Paul Celan Research Articles

Speeches on Poetry

Paul Celan’s ‘Speeches’ determine what poetry is and why we need it. He does not want ‘timeless’ poetry but still ‘lays claim to infinity’; he would ‘reach through time’. He neither refuses poetry as contrary to reason, nor elevates it as pure immediacy of meaning. He questions the ambivalent attitudes towards art—as ‘artifice’ or as ‘profound’. Celan cuts into the loose fabric of such ordinary language to shape it. Those who trumpet ‘plain sense’ against such incisive art deface it as degenerate. Celan’s poetic language presents us as ‘of the earth’ and as ‘released from it’—Büchner’s Lenz seeks clarity in the silence of alpine light but falls into madness in his isolation. He is drawn towards the life of the villagers at the foot of the mountains. He perceives the warm household fires, but it is an illusion that he can be a part of that scene. Thus, Celan enquires into art’s intensity. It is at the risk of reciprocity that a reader entertains the language of a poem. Eliot’s old ‘shadow’ between ‘the idea and the reality’ now falls between the poet’s production and the reader’s reciprocation. The reader may need someone with a free hand to hold a lantern to the script.

Franz Rosenzweig’s and Paul Celan’s Early German Translations of Yehudah Halevi’s Hebrew Poems

Abstract My paper examines Franz Rosenzweig’s and Paul Celan’s translations of Yehudah Halevi’s poems, approaching the topic from the perspectives of both translation studies and literary criticism. On the one hand, I will scrutinize Rosenzweig’s and Celan’s translations against the backdrop of their theological approaches. I will also attempt to articulate the translation technique that Celan typically employed throughout his life, while translating from multiple languages into German. On the other hand, I will explore Celan’s implicit departure from Rosenzweig and his choice to specifically translate these two poems in light of his poetics, his notion of exile, and his exclusive choice of using German as his only poetic language.

Später: Objectless Eschatology and Radical Hope in the Poetry of Paul Celan

abstract: In this article, I examine Paul Celan's career-long preoccupation with the notion of a new beginning and the eschatological possibility of bringing about a hoped-for better future through the artistic act. Drawing on three major reference points in Celan's conceptualization of this struggle—Heideggerian eschatological thought, Jewish messianism, and the utopian tendencies of the early 20th century European avant-garde—I suggest another theoretical framework through which to understand Celan's divergence from these approaches: Jonathan Lear's theory of "radical hope." Although not a literary concept, I argue that Lear's "radical hope" offers a unique vantage point from which to consider what I call Celan's "objectless hope," shedding new light on its peculiarities and on the poetic techniques with which it is made manifest.

A Poetic Revolution of the Political

In this paper I attempt to give a reading of Jacques Derrida’s second extended interpretation of Paul Celan’s “Meridian.” This second interpretation can be found in Derrida’s “seminar,” The Beast and the Sovereign, and differs from the first – which appeared in Shibboleth: For Paul Celan – in that it is placed in the broader context of the seminar: the deconstruction of sovereignty. In this context Celan’s “Meridian” acquires a special status because Derrida can identify in it a “step,” an act of freedom, a way, which can perhaps take us beyond all sovereignty by bringing about what Derrida calls “a poetic revolution of the political.” In my reading of Derrida’s reading of Celan I try to spell out the “structure” of this step as Derrida conceives it. I argue that it is ultimately in the difference between two poetic gestures, two equally necessary but still distinct acts, that the poetic revolution of the political and thus the step beyond all sovereignty becomes perhaps possible.

:Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology

:<i>Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology</i>

Lyric, lovers, and limitlessness: Shakespeare’s quarrel with time in Sonnet 55

As a genre, lyric remains difficult to define. Paul Celan perhaps best summarizes its meaning by referring to an encounter that lyric effects. In Sonnet 55, Shakespeare tests the limits of lyric against the most powerful of forces—time—showing that it can withstand its assaults better than stone monuments can preserve the king’s image. Shakespeare takes it one step further, however, hinting at the resurrective power of lyric and at the possibility of lyric’s lasting into eternity. Ultimately, Shakespeare succeeds in giving us an image of lyric as fostering human culture, birthing lovers and civilizations and outlasting both.

Three Scenes from Ukraine: War, Language, and Justice

This article brings together political, poetic, and philosophical themes to discuss the war in Ukraine and the disruptive and damaging effects that war—this war in particular—has on language and shared meaning. It accomplishes this using empirical and factual reporting on the gruesome events which took place in Mariupol and Bucha in March and April 2022, a literary analysis of the poetry of Paul Celan, and remarks on language and war made by Serhiy Zhadan during an acceptance speech at the German Book Trade. The author offers a poetic analysis of the war in Ukraine and shows how war fundamentally alters how language conveys and communicates meaning. And yet, this article maintains, following Zhadan, that language—and our shared hope in its meaningfulness—is, nevertheless, a profound source of healing and restoration after the trauma of war—and a significant and substantial site of justice.

