by Paul Celan
Ah, that layer of snow of which you tell me! For a long time I too had it! But I turned it into the tablecloth my wife spread over our — pleasantly round — table in order to host... so many incarnations of mud!
We remember your first visit, Rene Char, your words inscribed in your book. Downtrodden grasses stand up again. The Heart of the Second Olympian is among them, as is its bow.
Paul Celan
LETTER #6
TO JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Draft of an unsent letter to the French philosopher (who had just been the victim of an assassination attempt at his home on rue Bonaparte) concerning the Goll affair. The translation is based on the manuscript and incorporates Celan's variants in brackets.
After 7 January 1962 [?]
Dear Jean-Paul Sartre,
I take the liberty of appealing to you [like so many others] [at a moment] not without ignoring [the] your current preoccupations.
I write — I write poetry, in German. And I am Jewish.
For some years now, and especially since last year, I have been the object of a campaign of defamation the extent and ramifications of which go far beyond what one could call, at first sight, a literary intrigue.* You will no doubt be astonished if I tell you that it is truly a Dreyfuss affair—sui generis, of course, but with all its characteristics. It is a true mirror of Germany, the roads — "new" — which Nazism knows how to take — in patent collusion, in this case, with a certain "left" with national-Bolshevist tendencies, and also — as happens often in such a case — with a considerable number of "Jews" — are clearly visible. (All of this, moreover, reaches way beyond the borders of Germany.)
* and they have put much work into sapping our friendship ... They had much help . . .
I know all too well that it is difficult for you to believe this unknown person writing you. Permit me to come, in person, to plead my case before you, documents in hand, this case (which I beg you to believe is [rather] unique.)
I permit myself to join a small piece of writing to this letter. I would be happy to give you everything I have done.
I appeal to your sense of justice and of truth.
[In 1948, when I arrived in Paris,]
The facts force me to [ask you] [to treat] to use, concerning this letter, the greatest discretion. I also ask you to grant me a personal interview.
[No signature]
LETTER #7
TO GISELE CELAN-LESTRANGE
[Paris] Sunday, 21 August [1965] seven in the evening.
My darling,
Not a very good day yesterday, despite your beautiful Thursday letter and the phone call.
Clearly, this publishing house that sends me, without cover letter, letters addressed to me personally, opened— no, that will not do. My question, though "protocolled" (protokplliert) by Dumitriu, concerning those "two major American publishing houses interested in my work" (postcard from New York sent by dear Tutti two or three years ago) —: still unanswered.
They needed, those bastards, a well-known German-language writer who could also launch a "Lyrik" series for them — so, with the help of that oh so literary bastard Hirsch, they set a trap for me — and I fell for it, counseled by my "friends" Ingeborg, Lenz, Schalliick.
Anyway.
This afternoon, the Cinematheque again: October or rather Ten Days That Shook the World (after the John Reed book I gave you a few years back), directed by Eisenstein. The USSR has brought it out of its archives, this movie from before the Stalinist terror, made in 1928, and on the credits, before the pictures, one could read that it was dedicated to the proletariat of "Piter" — the popular name of Petersburg —:
so — I, you know me, I applauded.
— Psst! No reaction!
That's the answer I got, forcing itself on a theater where no one backed up my applause. Yet, there were readers of the Observateur . . . But the Observateur, that's "Leftism," that's the lovers of the Serie Noire, the homosexuals, the Idhec, the hip Marxisms, etcetera, etcetera.
So, all alone, I saw Petersburg, the workers, the sailors of the Aurora. It was very moving, at times reminding one of the Potemkjn, bringing to mind the thoughts and dreams of my childhood, my thoughts of today and of always, poetry -always-true-always-faithful, I saw my placards, many of them, those that, not very long ago I evoked in the poem I sent you — "Vaporband-, banderole-uprising," I saw the October Revolution, its men, its flags, I saw hope always en route, the brother of poetry, I saw . . .
Then, at a certain moment, at the moment when the insurgents occupy the Winter Palace, it began to desert poetry and to become Cinema, motion-picture shots, tendentious and overdone, the intertexts became propaganda — all that was History and its Personages had anyway been, from the very beginning, what was the least convincing, the role of the Left Social-Revolutionaries was completely expunged — , so then the heart loosened, searched for its silences (won, lost, won again), wrapped them around itself and led me outside, alone, as I had come in, running the gauntlet between young cinephile gents and young girls "mit tupierter Frisur," with too much makeup, in pants, sort of leftist sixteenth arrondissement, erratic and flabby. — But there were some, no doubt, who knew, taking, here too, responsibility for the terrible eclipses. Long live the sailors of Kronstadt!
*To Piter's Proletariat.
Long live the Revolution! Long live Love!
Long live Petersburg! Long live Paris!
Long live Poetry!
