by Paul Celan
In 1978, when Klett was reprinting Lehre vom Zerfall (the German Precis), I was asked to correct any errors that might exist. I was unable to do it myself, and refused to engage anyone else. One does not correct Celan. A few months before he died, he said to me that he would like to review the complete text. Undoubtedly, he would have made numerous revisions, since, we must remember, the translation of the Precis dates back to the beginning of his career as a translator. It is really a wonder that a noninitiate in philosophy dealt so extraordinarily well with the problems inherent in an excessive, even provocative, use of paradox that characterizes my book.
Relations with this deeply torn being were not simple. He clung to his biases against one person or another, he sustained his mistrust, all the more so because of his pathological fear of being hurt, and everything hurt him. The slightest indelicacy, even unintentional, affected him irrevocably. Watchful, defensive against what might happen, he expected the same attention from others, and abhorred the easygoing attitude so prevalent among the Parisians, writers or not. One day, I ran into him in the street. He was in a rage, in a state nearing despair, because X, whom he had invited to have dinner with him, had not bothered to come. Take it easy, I said to him, X is like that, he is known for his don't-give-a-damn attitude. The only mistake was expecting him.
Celan, at that time, was living very simply and having no luck at all finding a decent job. You can hardly picture him in an office. Because of his morbidly sensitive nature, he nearly lost his one opportunity. The very day that I was going to his home to lunch with him, I found out that there was a position open for a German instructor at the Ecole normale superieure, and that the appointment of a teacher would be imminent. I tried to persuade Celan that it was of the utmost importance for him to appeal vigorously to the German specialist in whose hands the matter resided. He answered that he would not do anything about it, that the professor in question gave him the cold shoulder, and that he would for no price leave himself open to rejection, which, according to him, was certain. Insistence seemed useless. Returning home, it occurred to me to send him by pneumatique, a message in which I pointed out to him the folly of allowing such an opportunity to slip away. Finally he called the professor, and the matter was settled in a few minutes. "I was wrong about him," he told me later. I won't go so far as to propose that he saw a potential enemy in every man; however, what was certain was that he lived in fear of disappointment or outright betrayal. His inability to be detached or cynical made his life a nightmare. I will never forget the evening I spent with him when the widow of a poet had, out of literary jealousy, launched an unspeakably vile campaign against him in France and Germany, accusing him of having plagiarized her husband. "There isn't anyone in the world more miserable than I am," Celan kept saying. Pride doesn't soothe fury, even less despair.
Something within him must have been broken very early on, even before the misfortunes which crashed down upon his people and himself. I recall a summer afternoon spent at his wife's lovely country place, about forty miles from Paris. It was a magnificent day. Everything invoked relaxation, bliss, illusion. Celan, in a lounge chair, tried unsuccessfully to be lighthearted. He seemed awkward, as if he didn't belong, as though that brilliance was not for him. What can I be looking for here? he must have been thinking. And, in fact, what was he seeking in the innocence of that garden, this man who was guilty of being unhappy, and condemned not to find his place anywhere? It would be wrong to say that I felt truly ill at ease; nevertheless, the fact was that everything about my host, including his smile, was tinged with a pained charm, and something like a sense of nonfuture.
Is it a privilege or a curse to be marked by misfortune? Both at once. This double face defines tragedy. So Celan was a figure, a tragic being. And for that he is for us somewhat more than a poet.
FOR PAUL CELAN
ANDREA ZANZOTTO
For anybody, and especially for someone who writes poetry, to approach the poetry of Celan, even in translation and in a partial and fragmentary manner, is a shattering experience. He represents the realization of something that seemed impossible: not only to write poetry after Auschwitz but to write "within" those ashes, to arrive at another poetry by bending that absolute annihilation while remaining in a certain way inside it. Celan crosses these entombed spaces with a force, a softness and a harshness one unhesitatingly calls incomparable. In his progress through the obstacles of the impossible, he engenders a dazzling crop of discoveries that have been decisive for the poetry of the second part of the twentieth century, and not only in Europe, at the same time as they are exclusive, impenetrable, stellarly unapproachable and inimitable. They question all hermeneutics, while simultaneously and impetuously expecting and prescribing just such a crisis.
Andrea Zanzotto, "Per Paul Celan," in Aure e disincanti del Novecento letterario (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 345-49.
Moreover, Celan had always been conscious that the further his language moved ahead, the more it was bound not to signify; for him, man had already ceased to exist. Even if in his texts ongoing tremors of nostalgia toward another history are not absent, history appears to him like the deployment of a ferocious and insatiable negation: language knows that it cannot substitute itself for the drift of a destructuration that will transform it into something other, that will change its sign. Yet at the same time, language has to "overthrow" history and something more than history; while remaining subjected to this world, it has to "transcend" it and at least point toward its horrible deficits.
