Paul Celan Research Articles

Remembrance Undisciplined: Reading Paul Celan with Max Czollek

Taking Walter Benjamin’s critique of history’s “disciplining” nature as a starting point, this article reads Paul Celan in dialogue with the contemporary German-Jewish poet, playwright, and essayist Max Czollek to consider the undisciplining of remembrance in both their poetry. The article highlights two sites where poetry makes an undisciplined sense of the past felt: language and historical perception. Readings of Celan’s “Lila Luft” and “Mapesbury Road” and Czollek’s “von der wiederkehr” and “nachrichten aus marathon” show how both poets draw on the resources of poetry to produce perceptual openings toward the pervasive reverberations of the national socialist past in the present. In doing so, they convey a sense of time in the aftermath of National Socialism that recent debates around memory in Germany—drawing on theoretical accounts of postcolonial aftermaths—described as “post-national socialist.” Reading Celan with Czollek renders visible to what extent Celan resonates with this contemporary discourse, while also highlighting the historical specificity of remembering in the wake of the Nazi genocide.

Paratexte, ohne die es keine Literatur gäbe. Zur Rezeption des Werkes von Paul Celan und der Funktion von Paratexten in der totalitären Tschechoslowakei (1948–1989)

The reception of literature written in German in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War was (and still is) in a hybrid position, oscillating between aversion to historical events that still resonate in Czech culture and society, and interest due to intensive cultural contacts and exchange projects between Germany and the Czech Republic. The reception of works by Paul Celan was all the more complicated because Jewish issues were by and large considered undesirable by the communist regime. The regime was officially only anti-Zionist, but de facto, as is well known, this meant anti-Semitic. In this article, attention is drawn to a neglected aspect of the surprising history of the reception of Celan’s poems in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1989 (with a brief excursion into the period 1990–2020) – namely, the “mediating function” of paratexts in the totalitarian regime. The first part briefly presents a definition of the term “paratext” and outlines the function of this type of text (taking into account the specific situation in which literature found itself in socialist Czechoslovakia). The following part illustrates the “mediating function” of paratexts in the Czechoslovak and the Czech editions of Celan’s poems.

The Semantics of the Absurd: On German ‘Hermetic’ Poetry and Political Commitment after 1945

German culture experienced an enormous rupture after 1945. Not only was the country in ruins and an outcast of the international community because of the recent regime and its devastating effects, its entire cultural tradition was under suspicion: had German culture always been steering towards this catastrophe? Was everything within it corrupt? While the frenetic economic activity of the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ side-stepped a mainstream confrontation with the horrors of the recent past, intellectuals and artists radically interrogated the reasons for the disaster. As always, language and the meaning-making procedures in language prepare the mind to open up and to prepare for action. Language is at the root of action and this insight fuelled reflections on language, for instance by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But it was particularly in lyric poetry that a lucid and politically aware examination of the recent past took place and an expression of such considerations could be found.
 This paper demonstrates how poets made a unique and highly significant contribution to the development of a new political awareness in Germanlanguage culture. By integrating silence and the absurd (that is, the unheardof and the unspeakable) into literary language, this so-called hermetic poetry did not entail a withdrawal from society but, on the contrary, devoted itself to a particular form of political commitment. This procedure represents a rupture with what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno called the ‘culture industry’ (1947), opposing conventional and habituated approaches to art in terms of its production and reception and advocating instead a stringent and critical concept of arresting aesthetic form that was to distinguish the work of art from products of that culture industry. Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, Günter Eich and Nelly Sachs are the household names associated with this poetics. While it was never necessarily mainstream, it was arguably the most innovative poetic strand of its time and in the long run a key factor in shaping a modern German culture that could come to terms with its past and overcome authoritarian structures.

