by Paul Celan
As a survivor of that deathscape the French call the "univers concentrationaire," Celan cannot but bear witness, though the mode of this witnessing differs vastly from that of most survivors while simultaneously radically differing in relation to itself over time. Let us now investigate this difference in Celan's poetics from his early poetry to his later, mature poetics by looking more closely at "Death Fugue" — written at the latest in early 1945 but in all probability already completed in late 1944. This positions it as one of the early "mature" poems of the young Celan, preceded only by the youthful poems — mainly love lyrics, though they already contain the darkness and preoccupation with death that became the hallmark of the later Celan — gathered by Ruth Kraft as Gedichte 1938-1944, published in 1985. When he published it for the first time, in a Romanian magazine and in Romanian translation, the poem was still called "Todestango." When he included it in The Sand from the Urns, it appeared as the closing poem — clearly to mark its special place, though not its chronological situation. In his first real book, Poppy and Memory, published in 1952, "Death Fugue" is located at the very center, surrounded by poems that in the main postdate it.
18. Paul Celan, Threadsuns (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 2000; Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2004).
19. After I wrote this introduction, and thus too late to take it into account, Mme Viviane Jabes Crasson sent me an essay by Steven Jaron that is one of the only serious attempts to deal with Celan's psychic condition that I know of: "Morceaux de sommeil, coins: Une reflexion autour de Paul Celan et Gisele Celan-Lestrange," in L'ombre de I'image de la falsification a I'infigurable, edited by Murielle Gagnebin (Seyssel: Editions Champ Vallon, 2003), 262-81.
I have already discussed Celan's later uneasy relationship to this poem and his decision not to allow it to be anthologized any further or to be read at public readings. But there is also, I believe, a decision not to let himself be identified with that single, early work — this on at least two levels. First, Celan was loath to be made a mouthpiece for what came to be called Holocaust poetry and refused to narrativize his experiences from that period — though what has been called the "ontological shame" of the survivor must also have an important role to play in this context. Second, as a poet, Celan did not want "Death Fugue" to overshadow the rest of his work, especially as this early poem can be read as an exception in his work and not as paradigmatic for his mature poetics. At the same time, his refusal to allow the poem to be published in later anthologies coincides more or less with a second critical turn away from or even against his work (after the early dismissal by misreading at the hands Hans Egon Holthusen and others) in Germany where, from the volume Speech-Grille onward, complaints about the growing obscurity and hermeticism of the work are coincident with and amplified by the rise of a new generation of German poets, such as Jiirgen Theobaldy or Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, who tried to define their own poetics in opposition to both the "hermetic" poetry and the "Naturlyrik" of the first postwar generation (Giinter Rich and Karl Krolow, among others) and who, influenced by U.S. poetry and events such as the Vietnam War and the growing student movement, see themselves as concerned with a different set of values and problems. The tension surrounding his relationship with "Death Fugue" can be seen as emblematic of the tension in Celan with regard to two essential poles: on the one hand, the need to witness, and, on the other, the desire I earlier spoke of as "visionary," to create in and through the poems a new, viable world that would overcome the past — without abolishing or dismissing it. This tension could be traced schematically in Celan's oeuvre if one were to look at the first part of it as an attempt to witness and to look at the late work, starting with Breathturn if not already with Die Niemandsrose, as essentially concerned with the very possibility of creating such a new world — at least in and through poetry.
The reason why "Death Fugue," as against the late poetry, exercises such a fascination and is so "readable" is essentially that its poetics are still rather traditional: the relationship between word and world, between signifier and signified, is not put into question. It is a poem that still, somehow, maybe desperately, believes, or wants to believe, or acts as if it did believe, in the fullness of utterance, in the possibility of representation. This fullness of language presupposes a fullness of being, a being who speaks and in whom both language and what language talks about are grounded. As against nearly all of Celan's subsequent poetry, the one thing not questioned in "Death Fugue" is the one who speaks and the place from which that one speaks. The poem is written (or spoken) by a "survivor" who adopts the persona of a "wir," who speaks in the name of a "wir," the "we," of the murdered Jews: "Black milk .. . we drink you at dusktime/we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night live drink and drink/we scoop out a grave in the sky."
That the dead can speak, or that a "survivor" can speak for them, that there can be a witnessing to their death, this is what Celan is going to radically put into question. The poem "Stretto" (p. 67), written in i958, is in many ways a rewriting of "Death Fugue" — down to the musical theme, as the word stretto (Engfuhrung in German) means literally a narrowing and comes from the technical vocabulary of fugal composition. The poem expands its landscape of disaster to include Hiroshima, but there is no more direct reference to the Shoah, no more "Meister from Germany," for example. The poem starts: "Verbracht ins/Gelande/mit der untriiglichen Spur://Gras auseinandergeschrieben. Die Steine, weiss" (Brought into/the terrain/with the unmistakable spoor: // grass written asunder. The stones, white). We no longer know who speaks, who is being addressed; the landscape can be, and is, simultaneously an inner and an outer landscape. On one level we can read these opening lines as indicating the situation of the reader coming to this difficult poem; on another level it is the "inner landscape" of the poet's mind/psyche; and on a third level it is also and simultaneously the landscape of his parents' death, the "Gelande," the terrain into which they were "verbracht" (the prefix ver- here brings the word into resonance with Verbrechen, meaning "crime"; an English construction that could carry some of that charge would be, instead of the verb to bring, the verb to place with the negatively loaded prefix dis-, thus "displaced into"). The same can be said for the opening verses of the next stanza: "The place where they lay, it has/a name — it has/no name. They did not lie there."
