Світлотиск

by Paul Celan, Пауль Целян, Пауль Целан

До книги вибраних віршів видатного німецькомовного поета Пауля Целяна (1920, Чернівці–1970, Париж) увійшли твори автора, написані ним в останні роки життя. Збірка містить сто поезій, надрукованих у прижиттєвих виданнях, а також у книгах, що з’явилися відразу після трагічної смерті Целяна. «Світлотиск» дає можливість ознайомитися з «пізнім» Целяном, чия творчість відзначалася дедалі більшою тьмяністю та герметичністю письма, численними поетичними кодами й шифрами, залишаючись одним із найцікавіших явищ європейської поезії другої половини ХХ століття.

Genres: Poetry, German Literature

136 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1970

About the author

Poet, translator, essayist, and lecturer, influenced by French Surrealism and Symbolism. Celan was born in Cernăuţi, at the time Romania, now Ukraine, he lived in France, and wrote in German. His parents were killed in the Holocaust; the author himself escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. "Death is a Master from Germany", Celan's most quoted words, translated into English in different ways, are from the poem 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue). Celan's body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.

Reviews

[Matthieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes some poetry (and poets) difficult? Is it that the content is hard to appreciate? The unique vocabulary that often slips through the cracks of the OED? The syntax? Is it that you feel completely lost when reading it, and don't know where to begin? Difficult poems are often the darlings of the critics (how many times has Harold Bloom swooned over Pound's Cantos, etc?), and on occasion some even burst into the mainstream (The Wasteland), despite having the endnotes be longer than the actual text. The difficult poem is suffused with a heightened understanding of language, countless textual irregularities, and often requires the reader to look at each word several times before permitting them to move on, etc. Over the last fifty years, we've certainly seen our share of difficult poems (written for the most part by the so-called difficult poets), but none have really baffled and enthralled us in equal measure quite like Paul Celan's. Poetry today seems to be strictly divided into two opposing fields: the so-called easy poems—comforting, sweet, and often inspirational; poetry that's appropriate for a recent high school and college graduate, or what one's grandmother would enjoy during the holidays. Poems that don't require much thought, and are almost immediately enjoyable to the reader (Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, recent Charles Simic, etc); and on the other, the dense, sprawling, Sisyphean-tasks-disguised-as-poems that are championed by comparative literature students/professors/critics, whose volumes are found in almost pristine condition in most university libraries (the Cantos, early Koch, most of Bernard Noël's poetry, etc). Paul Celan's falls into the latter group, but even among the difficult poets, he is something of an outsider. His early poetry was built upon the (tenuous) foundation of surrealist dream logic (directly influenced by the work of René Char), whereas his late-early and middle periods consciously moved away from this neo-surrealist style into one of focused grief and recollection. It was in the late forties and early fifties that Celan began to write about the Holocaust (and the fate of his parents) in his writings, and it was during this period—by far the most sentimental and openly pained—that Celan wrote some of his most famous and widely anthologized poems (Espenbaum, Todesfuge. It was here that Celan started to use specific personal, historical, and mystical references in his poetry—elements out of his childhood, country, and faith. His repeated allusions to his parents, his mother in particular (and the circumstances surrounding her death), caused him to be lumped in with, perhaps unfortunately, the Holocaust writers. While this label seems apt in a few places, it forces an overly broad generalization of Celan's work which, I believe, is neither fair to the poet or the reader. Celan is simultaneously too universal (i.e., more often than not, he never actually speaks about the events; instead, he goes beyond them, analyzing them from a distant, almost clinical vantage point, just as he outlines only specific feelings associated with the experiences that befell him during, as he put it, that which happened), and at the same time, too introspective, too isolated (there was no sense of universal mourning—he was too focused on his parents (his mother), and relating her death to his own life. Celan's work at this time—though obscured behind startling, unnatural images—nevertheless shows a young(er), prodigiously gifted poet coming to terms with his life, art, etc. His poetry was, at this time—and especially during his last period—a conscious negation of Theodor Adorno's statement that "poetry is impossible after [the Shoah]." It goes without saying that Celan would've sided with Jerome Rothenberg's comment that "after Auschwitz, only poetry is possible."

