by Paul Celan
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, would 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.
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 and of seduction, hypnot
ic 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.
