Protest and the Opacity of Literature: James Baldwin and Paul Celan

Abstract

This article analyzes Paul Celan’s translation of James Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and considers the connections between the poetics of these two writers. In addition to their shared preoccupation with and rearticulation of terms such as human, creature, and darkness, the translation reveals how they explored the relationship between literature and reality at early and transitional moments in their careers. While rejecting regnant modes of realism, Baldwin and Celan insisted, in different but related ways, on the bearing of the world on their writing, which they understood as a response to historical catastrophes that resisted inherited categories and hegemonic language. This article demonstrates how reading Baldwin’s essay and Celan’s translation together can help us understand their peculiar realism anew, and it elucidates how this aspect of their work continues to feel urgent today, with specific reference to the writing of Claudia Rankine.