The Images and Metaphors in Death Fugue

Paul Celan's Death Fugue is one of the most important poems of the 20th century. The obscure and profound metaphors and images in the Death Fugue have always attracted people's attention. In addition, his poetry is seen as the product of a world in transition. After the Holocaust, the myth of modernity was destroyed so that the past experience was considered questionable on a poetical level. The Death Fugue was written in a way that had never been written before. This paper analyzes the text from the perspective of metaphor and intention and explores the potential meaning of words. This paper selects three main images and interprets them in combination with history and philosophy. The author analyzes how metaphors and imagery in the poem reproduce the Holocaust scene and responds to literary criticism of poetry after the Holocaust. Through these rare metaphors and images, Paul Celan created a new paradigm of poetry and made readers read it in a new way.

To Speak with the Other—To Let the Other Speak: Paul Celan’s Poetry and the Hermeneutical Challenge of Mitsprechen

This essay explores the notion of Mitsprechen or “with-speaking” in Paul Celan’s poetry. “With-speaking” supposes that voices in the poems actively participate and engage in a dialogue that goes beyond traditional hermeneutic frameworks. Celan’s notion of col-loquy, distinct from the conventional sense of dialogue, challenges the separation between author and interpreter, rendering the traditional concept of intertextuality inadequate. The poems, according to Celan, give voice to human destinies, making texts audible as the voices of others. This vocal dimension of Celan’s poetry has prompted extensive discussion among philosophers, particularly in France. Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, influenced by German phenomenology and hermeneutics, critically examine the ethical implications of speaking “about” the other. They challenge traditional hermeneutical practices, emphasizing the responsibility of interpreters to respect the unique and untranslatable character of individual voices. This critique extends to Protestant categories of interpretation, drawing on alternative Jewish perspectives on being-in-the-world and alterity. The text explores the tensions inherent in speaking “for” or “in the name of” others, especially in the context of interpreting Celan’s work, raising questions about maintaining the fundamental difference and distance that otherness implies. The discussion concludes by highlighting Werner Hamacher’s formulation of a new philology that disrupts hermeneutical violence, influenced by the critiques of Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, and offering an alternative way of addressing the particular challenges posed by Celan’s poetry.

Doing Justice to Poetry: Gadamer and Derrida on Reading Paul Celan

A large part of what scholars do in the humanities is reading and interpreting texts, and they must do so in a just and righteous manner. But what does that mean, doing justice to a text? To a philosophical text, but also to a literary or a poetic text? This is the question at stake in the ‘Gadamer-Derrida encounter,’ which remains relevant for our daily interpretative endeavors. Rather than adding another commentary to the already extensive literature on this debate, this paper offers a comparative analysis of two closely related essays in which Gadamer and Derrida read the work of the German poet Paul Celan with a keen eye for differences, as well as similarities, between the hermeneutical strategies of both philosophers. These two essays lead me to specify the guiding question of this paper: what does it mean to do justice to a poetic text, that is, to poetry? To answer this question, the paper discusses several issues, starting with Gadamer’s and Derrida’s shared rejection of the intentions of the poet as the decisive factor in interpreting poetry. This is followed by a discussion of Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach, as exemplified by his interpretation of Celan, and Derrida’s main objections to this approach. Having subsequently discussed the way in which Derrida demarcates his own hermeneutics from that of Gadamer, the paper first concludes that Gadamer’s and Derrida’s positions are sufficiently refined to be considered as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Second, this paper argues that doing justice to a philosophical, literary or poetic text means seeking to decipher its meaning, as Gadamer argues, whilst accepting that no articulated meaning can ever be final, certain or exhaustive, as Derrida emphasizes.

Holding of the Nothing: Nihilation in Paul Celan’sSprachgitterandDie Niemandsrose

This article considers Paul Celan’s poetic treatment of the philosophical notion of the nothing ( das Nichts) in Sprachgitter (1959) and Die Niemandsrose (1963). In his middle period, Celan is drawn to what Martin Heidegger calls “the nihilation of the nothing.” For Heidegger, the nothing is a withdrawal of Being that crucially reveals beings as a whole and opens up chances of transcendence and freedom. For Celan, on the other hand, the question is instead to force thought-images of the nothing out of pre-existing conceptions in a way related to but different from both Heideggerian and theological discourses. Celan seems more concerned with how to be free in the face of the nihilation of memory and history, or how to “stand” on the philosophical un-ground as a German-Jewish poet after two world wars and the Holocaust. While recognizing the nothing as constitutive of Dasein, Celan treats the experience of nothingness as an endless fall into pure expanse due to the loss of the Same ( das Selbe).