If poetry is anyway always a construction, a composition, including at this terminal moment when everything denies it while traversing it, henceforth history cannot be supported or expressed, neither directly nor indirectly, in its multidirectional flight from meaning. Celan thus expresses himself in a system of forms or a seism of forms, aware that he is moving toward muteness (as he himself on occasion affirmed). This muteness is something different from silence, which can also be a form of realization; it veils and simultaneously makes evident a sort of "arm wrestling" in which an interior force slowly but inexorably ends up gaining the upper hand. Or, more accurately, should gain the upper hand — but there it is: to fall into muteness and simultaneously to find oneself in the same discourse forced into a kind of supreme delirium of discoveries, that is the paradox in which Celan manifests himself.
He advances through the spaces of a saying that makes itself gradually more rarified while at the same time becoming nearly monstrously dense, as in one of those "singularities" physics speaks of. He aggregates and dismembers words, creates a multitude of exacerbated neologisms, deturns syntax without however destroying in it a possible founding justification; he pushes his own linguistic system, German, into its deepest retrenchments. But at the same time he is aware that those marvelous designs of his, those unbelievable "fugues" and "strettos" along scales that may be musical or not, those geologies and suddenly truncated double bottoms, move toward something that is neither an unfathomable beyond of language, nor a return to a birthplace. In each movement of Celan's discourse something insinuates itself— something definitive, lapidary, but of a lapidariness that is like the metaphor for a missed eternity as much as for a death that at any rate remains "worried," un-venged. There are no longer any truly salvational births or returns, just as there is no longer any "Heimat" to which one does, however, aspire absolutely, especially in the context of powerful cultural references, be they the traces of the German tradition going from Holderlin to Trakl, or the presence of a very deep Hebraic element progressively assumed and borne during his extraordinary and harrowing destiny. One can then say that Celan's fate was at each moment an action, a drama obligatorily sacred (especially in the meaning of the Latin sacer) where malediction penetrates benediction in every poetic and human inventum.
And his very negation of the sacred, which, in an atmosphere of utter destruction, would in any event remain implied, has, however, always had for him a value of sacredness and intimation, of threat a
nd of seduction, hypnotic and blinding. It was the full acceptance of a destiny at the very moment when that term seemed to have been emptied of all meaning. There remained on the page the trace of an immense effort and of an exceptional gift of creation and love carried by an obsessive auto-frustration that was, however, immensely fruitful and even capable of being periodized in a series of turns, with its iridescent halos of surreality/irreality/subreality. A violence suffered and sedimented onto the page in the stigmata of his terrible rebuses, nearly like the residue of the unnamable massacre.
Other possibilities, other attitudes existed in the face of analogous problems and situations, even if not necessarily as extreme, which many of the highly motivated adepts of our era's experimental poetry have tried. Their premise was to consider givens such as the Celanian experience as in a way included in a kind of sphere to be invested from the outside, to be taken apart and profaned by fissuring it through collisions with a series of psychic attitudes and, before all, with codes that would be profoundly alien to it, borrowed from all the domains of current science (or nescience). It was, in substance, a question of taking apart, of attacking from the outside this "world mode" to gather even the most improbable possibilities for instauring a different relationship between history and the poetic word. For Celan this was an unending problem that he was fully conscious of; though faced with it he could not but feel obscurely impeached, despite his boundless knowledge, particularly in relation to languages, and despite his capacity for ardent symbiosis with other worlds of poetry and experience (suffice it to recall his fervent and complicit relationship with the ghost of Mandelstam). And although all his work took place in close contact with the most diverse forms of poetic experimentalism, including the most "profaning" ones, a contact encouraged by his choice of Paris as elected residence for his daily existence, he had established his exclusive home in the faithful concatenation with a Word which furthermore arose in German, his mother's/her murderers' language.
His prehensile eye and senses, his staggered or stepped pages where poetry "does not impose itself but exposes itself (as he put it himself), his Mexican sacrificial stone knives, his withdrawals-attacks in the confrontation with language, his procedures, even the most excessive and disturbing ones, are always condemned to gravitate around a "sublime" identity, sublime in as much as empty, and sublime because null. Yet he always remained in the shadow cone of a verticalism, as "in the presence of," as opposed to what could have happened to others. But whatever the place one wants to assign him, it is certain that no one has equaled his poetic richness in our age. It is nearly impossible to follow Celan through the thousands of stations of a Calvary that blossomed into an infinity of seductions, over vast forest flares, over the bites of glacial concretions, disfiguring objectifications, through ambiguous vegetalizations, and a spellbinding history that exploded simultaneously into "parallel" dictions in devastating xenoglossias. But an obstinate force came to freeze every possible resolution around this verticalist non-nucleus, because what, in the final analysis, never lacked in Celan, was the violence of a love that was absolute exactly because it was ever more "without object." Celan could not extract himself from this powerful and terribly monochord attitude to enter into what must have seemed to him like a double-faced terrain playing fast and loose. He couldn't surpass himself (supposing that that would have been worth the while) in this drive towards a form of sublimity, one furthermore disavowed on many occasions, that can be located in the traditions alluded to above and that were "his," from the "Holderlinian" line and the Hebraic — specifically Hasidic — one, all the way to a "flattening" in the reality, even if the pursuit of "reality" was the task he had from the start imposed on himself voluntarily and had made his own to the point of the ultimate sacrifice of himself.