“All that has room within it / even without / language”: the poetic technique of Paul Celan

The eastern European poet Paul Celan (1920–70) asserted that poetry is non-aesthetic: neither a work nor a process of art. His uncompromising approach, which became increasingly concerned with language’s capacity not only to broach the unspeakable, but also bring that unspeakability into his poems, continues to influence and shape the work of contemporary scholars, translators and poets. In this paper, I use apophasis – a centuries-old philosophical and rhetorical approach developed to deal in language with what lies beyond language – as a lens through which to examine Celan’s extraordinary relationship with and handling of words; and how he manages to shave language to its sheerest extremes. I investigate his diction and register, his wrenching and deforming of the German tongue, his inventive reworking of selected vocabulary into neologism, and the effect of this compressed energy on the structure and tone of the poems. Arguing that Celan achieves a verbal and dynamic dislocation that draws attention to what the poems stop short of saying, I consider what might usefully be drawn from his radical example, in order to shape a contemporary poetics whereby a poet might deal with what can be said against the mightiness of what cannot

Поетична збірка Пауля Целана «Мак і пам’ять»: історія літературного прориву

The article under studies traces the poetic and publishing genesis of Paul Celan’s collection of poetry “Poppy and Destiny”. The latter collection has made its way under extremely hard circumstances; however, it has eventually become a real literary breakthrough and the young author’s greatest poetic success. On the other hand, at first the poet published large collections of his texts in renowned German-language press (“Plan”, “Die Tat”). Later, he tried many times to carry out his literary debut in the form of a book. The early stages of “Poppy and Destiny” include several handwritten text collections (“Typoscript”, 1944; “Manuscript”, 1945), in which the young author prepared and gradually implemented the concept of his collection. The culmination of this hard work was the Viennese collection “The Sand from the Urns” (1948), which Celan soon destroyed due to numerous typographical errors. Nevertheless, he never rejected it, yet he conscientiously revised the poems, including a good half of them into the manuscript of the new collection “Poppy and Memory”. At a meeting of the literary “Group 47” in Niedorf (1952), he finally managed to get in touch with the Stuttgart publishing house “Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt”, which regarded his collection as an innovation in post-war German poetry, as well as promptly published it on Christmas Eve of 1952. The publication of the collection soon became a literary sensation and laid the cornerstone of the poet’s later fame in the German and European cultural space.

Поетична збірка Пауля Целана «Мак і пам’ять»: історія літературного прориву

The article under studies traces the poetic and publishing genesis of Paul Celan’s collection of poetry “Poppy and Destiny”. The latter collection has made its way under extremely hard circumstances; however, it has eventually become a real literary breakthrough and the young author’s greatest poetic success. On the other hand, at first the poet published large collections of his texts in renowned German-language press (“Plan”, “Die Tat”). Later, he tried many times to carry out his literary debut in the form of a book. The early stages of “Poppy and Destiny” include several handwritten text collections (“Typoscript”, 1944; “Manuscript”, 1945), in which the young author prepared and gradually implemented the concept of his collection. The culmination of this hard work was the Viennese collection “The Sand from the Urns” (1948), which Celan soon destroyed due to numerous typographical errors. Nevertheless, he never rejected it, yet he conscientiously revised the poems, including a good half of them into the manuscript of the new collection “Poppy and Memory”. At a meeting of the literary “Group 47” in Niedorf (1952), he finally managed to get in touch with the Stuttgart publishing house “Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt”, which regarded his collection as an innovation in post-war German poetry, as well as promptly published it on Christmas Eve of 1952. The publication of the collection soon became a literary sensation and laid the cornerstone of the poet’s later fame in the German and European cultural space.

Fictionalism and Aesthetic Experience in The Beast and the Sovereign

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the figure of the end of the world in the final lecture of Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign seminar series (the last seminar series he gives). The author argues that Derrida uses the final line of a Paul Celan poem (“The world is gone. I must carry you.”) as a valedictory refrain in order to show the political and existential stakes of his ontological investigations. The article situates these stakes within Derrida’s fictionalism, his belief that (1) ideal entities are irreal but also (2) the way in which the meanings of ideal entities work is like the way that the meaning of fictional discourse works. Using Derrida’s own example of Celan, as well as examples from Benjamin Britten and Skeeter Davis, the author argues for the importance of aesthetic experience in tying together these political, existential, and ontological themes.