О поэтической полемике между Паулем Целаном и Иоганнесом Бобровским

The main purpose of this work is to explore the experience of confronting guilt ‘after Auschwitz’ in the creative dialogue between two significant poets of the twentieth century — Paul Celan and Johannes Bobrowski. Despite their importance, their works remain inade­quately studied, particularly in the context of the interaction between language and existence, or more precisely, poetic semiotics and the ontological foundation of existence. Sander Gil­man, an American Germanist, in his work “Why and How I Study German” aimed at stu­dents of the German language in the United States, notes: “Learning German means under­standing the path that leads from the text to the crematory”. Celan shared a similar senti­ment. Bobrowski, while agreeing with Celan's belief that Auschwitz revealed the infernal nature of the German language, attempted to counter him by suggesting that even within the language of the underworld, a poet could serve as a synergistic participant in the manifesta­tion of Truth from the Light of Truth in the performative "production of the presence" of God. One of those who supported him in this argument was perhaps the most complex author in German history, Hamann, whom Goethe considered to be “the brightest mind of his time” and the future “forefather and teacher” of all Germans. In this context, the poetic dialogue between Celan and Bobrowski concerning the German ‘language after Auschwitz’ could be seen as an effort to prevent its complete deontologization, due to what the philosopher Hei­degger referred to as “the lack of holy names," stemming from “the defining characteristic of the present era of the world being the closed dimension of the Sacred”.

Sprach-Exil und „Haus des Seins“. Zum Status dichterischer Rede bei Bachmann und Celan in der Auseinandersetzung mit einem Topos Martin Heideggers

Heidegger’s concept of language as “the house of being”, alongside the notion that poets are destined to be the “keepers” of this “house”, appealed pre-eminently to German-speaking post-war poets such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Such poets dealt critically with this idea because of Heidegger’s refusal to confront his own highly controversial stance after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. According to Celan and Bachmann, the philosophical problem involved was not so much a hazy understanding of “Seinsvergessenheit” (forgetfulness of being), but that of a wilful repression of one’s individual and collective past, which is to say the deliberate refusal to acknowledge personal guilt. The dialogically related poems Exil (Exile) and In die Ferne (Into the Distance), both written in 1957, provided alternative poetic versions of the idea of “dwelling in language”, which can be regarded as answers to Heidegger on behalf of those who were silenced in the Shoah, those who Heidegger had deliberately forgotten.

Back to the Sites of Ḥurban : Poetic Reenactment and the Movement of Memory in Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik's "Beʿir haharegah," and Paul Celan's "Engführung"

Back to the Sites of Ḥurban : Poetic Reenactment and the Movement of Memory in Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik's "Beʿir haharegah," and Paul Celan's "Engführung"

World Literature and Mythology: Guarantees of Freedom of Man and Nation in Sigitas Geda’s Poetry

In this article, the author uses the theory of intertextuality (Julia Kristeva, Gérard Genette, Marco Juvan) to analyse reflections on the openness of cultural identity and Europeanness in Sigitas Geda’s (1943–2008) poetry and his commentaries. The objective is to discuss how resistance to Soviet ideology could be constructed in mythological and world-literary contexts. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s vision of the universality of World Literature has remained important in Geda’s work. The Lithuanian poet adopted and applied it in his work by creating a mythological foundation as a unifying universal, a synthesis of Lithuanian and various national cultures. In this way, he conveyed a deeper sense of European identity, coming from the intertexts of modern World Literature (especially the poetry of François Villon, Johannes Bobrowski, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Celan). Geda freed the imagination of a reader constrained by the Soviet occupation and directed it towards the universal world.

Eugen Simion entre la critique diurne et la critique nocturne

A critic of European stature, Eugen Simion devoted his life to literature and in particular to the writers of Romania, a country where, to quote Paul Celan, live “men and books”. A task that he accomplished in numerous writings – we list only a few such as Romanian Writers of Today, Critical Fragments – and in the encyclopaedic enterprise of the General Dictionary of Romanian Literature as well as in the creation of the admirable collection Fundamental Works, which is the Romanian equivalent of the Pleiades Library, without forgetting the integral publication of all the manuscripts of Eminescu. Excelling in grasping the profound structure of literary evolution, he also succeeded in focusing his analysis on particular authors who were all allies in his intellectual and spiritual quest.