Paul
LETTER #8
TO ERIC CELAN
[Epinay-sur-Orge,] Sunday 15 December 1968
My dear Eric,
It is a great joy for me to see you succeed so well in your studies — I congratulate you on being on the honor roll. (You see, I had in fact expected as much.)
I find that your handwriting has improved a lot; it begins to be very much your own, and in these days when so many things, and not surprisingly handwriting among them, are becoming depersonalized, it is particularly pleasurable to see a handwriting, yours, gain a firm profile.
I am also happy for your reading. Gorky and Turgenev are naturally human, Gorky before all, the tone in which he narrates is richly authentic, the problems he goes at he truly lives them, everything starts from the lived experience, and that's very important. Turgenev is more intellectual, more reflective, more abstract maybe, but still always close to human beings and their preoccupations. Of course the world has evolved since Gorky's and Turgenev's days; but to know them and study them in depth means to be able to measure and appreciate what changes, what evolves, what remains though under a new form, often different and yet at the same time identical. — I will continue to suggest reading matter to you, but soon you will pick your own and I'm certain that you will know how to orient yourself. Think also of poetry, of that poetry that is always in quest for truth and I will help you discover it.
I wish you very good holidays in Austria, and send you big hugs.
Your Daddy
LETTER # 9
FROM GISELE CELAN-LESTRANGE TO PAUL
[Paris,] I May 1969
My dear Paul,
Earlier you told me: Don't you too have difficult hours? Oh Paul, if only you knew! I cannot talk much about it and, in order to resist, I also choose to seem like, to do as if... That does not fool me, even if it fools others, and often it is harder afterwards ... But only the walls of my room witness the hours of my greatest distress.
Work is a refuge for me, the one and the other, together with all the illusions that represents, but I can't and won't deny that it is a help. But engraving is now receding, receding; gouache painting too has become impossible for me after that rush. You know how one can't stand oneself when one is not working and the high price one has to pay for the chance (what would be the right word?) for the possibility of working. I have such a hard time putting up with the copper's silences, as if contact could no longer be established, I am lacking that too right now. Moreover, I am once again not reading, again unable to listen to music. The two cant
atas you gave me, barely a month ago, I did love them very much. But I have to admit that today they simply bore me. But why tell you all this? I know so well what you are living through and how much more unjust and evil your fate is than mine.
Your phone...
I have just put on the Beethoven concerto again, which does touch me very deeply. Bach and his immense knowledge also has that acceptance, that resignation which at times is difficult for me to bear. Beethoven is wilder, more human, I feel closer to the pain and revolt of his music than to Bach's. To listen to Bach one has to be well. At least for me it is so. What I'm saying must be totally wrong. But these last few months I have often felt it that way.
Truly, I am begging you to take the step toward the new apartment with simplicity. Don't let moral considerations or questions of merit enter, please. Why couldn't you work there too? and why would it be worse not to be able to work there? Accept that in the middle of all your difficulties there is yet room for small miracles, try to be able to recognize them. I assure you that they happen, despite all. I know this apartment will not resolve any of your difficulties. I have no illusions on that score and I consider this possibility to live in less arduous surroundings like a very small thing; but small things also have their minimum of importance. A crumb, Paul, this apartment, yes, a crumb it is and nothing more, but still it is a crumb.
Tomorrow I'll go to the Grand Palais. I'll finish the 600 forms for the grading of the pupils. At noon no doubt I'll take myself by the hand to return to the Bauhaus. The Klees are very beautiful, and to see them again will make a few moments come truly alive. Kandinsky gives you a sense of true respect that makes you very small, though there remains the difficulty of approaching his work, which still remains problematic for me. I can't get into it completely.
I didn't ask if you were going to Lutrand's next weekend; it would give me great pleasure if you could benefit from nature a little. Last spring I was very sensitive to it, to the changes in the weather, contrasts that didn't leave me indifferent.
I'll leave you now. I wish you all the best. Try, as I am doing, to also see those things that are not bad; there are some of those. I still don't expect miracles: I have not changed and don't count on them and don't live in hope of them, but small miracles do happen and I recognize them. They do happen, Paul, especially when one doesn't expect them. I wish you many of them, they make life better for a few moments, even a few hours, which is better than nothing. No doubt life cannot give much more, this oh so mean and detestable life.
Gisele
LETTER # 10
TO GISELE CELAN-LESTRANGE
[Paris,] Wednesday, 14 January 1970
My very dear Gisele,
That moment which I can perhaps situate. You know my purpose, the purpose of my existence; you know my reason for being.
The "kilodrama" has happened. Faced with the alternative of choosing between my poems and my son, I have chosen: our son.* He is entrusted to you, help him.
Don't leave our (solitary) level: it will nourish you.
I have loved no other woman as I have loved you, as I love you.