L’art entre hubris et mania. Du pathologique au sublime

From Empédocle to Paul Celan, there have always been poets, artists whose works lead to the surpassing of the limits of meaning. They rub shoulders with absolute reality and get lost in it. On the other hand, there are those so-called "mad" mental patients who, in their insanity and delirium, desperately try to expel the symptom that strikes them. If, for the former, their works are based on inconsistencies that bring them to the extreme limit of tearing, for the latter, it is on the contrary a matter of sealing the tear that is tearing them apart.

Mitdenken: Paul Celans Theorie der Dichtung heute ed. by Evelyn Dueck and Sandro Zanetti

Reviewed by: Mitdenken: Paul Celans Theorie der Dichtung heute ed. by Evelyn Dueck and Sandro Zanetti Pamela S. Saur Evelyn Dueck and Sandro Zanetti, eds., Mitdenken: Paul Celans Theorie der Dichtung heute. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2022. 181 pp. In the introduction to Mitdenken: Paul Celans Theorie der Dichtung, the editors, Evelyn Dueck and Sandro Zanetti, discuss the theoretical basis of the poetic oeuvre of Paul Celan (1920–1970). His theories are explicated in various texts, notes, conversations, letters, and speeches, particularly those made upon receiving prestigious literary prizes. Analyses of these scattered texts offer no coherent overarching theory and only a few detailed interpretations of individual poems. Rather, they are exploratory pieces about Celan himself as a creator and his poetry in different eras, such as his own present, after the Shoah, and in light of an unforeseeable future. The development of his richly [End Page 97] evocative thoughts on poetry from the end of the 1940s to the 1960s does not conclude in a closed or systematic theory. Accordingly, the essays collected in this book do not amount to an attempt to mold Celan's theories into one unitary message. Each scholarly author pursues a different line of analysis, and their conclusions are generally compatible rather than contradictory. All have a theoretical bent; the pieces vary in the degree to which these discussions incorporate lines of poetry within their arguments. Several of these authors enhance their essays with references to ideas of philosophers such as Derrida, Heidegger, and Adorno or more recent or contemporary poets or critics such as Osip Mandelstam, Ann Cotton, and David Wills. The introduction presents a key concept of the volume, "Mitdenken," which is named in the title. The word is found in an early epigraph, taken from a 1958 letter by Celan: "Heißt es anspruchsvoll sein, wenn man sich—als Autor—wünscht, der Leser möchte mit dem Gedicht mitdenken?" (7). Dueck and Zanetti go on to say, "Zu dem, was wir 'mitlesen', 'miterfahren' und 'mitdenken' können, wenn wir Celans Dichtung lesen, gehören auch die zahlreichen Theorien im Bereich der Literatur, der Philosophie und der Kritik, die sich auf Celans Dichtung und nicht zuletzt auf deren Theorie eingelassen haben" (11). This volume contains nine excellent essays by well-established scholars with international academic backgrounds. Although under 200 pages, the book is dense in content and thoroughly researched and documented. Because it is highly theoretical and emphasizes advanced, even erudite research and commentary, its most appropriate audience is Celan specialists rather than students or poetry lovers interested in a basic introduction to the work of Celan. Among the subjects addressed are voice, the uncanny, the body, multilingualism, poetic language, openness, and laughter. A sense of the scope of the essays' contents may be provided here by highlighting a few discussion points. Among her other topics, Barbara Wiedemann emphasizes "Stimme," commenting, "Stimme ist von Celan immer positiv konnotiert, ist Ausdruck eines einmaligen Menschen mit seinem einmaligen Schicksal; Stimme ist das, was auch dann im Gedicht erhalten bleibt, wenn der Urheber aus seiner 'Mitwissenschaft' entlassen ist" (30). In a section of her essay, subtitled "Körper: Die Grundlage des Sprechens," contributor Yvonne Al-Taie writes, "Der Hiatus zwischen Sprache und außersprachlicher Wirklichkeit wiederholt sich im menschlichen Körper selbst und der doppelten Funktion [End Page 98] einiger seiner Organe—Augen, Mund, Lippen, Ohr, Hände, Haut—, die in ihrer physiologischen Funktion sowohl die Grundlage der organischen Lebensprozesse bilden als auch der verbalen und nonverbalen Interaktion mit den Mitmenschen dienen" (62). Al-Taie presents and interprets several lines by Celan that incorporate significant mention of these body parts. Ralf Simon's piece on "Vielstimmigkeit" presents a close reading of Stimmen, Celan's cycle of eight poems. It also brings out Celan's poetic confrontation with Nazi crimes and his own experiences of them: enduring forced labor and grieving the murder of his parents in the Shoah. Simon identifies eight voices in the eight poems: traumatic cries, collective voices of the dead, voices heard by the poet, voices of the murderers named but not permitted to speak, voices of forced laborers, sympathy associated with the biblical Jakob's voice, voices of murder victims...