Benjamin Fondane, Paul Celan et Norman Manea. Trois frères de lait noir

In this essay, we study the presence of Benjamin Fondane in the work of Paul Celan, especially in Gespräch im Gebirg (Dialogue dans la montagne). Starting from the interesting hypothesis of Norman Manea — the interlocutor of Celan would in fact be Fondane — we adduce further proof to his considerations while expanding our research to Stimmen from the collection Sprachgitter and Vor dein spätes Gesicht from the collection Atemwende, texts that Norman Manea did not consider. Finally we point out to the intertextual relations that exist between the poetry of Benjamin Fondane and that of Paul Celan and Yvan Goll while relying our philological analysis on the textual indices disseminated in their works, indices toward which criticism has not pointed up to the present time.

Paul Celan in Turkey: The reception of Paul Celan’s works in Turkey

Paul Celan (1920-1970) ist einer der wichtigsten und bekanntesten Dichter der Nachkriegszeit. Sein Gedicht Todesfuge ist allgemein bekannt. Als ein jüdischer Dichter führte er ein tragisches Leben in der NSDAP-Zeiten. Er wurde von den Nazis verhaftet und musste eineinhalb Jahre im Konzentrationslager im Straßenbau arbeiten. Seine Mutter wurde von Nazis mit einem Genickschuss ermordet und sein Vater verstarb unter schlechten Bedingungen der Konzentrationslager an Typhus. Im Mittelpunkt unserer Studie steht die Auseinandersetzung mit der Wahrnehmung von Celans Rezeption in der Türkei. Wird Celan auch, wie Rilke, wie Hölderlin, oder auch wie Bachmann von den türkischen Leser:innen gemocht/geliebt? Wurden die Gesammelte Werke Celans ins Türkische übersetzt? Welche Werke von Celan fehlen noch im Türkischen? Welche Werke Celans wurden als erstes ins Türkische übersetzt? Was kann unternommen werden, um Celans Werk den türkischen Leser:innen näherzubringen? Unserer Studie hat das Ziel, diese Fragen zu beantworten und Celans Rezeption in der Türkei zu untersuchen.

„bei / beider Neige“. Ortlose Sprache in Gedichten Paul Celans

The extraordinary richness of multilingualism in Paul Celan’s poetry has often been remarked. However, ‘multilingualism’ might not be the best word, since Celan’s one-of-a-kind conjunc-ture of languages and meanings/ambiguity rather undermines language categories and especial-ly the notion of national languages altogether. In the poem “Kermorvan” for example, knowing the words’ multilingual etymologies and applying language-structures from Hebrew establishes meaningful connections among them. Combining multilingualism and ambiguity, Celan’s Sprachigkeit (languality ) exposes the dynamics and movement of language itself, including the histories, contacts and ambivalences of words and idioms. In this way, his insistent claim to write in one language corrects the idea of exchangeable, co-existing languages towards an un-derstanding of their interconnectedness, which might best be described by David Gramling’s term semiodiversity. In “Bei Wein und Verlorenheit”, the word “Neige” incorporates such an idea of the larger movements of language. It is used similarly to a tilted image to adhere to at least three languages and numerous meanings in a snowball-like principle. The new view of (multi-)lingualism shown in the poem and in Celan’s poetic utterances replaces not only ideas of a simple mapping between things and words (de Saussure) or metaphors and meanings in language. It also replaces the understanding of a general translatability among all languages of the world. Last but not least, in the specific discourse on Jewish language, it resists the notion of a general foreignness towards all languages which has traditionally been projected onto Jews, by positioning itself inside the larger movements of language itself.

Zuhause in der Weltsprache der modernen Poesie

Paul Celan is probably the internationally best-known poet writing in German since World War 2. Coming from the former Romanian province of Bukovina, which had previously been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was originally regarded with scepticism by German literary critics who attributed the novelty of his work to his exotic Eastern European Jewish origins. This paper argues that after years of fascist isolation the critics initially failed to recognise that Celan’s work, far from being strangely exotic, actually represents mainstream modernity and should be seen in the context of a “World language of modern poetry” as defined by Hans Magnus Enzensberger with his anthology of international poetry Museum der modernen Poesie published in 1960. The anthology, to which Celan contributed with translations of Osip Mandel’štam, proved a landmark in the work of reconnecting West Germany with the international literary scene. The paper emphasises the importance of dialogue in Celan’s work and of his links to the tradition of international modernism.