Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays ed. by Richard Heinemann, Bruce Krajewski

Abstract

ESC 25, 1999 Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski, trans. and eds. Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?”and Other Essays. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1997. 190. $19.95 (U.S.) paper. Who was Paul Celan? Any scholar considering writing by and on Celan cannot but first wonder at the identity of the poet, grounded in various European traditions but of no single Eu­ ropean nation. Born Paul Antschel in 1920 in a Jewish settle­ ment on the borderland of Czernowitz between Romania and Ukraine, Celan was at home linguistically in Russian, Roma­ nian, and French. Although Celan’s parents died in a German concentration camp, ironicallythe only language in which Celan could express such a loss “was the German language, the lan­ guage spoken by the people who had brought it about” (Bayley 38). After WWII, Celan lived in Bucharest and Vienna before he finally settled in Paris, where he drowned himself in the Seine in 1979. Celan left behind him several volumes of po­ etry, a small portion of which forms the centre of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s commentary Wer bin Ich and wer bist Du? (Who Am I and Who Are You?). As the title suggests, Gadamer uses the rhetorical strategy of deciphering the “I” and the “you” in a cycle of poems by Celan called Breath-turn (Atemwende) to structure his com­ mentary. This slender work is as much an exercise in inter­ preting poetry as it is an encapsulated manifesto of Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy. As Gadamer puts it, “Hermeneutics means not so much a procedure as the attitude of a person who wants to understand someone else, or who wants to un­ derstand a linguistic expression as a reader or listener” (161). And how does one go about understanding a linguistic expres­ sion, or a poem? “Understanding a poem correctly requires one in all cases to completely forget private and occasional in­ formation ... All that matters is understanding what the text itself says” (150). At this point a reader might well object, given the specific historical and ethnic background surrounding Celan and his writing. Gadamer is prepared for this type of “crude” objection: “I am aware that Paul Celan’s world has sources quite remote from the traditions of the work in which 230 REVIEWS I—as well as most of his readers—grew up.” Apart from not sharing Celan’s Jewish background, Gadamer admits that he also lacked Celan’s knowledge of nature, which plays an im­ portant part in his poetry. But for Gadamer, there is also the liability that one might end up “in a certain danger zone: it could happen that one summons up knowledge which perhaps the poet himselfdid not possess” (128). Ultimately, “conclusive interpretation simply does not exist” (146); and with respect to Celan’s work, “a confession of incomprehension is, in most cases, a commandment of scholarly integrity” (144). Understandably, Gadamer’sreading ofCelan’speotry is not as straightforward as the title ofhiscommentary suggests. Who is the “you” in “Consoled You May” (“Du Darfst”), the first poem analysed? Indeed, “nothing more definite than what- or whoever next should welcome one after this summer ofrestless striding” (72). And the “you” in the mellifluous and concise “In the Streams” (“In Den Flüssen”)? An equally vague “[a]n indefinite you—perhaps realized in the Youofsomeone closeby or far away” (85). What is clear, I think, isthat Gadamer is not writing an analytical commentary on Celan’s Breath-turn based on special information or biographical context. Instead, Who Am I and Who Are You? is Gadamer’s philosophical response to Celan’s poetic language, a response itself often couched in poetic expressions. This poetic meditation on Celan was translated from Ger­ man into very readable English by Richard Heinemann, a free­ lance translator, and Bruce Krajewski, who teaches English at Laurentian University. I am especially interested in their trans­ lation of Celan’s poems. Unlike the justly famous “Todesfuge,” these poems are short, precise, and very hard to translate, in that often there are no equivalent English words for terms such as “meerüberrauscht” (119) or “Wundgelesenes” (“woundread ”) (106), neologisms Celan creates byjoining different parts of...