1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern by Al Filreis

Reviewed by: 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern by Al Filreis Abigail Moreshead Al Filreis. 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern. Columbia UP, 2021, ix + 332 pp. The year 1960 is a crucial moment for the art and literary world, and Al Filreis thoroughly explicates why this is the case. Filreis crafts an argument for the importance of 1960 as a year in which many factors—conversations among artist and intellectuals, publications, and artwork—coalesce to produce a moment (or series of moments) that revisits prewar modernism in light of traumas following the Second World War. Filreis characterizes this work as "the special convergence of modernism and radicalism as a belated response to World War II" (3). To create this narrative about 1960, Filreis weaves together writing, artwork, and dialogue between authors and artists to show a world reckoning with the impact of genocide. This weaving makes the centrality of Jewish authors Paul Celan, Jerome Rothenberg, and Hannah Arendt all the more prescient as they ask questions through poetry, essays, and other forms about what language and writing mean in the context of the devastation wrought by fascist authoritarianism. [End Page 176] Filreis frames 1960 by opening with a first chapter that begins near the end of the year—on an October day when James Baldwin and Celan both, on separate continents, address the role of writing in their present age. The year 1960 is crucial because of both its distance from and proximity to the war's end. Among other factors, Filreis explains that during this period genocide comes under consideration by artists, writers, and literary critics as no longer just the "purview of diplomatic and regime historians" (45). This conceptualization of genocide for cultural study raises questions about the role of the survivor and witness. Other contemporary factors that bring the past war into the present, for intellectuals in 1960, include the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In the book's first section, "Emerging from the Night of the Word," Filreis combines historical context with close readings of both the texts and biographies of several mid-century American and European authors. Filreis focuses heavily on the lives, works, and perspectives of Celan, Rothenberg, and Baldwin, although many others (such as Amiri Baraka, Frantz Fanon, and Ingeborg Bachmann) also appear. The first three chapters in section 1 deal with how these authors grapple with the war's trauma, directly inflicted on Holocaust survivors such as Celan. Examples of the key works examined include Celan's 1960 poem "Wolfesbohne," a poem which in, Filreis's words, "was virtually [Celan's] only direct expression" (33) of his Holocaust experience. The second section, "The End of the End of Ideology," focuses on more specific groups and movements, such as the legacy of absurdism and the Zero art movement. Chapter 4 is a good exemplar of Filreis's analysis in section 2, as Filreis examines how the idea of the absurd—especially as it relates to the work of Kafka—is recycled among mid-century writers, as W. H. Auden and Arendt debate the meaning of forgiveness amid the trial of Eichmann. Readers will do well to heed Filreis's comment in the preface that "few of the chapters present discrete material; the analysis is typically additive, conjoined, and complementary" (x). This being the case, to appreciate the book to its fullest, opening to any particular chapter in 1960 requires looking back at the narrative threads established in earlier chapters, such as the stage set in chapter 1's focus on 22 October 1960. While not a chronologically linear narrative, it is an intricately woven one in which characters appear, disappear, and reappear. And yet, the book's structure is, I believe, one of its greatest assets. The form of Filreis's narrative impresses on the reader the timeliness of 1960 by continually looking back to set the stage for the [End Page 177] various dialogues and events that occur. How Filreis studies the various literary and historical threads coming together here is as important as the fact that he does: approaching a single...

