“All that has room within it / even without / language”: the poetic technique of Paul Celan

Abstract

The eastern European poet Paul Celan (1920–70) asserted that poetry is non-aesthetic: neither a work nor a process of art. His uncompromising approach, which became increasingly concerned with language’s capacity not only to broach the unspeakable, but also bring that unspeakability into his poems, continues to influence and shape the work of contemporary scholars, translators and poets. In this paper, I use apophasis – a centuries-old philosophical and rhetorical approach developed to deal in language with what lies beyond language – as a lens through which to examine Celan’s extraordinary relationship with and handling of words; and how he manages to shave language to its sheerest extremes. I investigate his diction and register, his wrenching and deforming of the German tongue, his inventive reworking of selected vocabulary into neologism, and the effect of this compressed energy on the structure and tone of the poems. Arguing that Celan achieves a verbal and dynamic dislocation that draws attention to what the poems stop short of saying, I consider what might usefully be drawn from his radical example, in order to shape a contemporary poetics whereby a poet might deal with what can be said against the mightiness of what cannot