The Way Through the Human-Shaped Snow

Abstract

This essay interprets Paul Celan's Weggebeizt as a concentrated recasting of major themes in the Book of Job. It attempts to show how the poet may have constructed the poem out of a close interrogation of passages in Job, including glosses and cryptic translations of the idiosyncratic Hebrew text. Talk of biblical echoes or influences is eschewed in favor of a method of parallel reading by which Celan's new-forged words are referred back to key words and phrases in the argument between Job and God. The main points of contact between Job and Weggebeizt are: 1) conflation of multiple and opposing senses of a single wind figure; 2) the recurring theme of trial and the ambivalent treatment of and false witness as well as oaths of purity and true speech; other points of contact are: 3) ice and snow figures, 4) references to Sheol and heaven (which Celan combines into a single place). Some familiarity with the Book of Job is assumed, but key Hebrew words are cited with their alternate translations, especially when it appears that the poem is playing off multiple senses of the original. The paper is written in a commentary style, with line by line explorations of meaning. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol11/iss2/4 THE WAY THROUGH THE HUMAN-SHAPED SNOW: PAUL CELAN'S JOB SAUL MYERS Johns Hopkins University To read Paul Celan's later poems is to travel with them, often to get lost with them, as they speed in a restless search for a place. Each poem traces a solitary trajectory through the most uninhabitable landscapes, only staying long enough in any one no-man's-land to sketch the insufficiency as well as the danger of tarrying. Each poem seems born of an initial implosion, a highly charged vacuum that draws it and the Du it addresses in quest of common terrain. Such poems demand a special kind of reading, a reading unterwegs; for it is only in response to a summons from elsewhere and on the way to this elsewhere that such poems constitute themselves on the page. Weggebeizt presents special problems for the translator and interpreter; it draws not only upon word-roots from Mitteland Althochdeutsch, but also upon very specific passages in the Book ofJob.' The reader must be prepared to enter into an encounter with one of the most problematic and mysterious wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible. The following reading of Weggebeizt will show how Celan's volatile, synthetic German veers close to Job, so close in fact that some of Celan's astonishing neologisms are cryptic translations and glosses of the Hebrew. WEGGEBEIZT vom Strahlenwind deiner Sprache das bunte Gerede des Anerlebten-das hundertziingige Meingedicht, das Genicht. TRIED OUT from the beaming wind of your language the various talk of lifted experience, the hundredtongued forsworn poem, the noem.