The problematics of the poem include, in an unstated way, the mass annihilation of human beings from Auschwitz to Hiroshima but in combination with another problematics, that of speaking, of saying itself, and, by extension, that of the possibility of the poem itself. The fourth stanza, for example, plays on Wort (word), which is the most often repeated and questioned ("heraufbeschwort," to use a Celanian term) word in the Celan opus, and, contrapuntally, the words ashes and night. Where the poet-narrator-reader of the "Todesfuge" had his mouth full of words, in the "Engfiihrung" what is most fully present is absence. We are, cosmically speaking, in a vast empty space traversed by "Partikelngestober" — particle flurries, reminiscent of Celan's later coinage "Metapherngestober," metaphor flurries.
The only place or object the poet finds to address his speaking to is the stone: "there was time, to try it with the stone — it remained hospitable, it didn't interrupt" (lit. it didn't "ins Wort fallen," "fall into, upon the word"). The stone that is addressed reappears in another seminal poem, "Radix, Matrix," from the volume Die Niemandsrose, which opens with the line: "Like one speaks to the stone, like/you, /to me from the abyss." The poem, as Werner Hamacher says, "describes the figure of an impossible dialogue."20 The you and the I of the poem are caught in an unending, indeterminable interchange; they change places, inverting the direction of speaking, so that Hamacher can conclude:
The irreconcilable ambiguity of Celan's formulation — in which the absence of the you suspends the I, that of the I suspends the you, and along with it discourse itself is suspended — realizes on the level of composition what the apostrophe says of the you[,] . . . that it is what is "in the nothing of a night... encountered."... As
one speaks to the stone, so speaks the stone: to nobody and nothing.21
20. Werner Hamacher, "The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure through Celan's Poetry," Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 276-314, 294.
"The poem," Hamacher goes on, "is a texture of interrupted illocutionary acts and muteness, thus becomes itself the mute discourse of a stone, a nothing encountered." This most radically stated impossibility of speaking — and thus of witnessing — is linked in the third stanza to the murdered Geschlecht (a word that carries a constellation of meanings: sex, gender, race, generation, family, lineage, species, genre): "Who/who was it, that/lineage, the murdered one, the one/ standing black in the sky:/Rod and ball — ?" Celan answers this question in the following stanza — though he puts the answer in parentheses, indicating that this is somehow extraneous matter, finally not central to the poem, and yet it is there, stands centrally in the poem, this matter of, if I may permit myself to pun on the typographical symbol used by Celan, the parent thesis: "(Root./Root of Abraham. Root of Jesse. No one's /root — o /ours.)"
The root of the Jews, Abraham's, Jesse's, is also, now, after the Shoah, "no one's root." That "no one," that Niemand, already given in the title of the volume in which the poem appears as "Die Niemandsrose" and encountered in many versions throughout Celan's work, is no longer simply the figure of a straight inversion: that is, it does not simply mean the absence of someone. Hamacher, again:
In this most radical version of inversion, language no longer converts its own nothingness into the substantial being of appearance, sound, and consciousness, as with Hegel and Rilke. Rather, it converts its literary being, compositionally and semantically, into nothing. This
21. Ibid., 295-96.
inversion is grounded in the third stanza's questioning after the murdered race.22
So here, in late Celan, the language itself in stating, imparting, acting the impossibility of speaking, becomes the very "stigma of the murder of European Jewry in the extermination camps of the Nazi regime." Peter Szondi countered Adorno's well-known dictum by saying, "After Auschwitz no poem is any longer possible except on the basis of Auschwitz." "Radix, Matrix" speaks out of that ground, but that ground, "Grund," has become an abyss, "Abgrund." Hamacher:
[This abyss] is not the condition of its possibility but rather that of its impossibility [The poem is still only capable of speaking because it exposes itself to the impossibility of its speaking. It no longer speaks the language of a race that could be the ground, center, origin, father and mother. Rather it speaks — uprooted, orphaned — the language of the murdered. On this account Auschwitz, a name for innumerable unnamables, can never become for it a historically bound fact. Murder cannot become the univocal object of its speaking; it can only be the projection of a questioning that recognizes itself as objectless and mute, and therein as itself a victim of the murder.23
This is not the place to enter into a detailed analysis of this question of inversion. Suffice it to say that Celan's "Niemand" is clearly not a simple negative, the negation of a "someone." Rather it is the possibility of the impossibility of the poem itself, and that possibility of the impossibility of the poem is the only possibility that Celan will grant the poem after Auschwitz. It is from this no-place, this abyss, that the poem speaks. It is that "Niemand" who does the witnessing in the verse: "Niemand zeugt fur den Zeugen." Nobody witnesses for the witness. The impossible/possible poem witnesses for the witness. What Celan — as a "survivor," that is, as someone who should be dead, because he comes/is there after death, as someone whose life is in suspension, is a mere supplement of death — bears witness to, is another, a new way of speaking, the only way possible after the Shoah.