The Turn

Something happened to Celan in the early sixties. Towards the end of his 1961 Meridian speech, he spoke about the future of poetry, and how we sensed that an Atemwende (Breathturn) was imminent—a self-contained poetic movement that would take on all the attributes of the past, and restructure them into something contemporary and necessary. Immediately after this speech, he began writing short, cryptic, and formally innovative poems that would eventually coalesce into his first post-Wende poetry book, Atemwende (Breathturn). Though the poems comprising it were written between '62 and '65, Atemwende wasn't published until 1967. Celan had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals due to severe depression, and was institutionalized for several months in '65 following his first suicide attempt. What he wrote was fractured, strange, and elusive. This volume was followed by Fadensonnen (Threadsuns) in '68, the second movement of the post-Wende style, comprised of poems written between '65 and '67. It was the last of Celan's books to appear in his lifetime.

Lichtzwang

Lichtzwang (Lightduress) was written between June and December in 1967, and was published three months after Celan's suicide. By all accounts, 1967 was a very difficult year for Celan. It began with a false accusation of plagiarism, which shamed Celan to the extent that he attempted suicide for the second time. From February until December, he was interned at a psychiatric hospital, unable to leave for work or travel until April. Over the next year, Celan would separate from his wife, deal with serious physical and mental illness, and attempt to reassemble what was left of his life in a small Paris apartment. The impetus needed to realize this final part of the post-Wende came in July, when he traveled to Germany in order to give a speech. Present among those in the audience was the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was quite fond of Celan, whom he considered the living heir to Hölderlin, so after the speech, he invited the poet to his retreat (die Hütte) in Todtnauberg. Though he refused to have his photograph taken with Heidegger, he gladly accepted the invitation. He wrote in the guestbook. He wrote: Into the hut-book, looking at the well-star, with a hope for a coming word in the heart. The two of them walked in the surrounding forest, where Celan greatly impressed Heidegger with his knowledge of botany and mineralogy. But this event goes beyond mere formalities. Celan, the survivor of a Nazi work camp, orphaned during the war when his parents were executed along a stretch of the Bug river, was a painfully shy man, who did not easily find himself in conversation. This meeting is different, however. He had clearly come, if not to directly confront Heidegger with his past, then to ask for a word (an explanation or apology) from a German thinker whom he considered to be one of the finest living minds, a thinker preoccupied with poetry (Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl—all of whom were essential poets for Celan), but who was also at one time deeply involved with the Nazi party.

Two men, insisting on their seperateness, each enveloped in his own world, walk through a wet forest. They say nothing more to each other, and Celan never receives the coming word that he hoped for. The result of this meeting is the poem Todtnauberg:

Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,

in the
Hütte,

written in the book
—whose name did it record
before mine — ?
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker's
word

to come,
in the heart,

forest sward, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,

crudeness, later, while driving,
clearly,

he who drives us, the man,
he who also hears it,

the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,

humidity,
much.

I consider this to be one of the most striking, affecting poems to have come out of the last century. Formally unique: a single sentence, divided into nine stanzas, five of which have but two lines, and is essentially composed of incongruously juxtaposed nouns and noun-clauses commenting on those nouns, separated by commas until a single period brings the poem to a close. As a result, the poem has a cut-up, composite feeling—something stretched out, compressed, short of breath. It is an exhausted, disappointed poem, read as something incomplete (emotionally, aesthetically, semantically). This, to me, is the centerpiece of the volume. There are very few 'long' poems in this book (and long is a relative term when talking about Celan, as his 'long poems' are what most would consider to average in length), as the majority of what he was writing during the last few years of his life took the form of very short, enigmatic poem-statements, such as:

CLEARED, this start
also.

Bow-wheelchant with
Corona.

The duskrudder responds,
your torn-
awake vein
unknots itself,

what's left of you, slants,
you gain
altitude.

&

A YOU, cast in lost matter,
accurate to the mask,

along the lid-
crease with
one's own
lidcrease to be near you,

the trace and the trace
to strew it with grey,
final, deathly.


