Ethical Encounters: Reading Paul Celan

Abstract

Ethical Encounters: Reading Paul Celan BRIDGET THOMSON UniversityofSouthampton Paul Celan, Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Ed. by Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. 2003. 1000 pp. 39,90. isbn 3-518-41390-2. Kommentar zu Paul Celans 'Die JS?emandsrose*. Ed. by J?rgen Lehmann. Heidel berg: Universit?tsverlag Winter. 2003. 430 pp. 42,00. isbn 3-8253-1513-4. 'Im Geheimnis derBegegnung'. IngeborgBachmann und Paul Celan. Ed. by Dieter Burdorf. Iserlohn: Institut f?r Kirche und Gesellschaft. 2003. 100 pp. 9,00. isbn 3-931845-68-0. Grenz?berschreitungeninder Dichtung Paul Celans. By Simone Schmitz. Heidelberg: Universit?tsverlag Winter. 2003. 411 pp. 58,00. isbn 3-8253-1674-5. Die ?eitlichkeit des Ethos. Poetologische Aspekte im Schreiben Paul Celans. Ed. by Ulrich Wergin and Martin J?rg Sch?fer W?rzburg: K?nigshausen & Neumann. 2003. 232 pp. 29,80. isbn 3-8260-2592-x. Paul Celan is an extremely important presence in European poetry, and yet his unusual diction, painstaking syntax, and the breadth of his emotional, cultural and philosophical reach make his work difficult to locate. Celan's poems read like pacts with absent others. They both seek and disdain under standing. And their taut inflections of experience continue to elicit a vigorous range of critical attention. The complexity and force of Celan's work derive from his fraught and self-reflexive response to catastrophe. He bears witness to the Shoah, and the losses which remain one of its lasting consequences, in ways which refuse thematization, articulating trauma and the isolation of exile with a precision that sometimes brings us unbearably close to the expe rience of dislocation, towhat itmight mean to have lost family, community and home. This sense of injury haunts the poetic project of representation, but is nowhere disclosed directly. At the same time, however, Celan's work involves an incessant reaching into new or forgotten lexical strata in an effort to reproduce the physical and mental reality of experience, to expand our sense of its texture and detail, and to open onto other things. Poems, he suggested, are a means of orientation ? enabling experience as they trace it, BRIDGET THOMSON 267 seeking paths tomeaning through the disquieting folds and intense exposure of their writing. Now, more than thirty years after his death, readers have more tools with which to explore the tensions of Celan's work. The gradual release of archival material has resulted, since the early 1990s, in a range of annotated editions of his poetry, poetics and correspondences. These illuminate some of themore recondite elements of the poetry, as well as bringing us closer to the personal conditions and historical climate from which it emerges. The pub lication of the lettersCelan exchanged with his wife goes perhaps the furthest in revealing how details of the physical world encountered in his movements across Europe become traceable as topoi in the poetry, as well as showing the care with which he attended to the very structure of relationship invoked by writing to an intimate other in her absence, the mutual I-Thou relationship.1 But the usefulness of documentation for understanding Celan's poetry turns on its empirical status within the poem. While close reading is now vastly enabled by the elucidation of references, the relation of text to context is never a mimetic one, but deranged by the poetry's structures of displace ment and delay. Celan is known to have recorded and then erased the place and date of a poem's writing before publication, as ifremoving too direct a link to an event, object or theme. And so recent scholarship has necessarily become more reflexive in its critical responsibility to a vulnerable private knowledge and the heightened legibility of its traces. Celan criticism, in the diverse forms represented by these five books, would seem to be probing the conscience of his work, looking at how poetry relates to, recalls or evokes the lost others of history, how it represents the ruins of cultural memory, and how its structures of difference and specific acts of address embody a non-totalizing ethics of remembrance. Barbara Wiedemann's is the first complete edition of Celan's poetry to be published as a...