Snow Part

by Paul Celan

Celan's poems resist straightforward exegesis. They are not linear progressions, moving from word to word, from point A to point B. Rather, they present themselves to a reader as intricate networks of semantic densities. Intentional puns, oblique personal references, intentional misquotations, bizarre these are the sinews that bind Celan's poems together. It is not possible to keep up with him, to follow his drift at every step along the way. One is guided more by a sense of tone and intention than by textual scrutiny. Celan does not speak explicitly, but he never fails to make himself clear. There is nothing random in his work, no gratuitous elements to obscure the perception of the poem. One reads with one's skin, as if by osmosis, unconsciously absorbing nuances, overtones, syntactical twists, which in themselves are as much the meaning of the poem as its analytic content.

Genres: Poetry, German Literature

198 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

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

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Instead of attempting to review this entire book I will instead offer a rather simple interpretation of a relatively simple poem from the collection. Of course when we’re speaking of Celan nothing is really simple, as his poems are extremely compressed expressions of intense states of being, often completely interior, with the poem made even more difficult by compound neologisms and specific personal references that only repeated readings can begin to clarify, or the reading of secondary literature to at least gain a foothold, a way to begin a reading. But the poem I have chosen to interpret is composed of rather common words, and not very many at that, clocking in at only twenty-three.

Snowpart is, I think, the last collection that Celan himself compiled and presented as a unit, though it was not published until 1971, one year after his suicide by drowning.

Here’s the poem, in the two translations at my disposal; the first by Pierre Joris, and the second by Ian Fairley.


UNREADABILITY of this
world. All doubles.

The strong clocks
back the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.

You, wedged into your deepest,
climb out of yourself
for ever.


* * * * * *


UNREADABLE this
world. All doubles.

Strong clocks
accord the cleft hour
hoarsely.

You, clamped in your deepest,
climb out of yourself
for ever.


* * * * * *


It begins in despair, or at least defeat. The world encountered – this earth, this life, this civilization – is not a unity, and there is a contradiction between what’s seen and its meaning, or what is presented as its meaning. This is possibly a suggestion of Plato’s cave allegory, which introduces the idea of perfection existing somewhere and increases the tension of the poem, but is also probably an illustration of something more willful and sinister, such as governmental duplicity and just plain lying and deceit by individuals. The poem begins at a dead-end.

Then strong clocks strike. I see a man paralyzed by anguish sitting in a public square when suddenly clocks strike the hour and he’s snapped out of his idée fixe, or blank mind abyss. Here is where the two translations seem to me to go in opposite directions. In the Joris translation the clocks reinforce the fissure between the man’s (the poet’s) apprehension of the world and the world’s concrete reality, furthering the poet’s alienation; while Fairley's seems to suggest that the striking of the clock brings into accord the poet’s and the world’s realities, at least momentarily. Someone who can read the original would have to help me here.

But regardless these two interpretations have the same result: an internal movement within the poet. Wedged or clamped in the deepest part of himself he then begins a movement out. But even here I read a doubleness. Is this climbing out an attempt to escape, or a kind of ascension, or both? With Celan it must be both: a perpetual escape, or rather an attempt at an escape, from the hard reality of the double world; and a perpetual ascension into higher levels of metaphysical reality. Either way the struggle, the work, never ends and there is never a complete release, which only death itself can afford.

[Jonfaith]

These poems are opaque yet luminous. Words on a page: polyglot yet flattened into English, a borrowed tongue. My grateful, lazy ass.

I read these across a patch of insomnia. Some of them clicked, offering a flare of possibility. Others fell to ground, almost cinders or unfamiliar coins.

I have a biography of Celan and I want to read it. Fear is preventing me. My workdays are presently distilled exasperation. My back might not be stern enough for this particular study. I do long for Balkan mornings, without having to make decisions.