22. Ibid., 296.
23. Ibid., 297.
But this problematic of the witness has a further dimension, or, better, further dimensions, that I would like to explore here in some detail as one example of the complex polysemy that orchestrates so much of Celan's work, making its translation such an arduous task—with translation first of all being the most demanding and active reading to which we can submit ourselves and the poem. I first encountered these other layers of embedded meanings when attempting to translate the poem "Aschenglorie hinter" from the volume Atemwende/Ereathtwm.
This book is the first book after what is called Celan's "Wende," or turn, which I have elsewhere described as follows: "The poems, which had always been highly complex but rather lush with an abundance of near-surrealistic imagery & sometimes labyrinthine metaphoricity ... were pared down, the syntax grew tighter & more spiny, his trademark neologisms & telescoping of words increased, while the overall composition of the work became much more 'serial' in nature, i.e. rather than insisting on individual, titled poems, he moved towards a method of composition by cycles & volumes."24 This "turn" had been prepared for some years and can already be seen at work in the differences between the poetics of "Death Fugue" and those of "Stretto," as discussed above, though they become more radical, not to say ab...solute, from Breathturn onward (the title itself speaks of the "turn"). Already in 1958 Celan had suggested that for him poetry was no longer (if it had ever been) a matter of "transfiguring" (verkldren). He wrote that given the "sinister events in its memory," the language of German poetry has to become "more sober, more factual|,]... 'grayer.'" This greater factuality checks a core impulse of the lyrical tradition, its relation to the "lyre," to music: "it is ... a language which wants to locate even its 'musicality' in such a way that it has nothing in common with the 'euphony' which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors." The direct effect of giving up this "euphony" is to increase the accuracy of the language: "It does not transfigure or render 'poetical'; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible."25
24. See the introduction toBreathturn.
Let us return now to "Aschenglorie hinter." The final stanza of the poem reads
Niemand
zeugt fur den
Zeugen.
When I first ventured to translate the poem, this sentence seemed semantically unambiguous and the stanza easily became
Nobody
witnesses for the
witness.
At the time this formulation seemed both straightforward and extremely pregnant to me, encapsulating a central concern in Celan's work, namely, the concern that this tragedy would eventually, already in the second post-Shoah generation, become lost — not necessarily lost as a simple "forgetting," but lost into mere storytelling, "mythos," mythined, though made even more complex by a radical questioning of the very possibility of witnessing.
25. Celan, Collected Prose, 15—16.
Moving deeper into Celan's work, reworking the translations of Breathtur n and starting to translate later volumes, it became clear that the zeugen/Zeuge complex was much more semantically multilayered than I had at first perceived. The German word zeugen also has the meaning "to beget, to generate," a meaning kept more or less alive in the English word testify via its Latin root testis, which refers both to the "witness" and to "testicle" (as the "witness" of virility). One also has to keep in mind the "Rod and ball," the "Hode" from the poem "Radix, Matrix." (Another semantic extension would lead us to "testament," "testamentary" — clearly terms that can also play into the witness complex.) Unhappily, in English there is no synonym for witness based on the verb/o testify (the back-formation testifier sounds odd and is unusable), and rendering the line as "nobody testifies for the witness," though getting in some of the semantic richness of the "zeugen" complex, ruins the poetics of the line and its use of repetition and internal rhyme, one of Celan's favorite and most pregnant technical devices. The most satisfactory solution I have (so far) found that takes the polysemy into consideration is the following version: "Noone/ bears witness for the/witness," as an attentive reader can (one hopes) hear in the expression "to bear" some of the load of procreation that the German word carries.
More recently I have come across an ex
cellent essay (which I recommend for any in-depth reading of this poem) by Jacques Derrida, who teases a further layer out of the Latin root testis by linking it to the word terstis. He quotes Emile Benveniste's Dictionary of European Institutions: "Etymologically, testis is someone who is present as a 'third' (terstis) at a transaction where two people are concerned." This linkage, so argues Derrida, will then also throw light on another obscure image in the poem, namely, the "Dreiweg," the "threeway" that occurs twice elsewhere in the poem. He writes: "The poem bears witness. We don't know about what and for what, about whom and for whom, in bearing witness for bearing witness, it bears witness. But it bears witness. As a result, what it says of the witness it also says of itself as witness or as witnessing. As poetic witnessing."26
But beyond the witnessing to the past, Celan also witnesses for the possibility of a vita nuova, a new life — maybe only or mainly in an indirect way, that is, by bearing witness (as Derrida points out) to the possibility of the poem and by having the poem itself say that witnessing. A poem from Breathturn, a poem whose importance is signaled by the fact that one of its composita will become the title of the next volume, Threadsuns, reads
