Florilegia: Influence and Cross-Pollination between Celan and Hölderlin, Pindar and Horace

Abstract

Florilegia: Influence and Cross-Pollination between Celan and Hölderlin, Pindar and Horace John T. Hamilton (bio) According to his biographers, before succumbing to the dark waters of the Seine on or about April 20, 1970, Paul Celan left his copy of Wilhelm Michel’s 1940 biography, Das Leben Friedrich Hölderlins, on his desk in his apartment at 6 avenue Émile Zola, close to the Pont Mirabeau.1 Michel’s volume was opened to the page where Celan had underlined a brief portion of a citation from Clemens Brentano: Niemals ist vielleicht hohe betrachtende Trauer so herrlich ausgesprochen worden. Manchmal wird dieser Genius dunkel und versinkt in den bitteren Brunnen seines Herzens; meistens aber glänzet sein apokalyptischer Stern Wermut wunderbar rührend über das weite Meer seiner Empfindung.2 The passage may be taken as a striking testament, as a final communication entrusted to posterity, one that would forever link Celan’s ominous resolve to Hölderlin’s tragic Umnachtung. The presumed uniqueness of Hölderlin’s past case (“niemals […] vielleicht”), that “contemplative mourning has perhaps never been expressed so magnificently,” is acknowledged and challenged by Celan’s present mournful state, by a repetition that, all the same, hardly detracts from both poets’ singularity. The niemals is asserted and qualified by an implicit wieder einmal, which therefore relates to Jacques Derrida’s conclusion [End Page 600] concerning Celan’s obsession with dates—namely, that “a date marks itself and becomes readable only in freeing itself from the singularity that it nonetheless recalls” (Derrida 35). Analogously, the tendency of Hölderlin’s work, that it “sometimes [manchmal] becomes dark and sinks into the bitter wells of his heart”—this feature observed by Brentano, cited by Michel, and underscored by Celan—can be read only when it compromises the uniqueness that it nonetheless confirms. In each instance, das eine wie das andere Mal, one finds the shared theme of fatal submergence, how the poet and therefore the poets, Hölderlin and Celan, sometimes sank into bitter depths, apart and yet together. The line that Celan inscribed on the printed page could therefore be seen as a caesura that unites him to Hölderlin, unites him, however, through separation. The condition held in common, this proclivity to immerse oneself in bitterness, does not, however, exhaust the profoundly personal significance of the citation. Rather, Brentano’s lines touch upon a broader network of matters that manifests the intimacy that Celan discovered between Hölderlin’s itinerary and his own. As Michel explicitly notes, the words are taken from Brentano’s “Bekenntnisbrief,” written to the painter Philipp Otto Runge on January 21, 1810, a date that would have been particularly resonant for Celan, insofar as it fell one day after the exemplary date that delineates a well-recognized meridian: from Hölderlin (“Tübingen, Jänner”) through Büchner’s Lenz (“der den 20. Jänner durch’s Gebirg ging”), to the notorious Wannsee Conference in 1942. As Celan famously suggested in his Büchner-Preis speech: “Vielleicht darf man sagen, daß jedem Gedicht sein ‘20. Jänner’ eingeschrieben bleibt?” (GW 3: 196). The hypothesis is reiterated towards the end of Der Meridian, when Celan alludes to his failed encounter, in July 1959, with Theodor W. Adorno in Nietzsche’s Engadin: “Ich hatte mich, das eine wie das andere Mal, von einem ‘20. Jänner’, von meinem ’20. Jänner’, hergeschrieben. Ich bin … mir selbst begegnet” (GW 3: 201). Das eine wie das andere Mal—The ramifications continue to spread. Celan’s prose account of the missed opportunity at Sils Maria, his Gespräch im Gebirg (1959), itself hearkens back to yet another text, to Kafka’s short piece, Der Ausflug ins Gebirge (1912), in which the first-person narrative turns entirely on an encounter with a palpable no one: “Wenn niemand kommt, dann kommt eben niemand. […] Lauter niemand” (Kafka 1: 21)—an encounter with no one, and therefore with oneself. In citing Brentano’s letter from January 21, Wilhelm Michel—himself a recipient of the Büchner Prize in 1925—unwittingly opened the [End Page 601] floodgates, releasing the waters of multiple dates and cross-references that constituted Celan’s idiosyncratic immersion...