A Date, a Place, a Name: Jacques Derrida's Holocaust Translations

Abstract

f) n Rams, Jacques Derrida reflects on his un-interrupted [le dialogue / ininterrompu] with Hans Georg Gadamer.1 Across impassable caesura of German philosopher's death, Derrida extends a belated invitation to Gadamer to engage in a on Paul Celan' s poetry and prose. Interrupted yet unceasing, posthumous two infinities, poem, as stated in subtitle takes place as an act of witness to third and as a tribute to a common friend and his poetic legacy. This moment of recollection and (double) mourning also involves a translation and retranslation of Celan's poetic word word of a poet-translator, whose own poetry has been often deemed untranslatable. Indeed, question of limits of interpretation between hermeneutics and deconstruction pivots on question of limits of translation. As has often been noted, problematic of translation, of border-crossing both between languages and within each language, is central to Derrida's work.2 In his reflection on translation, Derrida acknowledges his indebtedness to Walter Benjamin's articulation of the task of translator, on one hand, and to Heidegger's writings on language on other. What is beginning to emerge here is a constellation of texts functioning as sites of textual encounters that Derrida orchestrates between Celan and Heidegger, to which Benjamin has also been invited (these are encounters that will culminate in coda of Derrida's posthumous exchange with Gadamer). For purposes of this essay, I will focus on three of these texts, which Derrida wrote between years 1984 and 1987: Des Tours de Babel, Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, and Of Spirit.5 In a way, in his respective engagements with Heidegger's texts and with Celan's poems, Derrida takes up theme of a hoped-for yet unrealized encounter between thinker and poet, as it was alluded to in Celan's Todtnauberg.JThe poem transcribes a fated meeting between Jewish German poet from Romania and German philosopher, and their walk in woods of Black Forest down path that will forever remain half-trodden (Celan 2001, 13).4 Yet, it is this irrevocably interrupted conversation that Derrida will take up and carry toward its unfulfilled promise.