Words You Burn Down: Toward a Poetics of Umfarshtandlekh Translation

Abstract

Abstract The present work addresses the deep intertangled poetic kithship between the Jewish German-language poet Paul Celan (1920 – 70) and his most prolific translator, the contemporary translingual American poet, Pierre Joris (b. 1946). Taking Joris's recent and final translated volume of Celan's poetry — Memory Rose into Threshold Speech (2020) — as its discursive perch, this essay constellates various key interlocutors between the two poets and examines Joris's tremendous half-century-long feat in translating Celan into an American idiom. The force and ultimate lasting power of Joris's translation project lies in its rare ability to hold and behold in English the mutilated music of Celan's umfarshtandlekh (incomprehensible) poetics, itself a form of German reimagined through a post-Holocaust expanded Yiddish.