[Adriana Scarpin · Rating 4 out of 5]

PARTE DE NIEVE, enarbolada, hasta el final,
en el viento ascendente, ante
las cabanas desfcnestradas
para siempre:

rebotar sueños rasantes
sobre el
hielo estriado;

escarzar las sombras
de las palabras, apilarlas
alrededor de las abrazaderas
en el agadón.

[Béla Malina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never get enough of Celans magic. I will continue reading his work and revisit all of his collections.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always feel ill-equipped to discuss Celan's poetry because, simply put, I am in total awe of his work. He belongs to a small handful of poets who, for me, almost transcend the boundaries of the word on the page. By that I mean, their work comes closer than any other writers I've read to actually transmitting feeling through words (which I believe to be impossible in literal terms). This select group also includes Edmond Jabès, Alejandra Pizarnik, René Char, Danielle Collobert, and Ingeborg Bachmann. There are a few others that come close, but those are the elites for me at present.

Schneepart was not a collection Celan authorized for publication, though it is largely believed that he was intending to do so. It is a very dark set of poems, most of them written during a time that he was living apart from his family (at his wife's request) following psychiatric hospitalization after his suicide attempt in January 1967. As with most of Celan's poetry, especially if reading it in translation, it's advisable to read the translator's introductory commentary for a better understanding of the roots of some of these poems. Celan's work can appear to be highly personal, laced with obscure references that even critics cannot always parse (though Celan himself notably denied the hermetic nature of his poetry). But for those references that are either clear or can be teased out with a degree of certainty, it is rewarding to read the meaning behind these and gain a more nuanced appreciation for the poems. Of course, Celan's language alone strikes like sparks on flint so one can also choose to enjoy his poetry strictly on a superficial level. Though regrettably, reading him in English will always be less than ideal, given how tightly the German language was woven into his identity and his communicative powers.

IN THE ENTRY HATCHES to truth
the scanners are praying,

soon walls touch down at
conference tables,

the emblems jaw-jaw
blood,

a crow sets
its half-faced
compass wing to
half-mast.

[Ross Blocher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Minimal
Fragmented
Poetry-
Like an inside joke:
You get it
or
You weren't born in 1920 Czernowitz

Schneepart (Snow Part) was my introduction to Celan, discovered on a library shelf while looking for German/English texts to read as a study aid. He was a poet who spoke multiple languages but composed in German, was accused by a widow of stealing her husband's poetry (I am unequipped to weigh in, though it sounds like the accusation may have been unfounded), and took his life by drowning in the Seine in 1970. This collection was among his late, unpublished works. My favorite thing here was Celan's propensity to blend words together and create new ones. These German portmanteaus (in a language notorious for compound words) were a fun exercise in trying to identify the roots and modifiers and see if I could get what he was hinting at before checking the English translation. Mostly this was helpful for vocabulary reinforcement, because the poems don't communicate much in the way of storytelling or sentence structure.

Some may take exception to this characterization, including the translator (Ian Fairley), who writes a florid introduction extolling the depth packed into these bare lines. He deconstructs a couple poems, introducing details of geography, history, place and process that would be unknowable to someone just looking at the words themselves. The translator sprinkles his introduction with pretension: synaptic density, terrible coherence, imperfect symmetry, the singularity of this stance, agglomeration, heraldry of desolation, foreshortened articulation, glaciofluvial and karstic erosion, invert and repeat the schema, creates an interruption of breathing space... Oof.

I'll give an example poem, as translated by Fairley into English. See what you can make of it:

YOUR BLOND SHADOW, curbed
to the swimming-bit,
flashes its watershabrack,

- you too
would have a right to Paris
could you know yourself
more bitterly -,

the mark on your haunch
sketch, colourless, the half-
nigh levade.

I'm sure there's a lot of interesting information encoded there, but I have no access to it. This was a helpful if slow exercise in German learning, but impenetrable as poetry.

[Matthieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language in pain.