There remains only to listen to what Nelly Sachs said: "Celan, blessed by Bach and by Holderlin, blessed by the Hasidim," and to draw from this the arguments for a sincere and pious gratitude to which the whole of our century should pay tribute. And a tribute that should also have been paid to him by someone who had all the necessary titles allowing him to join the poet at the summit of shared knowledge. This admirer, however, buried Celan under a most disconcerting array of attitudes and discourses, wounding him by committing maybe the worst of his many major errors: I am speaking of Heidegger. The poem by Celan entitled "Todtnauberg" (the mountain village the philosopher used to retire to, and where Celan went in 1967 with "a hope, today/for a thinker's/word/to come,/in the heart/") carries the burden of what can be seen as a final disappointment. Even if we don't know much about the details of a conversation in which the fundamental problems of poetry had no doubt their place, he most certainly hoped to hear the philosopher speak his frank disapproval of the genocide or else make some declaration of remorse for having kept silent on the matter. But it was not to be. In the very beautiful and mysterious words of the poem there transpires a Heidegger locked into himself, close to autism, and a Celan enveloped in an anxious apprehension. There remains the feeling of a scission, of a stridence, and as if of a last treason committed by a whole culture against the confident and innocent poet who had risked everything in his writing to set himself beyond absolute despair, without however being able to admit it, and who ends up perishing because of it. There remains the feeling of a fracture at the heart of German culture, or rather of European culture as a whole, which unhappily even today, in a time moving toward a new cohabitation between men, still projects the indigestible traces of a shadow.
ON PAUL CELAN IN NEUCHATEL
FRIEDRICH DÜRRENMATT
Poems became important for me only when I got to know Paul Celan in Paris. We visited him in his Parisian apartment. A woman, painting; a child. He was melancholic, despairing, somber, believed he was persecuted, some German newspaper had criticized or misquoted him, but then when one day he and his wife visited us in Neuchatel and stayed with us for a few days, we got to know another side of him. We had lodged the couple in a hotel up on Chaumont. At first he was sad, just as I had known him in Paris, we felt oppressed just as we had in Paris, we tried to cheer him up, we just didn't know how to, just as we hadn't known how to in Paris. On the last day his melancholy suddenly cleared, like a sky clears after dark clouds. The day was hot, heavy, no wind, oppressively leaden. We played ping-pong for hours, he had an enormous, bearlike vitality, he played my wife, my son and me into the ground. Then he drank a bottle of Mirabelle, a strong schnapps, to accompany a leg of lamb, his wife and we had Bordeaux, he, a second bottle of Mirabelle, Bordeaux in between, in the pergola before the kitchen, summer stars in the sky. He improvised dark stanzas into the big-bellied glass, began to dance, sang Romanian folk songs, communist anthems, a wild, healthy, exuberant lad. When I drove him and his wife up to Chaumont, through the late night Jura forest, Orion was already on the rise, then dawn grew inexorably, Venus flaming up, he sang and bawled like a boisterous faun. Later we heard little from him. Once he sent a newspaper clipping, begging me to intercede, suspecting a surreptitious attack, I reread the article again and again, could not find anything, did not understand his suspicion, did not answer him because I did not understand and because I did not know how I could have calmed him without becoming his enemy, given that he saw enemies and suspected plots everywhere. Then he came one more time, from Paris or Germany, as if fleeing from something, sat in my studio between my paintings, was silent, and yet a conversation seemed to get under way, died down, my wife readied the guest room, I went down to the wine cellar, unhappy in the knowledge that I had made him unhappy, that he had sought help without finding it, returned with a few bottles, the studio was empty. Only now do I hear Celan's voice again. More than twenty years later. Suhrkamp Verlag has published two records. I listen to his voice. Celan reads his poems with urgency and accuracy, the tempo even, at times quickening. Word creations, associations, I see images as I listen. Images from Hieronymus Bosch, The Last Judgment, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Are these poems still sayable,
not too esoteric to have an unmediated effect, hieroglyphs that reveal themselves only after long contemplation, poems of absolute loneliness, spoken behind soundproof sheets of glass, poems without time or tone, black wordholes, word-alchemical? The same helplessness overcomes me that I felt in front of Celan, the sadness he knew how to spread.
From Turmbau: Stoffe IV-IX (Zurich:Diogenes Verlag, 1990), 769-77.
THE MEMORY OF WORDS
EDMOND JABÈS
I have never spoken of Paul Celan. Modesty? Inability to read his language? And yet everything draws me to him.
I love the man who was my friend. And, in their differences, our books meet up.
The same questioning links us, the same wounded word.
I have never written anything on Paul Celan. Today I take the risk of doing so. I did not make this decision all alone.
To write for the first time on Paul Celan, for German readers, tempted me.*
To write for the first time on Paul Celan and to give my writing as destination the place opened by his language, by his very words, has convinced me to say "yes" —as one says "yes" to oneself, in silence or in solitude. While thinking, however, about the missing friend. And as if, for the first time, serenely, I accompanied him there where we had never penetrated together, into the very heart of the language with which he had battled so fiercely and which was not the one in which we spoke to each other.