It's important to realize when reading Celan that each word he uses, each instance of idiosyncratic punctuation is there for a reason. A very rigid and defined logic provides structure to even the shortest poems in the book:

ONCE, death was much in demand,
you hid in me.

&

DISCUS, bestarred
with face fronts,

throw yourself

out of yourself.

This is probably the most direct and [immediately] understandable that Celan gets. This is poetry of the purest, least pretentious kind. In a world where we're constantly running up against overwrought, sentimental, heart-on-the-sleeve nonsense, Celan's sinewy, skittish verse is absolutely vital. This is a poet overflowing with grief and passion, yet somehow managing to pass himself off as the model of restraint. This limiting action/means of self-restriction infuses the poems with an indescribable yet overwhelming tension. The sense of doom is palpable, and by the last few cycles, you get the image of a man completely broken looking to (his) death as a means of rising above the suffocating horror of his day-to-day existence. Schneepart aside, this may be the most beautiful and oblique suicide note in history.

The tragic flow of these poems will carry you away (if you let them).

[Adriana Scarpin · Rating 4 out of 5]

No obres de antemano...

No obres de antemano,
no envíes nada fuera,
mantente
dentro:

transfundido de nada,
libre de cualquier
plegaria,
sutilmente acordado según
la pre-inscripción
insuperable,

yo te acojo
en lugar de toda
paz.

[Béla Malina · Rating 5 out of 5]

?<3

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Celan's poetry after Breathturn is best summarized by translator Pierre Joris in his Introduction to Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry ...

In the early sixties, that is, midway through Paul Celan's writing career, a radical change, a poetic Wende, or turn, occurred, later inscribed in the title of the volume Atemwende | Breathturn, heralding the poetic he was to explore for the rest of his life. His poems, which had always been highly complex but rather lush, with an abundance of near-surrealistic imagery and sometimes labyrinthine metaphorically - though he vehemently denied critics' suggestion that his was a "hermetic" poetry - were pared down, the syntax grew tighter and more spiny, and his trademark neologism and telescoping of words increased, while the overall composition of the work became much more serial in nature. That is, rather than insisting on individual, titled poems, he moved toward a method of composition by cycles and volumes.

My favourite passages...

We already lay
deep in the underbrush, when you
finally crept along.
But we could not
darken over toward you:
there reigned
lightduress.

*

Where I forgot myself in you,
you became throught,

something
rushes through us both:
the world's first
of the last
wings,

the hide
spreads over my
storm-riddled
mouth,

you
come not
to
you.

*

Your face shies quietly,
when all at once
lamplike it lights up
inside me, at that place
where one most painfully says Never.

*

Addressable
was the one-
winged soaring blackbird,
above the firewall, behind
Paris, up there,
in the
poem.

*

Delusionstalker eyes: in you
end up the rest of the gazes.

A single
flood
swills up.

Soon you brighten
the rock to death, on which they

have
bet, against
themselves.

*

Do not work ahead,
do not send out,
stand
inward:

transgrounded by the void,
free of all
prayer,
fine-fugued, according to
Writ's pre-Script,
Not overtakable,

I take you in,
instead of any
rest.

[toni · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are the ones I love: 'Where I forget myself in you...'(p.59); 'HIGHGATE' (p.77, this one I love the most!); 'Apostrophizable'(p.141).

I hate to say this, but some of them look really absurd to me, say this one

In the dark-cuts I learned it:
you live toward me, nevertheless,
in the standpipe,
in the
standpipe.

Sure Murakami will LOVE it.

[Michael sinkofcabbages · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will follow me to the end.

[злорад павич · Rating 3 out of 5]

це не оцінка

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even the title of this work, the final one Celan prepared for publication, seems more strained and fraught than those of the previous two volumes of his post-Wende work (Breathturn and Threadsuns). While hope, at times, put up some kind of a fight in those earlier volumes, in Lightduress it’s all but overwhelmed by the poet’s and Europe’s history and illness. Which is to say, in Joris’ amazing translations, some of these poems are painful to read, as they should be.