It is love — that overcontested thing — that dictates these lines to me.
Paul
*Ed. note: According to an oral communication by GC-L reported by Andre du Bouchet, PC had expressed this alternative in explicit terms, during moments of delirium, saying that poetry was demanding that he reenact "Abraham's sacrifice" (conversation of Eric Celan with Andre du Bouchet).
Previous page:
Gisele Celan-Lestrange,
etching, no. 15 in the
series Schwarzmaut.
PAUL CELAN AND LANGUAGE
JACQUES DERRIDA
Q: Would you say that one must have been, like Celan maybe, capable of living the death of language in order to try to render that experience "live"?
A: It seems to me that he had to live that death at each moment. In several ways. He must have lived it everywhere where he felt that the German language had been killed in a certain way, for example by subjects of the German language who made a specific use of it: the language is manhandled, killed, put to death because it is made to say in this or that way. The experience of Nazism is a crime against the German language. What was said in German under Nazism is a death. There is another death, namely the banalization, the trivialization of language, of the German language for example, anywhere, anytime. And then there is another death, which is the one that cannot not happen to language because of what it is, that is to say: repetition, slide into lethargy, mechanization, etcetera. The poetic act thus constitutes a kind of resurrection: the poet is someone who is permanently involved with a language that is dying and which he resurrects, not by giving it back some triumphant aspect but by making it return sometimes, like a specter or a ghost: the poet wakes up language and in order to really make the "live" experience of this waking up, of this return to life of language, one has to be very close to the corpse of the language. One has to be as close as possible to its remains. I wouldn't want to give in to pathos too much here, but I suppose that Celan had constantly to deal with a language that was in danger of becoming a dead language. The poet is someone who notices that language, that his language, the language he inherits in the sense I mentioned earlier, risks becoming a dead language again and that therefore he has the responsibility, a very grave responsibility, to wake it up, to resuscitate it (not in the sense of Christian glory but in the sense of the resurrection of language), neither as an immortal body nor as a glorious body but as a mortal body, fragile and at times indecipherable, as is each poem by Celan. Each poem is a resurrection, but one that engages us with a vulnerable body that may yet again slip into oblivion. I believe that in a certain way all of Celan's poems remain indecipherable, keep some indecipherability, and this indecipherability can either call interminably for a sort of reinterpretation, a resurrection, new breaths of interpretation or fade away, perish again. Nothing insures a poem against its death, because its archive can always be burned in crematory ovens or in house fires, or because, without being burned, it is simply forgotten, or not interpreted or permitted to slip into lethargy. Forgetting is always a possibility.
From an interview with Evelyne Grossman, Europe 861-62 (January-February 2001): 90-97.
ENCOUNTERS WITH PAUL CELAN
E. M. CIORAN
Precis de decomposition, my first book written in French, was published in 1949 by Gallimard. Five works of mine had been published in Romanian. In 1937, I arrived in Paris on a scholarship from the Bucharest Institut francais, and I have never left. It was only in 1947, though, that I thought of giving up my native language. It was a sudden decision. Switching languages at the age of thirty-seven is not an easy undertaking. In truth, it is a martyrdom, but a fruitful martyrdom, an adventure that lends meaning to being (for which it has great need!). I recommend to anyone going through a major depression to take on the conquest of a foreign idiom, to reenergize himself, altogether to renew himself, through the Word. Without my drive to conquer French, I might have committed suicide. A language is a continent, a universe, and the one who makes it his is a conquistador. But let us get to the subject....
The German translation of the Precis proved difficult. Rowohlt, the publisher, had engaged an unqualified woman, with disastrous results. Someone else had to be found. A Romanian writer, Virgil lerunca, who, after the war, had edited a literary journal in Romania, in which Celan's first poems were published, warmly recommended him. Celan, whom I knew only by name, lived in the Latin quarter, as did I. Accepting my offer, Celan set to work and managed it with stunning speed. I saw him often, and it was his wish that I read closely along, chapter by chapter, as he progressed, offering possible suggestions. The vertiginous problems involved in translation were at that time foreign to me, and I was far from assessing the breadth of it. Even the idea that one might have a committed interest in it seemed rather extravagant to me. I was to experience a complete reversal, and, years later, wou
ld come to regard translation as an exceptional undertaking, as an accomplishment almost equal to that of the work of creation. I am sure, now, that the only one to understand a book thoroughly is someone who has gone to the trouble of translating it. As a general rule, a good translator sees more clearly than the author, who, to the extent that he is in the grips of his work, cannot know its secrets, thus its weaknesses and its limits. Perhaps Celan, for whom words were life and death, would have shared this position on the art of translation.
E. M. Cioran, "Encounters with Paul Celan," in Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France, edited by Benjamin Hollander (San Francisco: ACTS 8/t), 1988): 757-52.
