be altered so as to read something like:
    And let
    your freshwatermussel that rode
    with you to this place …
    Again, any solution is bound to be local, as the translator cannot rely on a generally applicable rule but has to try to reproduce, wherever possible, the movement of Celan’s language, while deciding how much strain it is reasonable to impose on the target language.
    But there is yet another problem facing the translator of Celan into English. It concerns what I like to call the present episteme of American poetry, that is, the set of presuppositions, linguistic and historical, that determine to a great extent how we hear and what we recognize as “good” poetry and, by extension, good translations. This episteme, so revivifying for American poetry since World War II, is in part inherited from such great modernists as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and others, but goes back at least as far as Walt Whitman. It demands that the language of poetry be as close as possible to the spoken, colloquial language of today. As a reaction to the genteel tradition of the British poetry of the Victorian and Edwardian eras (and its American equivalents), this has meant avoiding rhetorical flourishes and most traditional “poetic” effects. In relation to translating Celan into English, this can all too often induce the temptation to oversimplify the original poem, by giving short shrift to the oddities of the word constructions and by ironing out the twists and quirks of Celan’s syntax, in a doomed attempt to make the language sound “natural.” Yet the development of Celan’s poetry away from the traditional metrics and rhymes still present in the early work toward a line based on different units (breath, syllable, word) brings to mind certain developments in American poetry—one need only think of Charles Olson’s injunctions in the “Projective Verse” essay concerning a new breath-based metrics or compare the tight vowel-leading poetics of Louis Zukofsky’s poem “ A ” with similar attentions in Celan.
    In my versions I have drawn on every possible scrap of information I could garner concerning the poems and on all possible poetic