Poetik der Transformation: Paul Celan--Ubersetzer und ubersetzt (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poetik der Transformation: Paul Celan—Übersetzer und übersetzt Jerry Glenn Poetik der Transformation: Paul Celan—Übersetzer und übersetzt, edited by Alfred Bodenheimer and Shimon Sandbank. Conditio Judaica 28. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999. 186 pp. DM 94. Paul Celan (1920–1970) is widely recognized as the greatest German-language poet born in the twentieth century. And he is no less accomplished as a translator. The present collection considers both roles, Celan’s untranslatable work in translation—French, English, Spanish, and Hebrew are the languages that are included—and his activity as translator of numerous poets from several languages. One article is written in French, five in English, and the remaining seven in German. The book is formally divided into two sections that reflect the two categories of the title, but as the editors point out in their introduction, the first section, on Celan the translator, itself has two distinct parts: first two general articles by Axel Gellhaus (“Das Übersetzen und die Unübersetzbarkeit—Notizen zu Paul Celan als Übersetzer”) and Jürgen Lütz (“‘Der Schmerz schläft bei den Worten’: Freigesetzte Worte, freigesetzte Zeit—Paul Celan als Übersetzer”), and then studies of individual translations of works by Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Mandelstam, Dickinson, and Rokeah. It should be noted that these studies often refer to Celan’s original poetry and poetic essays, underlining the close connection between his original creative work and his work as creative translator. The five studies in the second part vividly illustrate the difficulty of translating Celan’s enormously complex poetry. Although he first achieved a measure of fame in 1952 and true prominence in 1959 [End Page 167] upon being awarded the Büchner Prize (Germany’s most prestigious), it was not until the late 1960s that the significance of Celan’s Jewish heritage came to be mentioned in any serious way. Many critics still downplay its importance, and translation studies are an ideal place for this group to focus their attention; as the list above indicates, Celan by no means favored Jewish authors for his translations (Shakespeare and Valéry are other prominent poets he translated extensively), and neither the Holocaust nor Jewish mysticism, two topics that feature prominently in some scholarship on Celan, are pertinent to most of the authors included in this study. The extent to which the scholarly community has come to recognize the importance of the Holocaust in Celan’s thought and work is vividly illustrated early in the first general study by Gellhaus, where the author cites Celan’s citation of Heidegger’s concept of the “abyss between languages,” and compares this to the abyss that Celan had to overcome whenever he set foot on German soil (p. 12). Lütz, the author of the second of the general studies, also alludes to the importance of Celan’s Jewishness, going so far as to observe that the relationship of the original to Celan’s translation often corresponds to the relationship between language before and after Auschwitz (p. 33). Several contributors make use of Walter Benjamin’s essay on translation and his concept of “Intention auf die Sprache,” first applied to Celan by Peter Szondi in his pioneering study of the translation of a Shakespeare sonnet. Otherwise, a wide variety of methodologies or theoretical underpinnings can be seen. Ute Harbusch’s study of Mallarmé’s Trunkenes Schiff concentrates on tropes and metaphors. In his examination of Celan and Dickinson, Bahti applies the principles of Werner Hamacher’s “path-breaking and still unsurpassed study” “Die Sekunde der Inversion” (p. 119; not, by the way, a value judgment everyone would agree with). There are a few detailed philological studies, most notably: Stéphane Mosès on Celan’s version of Appollinaire’s short poem “L’Adieu” and Larissa Naiditsch on Mandelstam and Celan. I found José Luis Reina Palazon’s discussion of translating “Todesfuge” into Spanish disappointing, since with my limited command of Spanish I was not able to follow his potentially interesting discussion of rhythm and metrics. On the other hand, Shimon Sandbank on Celan in Hebrew is not only interesting but also perfectly understandable even for a reader with no knowledge of Hebrew. My two favorites among the...