(Coming closer to writing something about this. But can you speak of (write) something that exists outside of words/speech?)

A word about the crocus.

[Mariia Lyshen · Rating 3 out of 5]

At this point я читаю Целяна, аби загнатися, що не розумію геніального

[James Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars obviously for Celan's German, three for this translation, which I have a hard time with. I think I'm just going to have to learn German...

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still thinking about this remarkable collection. It's astonishing to be able to craft poems about great violence that still manage to drift across the page like falling snow. Celan is a master of diction, crafting a hybrid language of ellision—words that become wounds.

“larger
than
death we lie
together, the autumn
crocus swarms
under your breathing lids” (Largo, 47).

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

i suspect that if i read german i would enjoy this more. the more interesting bits of the translation come in the juxtaposed compounds. some beautiful moments and the whole seems more than the parts. would like to read more celan, perhaps by a different translator for comparison.

[Rob Arnott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m too stupid for Celan

[Jarkko Tontti · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://kiiltomato.net/critic/paul-ce...

[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...

Lilac air with yellow windowstains,

Orion's belt above the Anhalter ruin,

flamehour, nothing
intercurrent yet,

from
standing bar to
snow bar.

*

The chasms are
sworn in on White, from them
arose
the snowneedle,

swallow it,

you order the world,
that counts
as much as nine names,
named on knees,

tumuli, tumuli,
you
hill away, alive,
come
into the kiss,

a flip of the fin,
steady,
lights up the bays,
you drop
anchor, your shadow
strips you off on the bush,

arrival,
descent,

a chafer recognizes you,
you approach

each other,
caterpillars
spin you in,

the Great Sphere
grants you passage through,

soon
the leaf buttons its vein to yours,
sparks
have to cross through
for the length of a breathdistress,

you are entitled to a tree, a day,
it decodes the number,

a word with all its green
enters itself, transplants itself,

follow it

*

Snowpart, arched, to the last,
in the updraft, before
the forever dewindowed
huts:

flatdreams skip
over the
chambered ice;

to carve out
the wordshadows, to stack them
around the cramp
in the crater.

*

Be sloppy, Pain,
don't slap her face
you yourself botch
the sand boil in
the white Beside.

*

Something like night, sharper-
tongued than
yesterday, than tomorrow;

something like her
fishmouthed greeting
over the sorrow-
bar;

something blown together
in children's fists;

something of my
and of no substance.

*

The in-ear device sprouts a bloom,
you are its year, you are dis-
cussed by the tongueless world,
one in six
knows this.

*

A lead, treeless,
for Bertolt Brecht:

What times are these
when a conversation
is nearly a crime,
because it includes so much
that's already been said.

[Lilly Brenneman · Rating 4 out of 5]

absolutely beyond!! 4.5/5⭐️ glad i look to booksellers for recommendations!

[Hirkotta Hirkotta · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Ейфоризовані
хори повільних
динозаврів майбутнього
розігрівають пересаджене серце.

Його
відторгнення, я зазимую
з тобою”

[Mika Lamminpää · Rating 2 out of 5]

Onpa vaikeaa. Totta kai Lumen ääni on hyvä runoteos - tavallaan. Useimmat runoista ovat kuitenkin niin kryptisiä, että tuntuu kuin pitäisi olla joku koodinpurkaja apulaisena tässä ryteikössä selvitäkseen. Voi olla että vika ei ollut runoissa, vaan minussa. Olen vain liian tyhmä tajutakseni tällaista runoutta. En kuitenkaan kadu sitä että ostin tämän itselleni. Saatan palata tähän vanhempana ja viisaampana.

[Puurojohannes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vaikuttava, kahluun pituinen kirja. Mietin oisinko ehkä pitänyt tästä vielä enemmän pelkästään saksan tai suomen kielisenä. Toisaalta pirun antoisaa vertailla ja ihmetellä kääntäjän valintoja. Tähän palaan vielä!!