Covert narrativity in contemporary poetry: English and German examples

Abstract This article is based on the premise that poems are primarily read for their meaning, understood as what the text signifies in its semantic dimension and communicates to the reader, such as reflections, experiences and perceptions – fundamental phenomena of human existence, problems of living and acting, of experience and imagination. Such phenomena are centrally concerned with aspects of change, due to the temporal constitution of human existence. A powerful device for representing and processing such phenomena is the operation of narration, defined as a change of state predicated on a person or a situation. In that sense change and dealing with change pervasively underlie the contents of lyric poems. This explorative study seeks to demonstrate the variability and diversity of narrative as a prime device in poetry, typically employed in an obfuscating or compressive manner, as what one might call “covert narrativity”. To explore the diversity of covert narrativity, examples are taken from the wide range of contemporary German and English poetry: Paul Celan’s “Corona”, Simon Armitage’s “The Making of the English Landscape”, and Glyn Maxwell’s “The Byelaws”.

The problem of the ‘absolute’: the desacralized language of Paul Celan’s poetry in the post-Shoah era*

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to examine how poetry, in the case of Paul Celan, created its own language after the Shoah. The thesis is that Paul Celan intentionally uses religious language to expose the object, but at the same time he desacralises it. This shift is revolutionary. In the main part of this article I analyse an exemplum of the use of language which is given in the poem, ‘In the rivers’. This analysis is meant to show the mechanisms for creating a proper language. The conclusion is that Celan’s poetry is founded upon the figure of a witness. This desacralised figure is poetic and ethical (but not substantial). What is more, the way this poetry is written puts it into the position of a witness as well as that of the reader. This is a social fact, so the point of view of the author traverses the sociology of both religion and that of literature.

Memory and Utopia: The Poetry of José Ángel Valente by Manus O'Dwyer

Reviewed by: Memory and Utopia: The Poetry of José Ángel Valente by Manus O'Dwyer Ricardo Fernández Romero Memory and Utopia: The Poetry of José Ángel Valente. By Manus O'Dwyer. Cambridge: Legenda. 2020. x+ 142 pp. £75. ISBN 978-1-781883-65-5. Discussions of José Ángel Valente (1929–2000), one of the most important and original Spanish writers in the Spanish and Galician languages of the second half of the twentieth century, typically bring to mind a specific image: a modern mystic, a difficult and hermetic 'poet of silence'. This excellent monograph sails against the tide to, as Manus O'Dwyer himself writes, 'desvalentizar' the subject, 'making clear the political and social significance of his poetry' (p. 110). The challenge is considerable, especially given the fact that O'Dwyer identifies an ethical underpinning to the 'poetics of silence' (the questioning of lyrical language, absence, solitude, etc.), which requires a political approach to Valente's signature poetics. Even the title of the monograph points in this direction in its reference to the memory and testimony of the disappeared and those lacking a voice. Valente's desire to recuperate silenced figures indicates an openness to alterity, a poetic quest for a language that gestures towards a utopian future of radical social and political reform. This new vision of the poet is constructed through concise and precise analysis that does not shy away from issues of great philosophical and aesthetic complexity. Highlights include the examination of a fundamental philosophical tradition present in Valente that O'Dwyer connects with a specific religious culture: 'a discourse and understanding of Jewishness that develops in the works of post-war French thinkers—Sartre, Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot' (p. 75). In them, Valente finds '[a notion of community] that resists the atomistic conception of the individual of liberal tradition' and 'a utopian hopefulness': 'radically new forms of social relation and organisation that could be described as secularised versions of Jewish messianism' (p. 75). It is from this same perspective that O'Dwyer situates the importance of Ernst Bloch's utopian thought for understanding the poet. Such observations are complemented towards the end of book through reference to Valente's dialogue with the poets Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan. Of all these thinkers and writers, the relevance of Levinas, Bloch, and Celan comes to the fore in the political approach to Valente's poetry. The result is convincing as long as we understand the political dimension in general terms as opposed to being restricted to specific ideological labels and labelling. On repeated occasions, O'Dwyer reduces the historical backdrop for Valente's poetry to broad brushstrokes: 'the suffocating atmosphere of fascism', 'the intellectual and political mediocrity of the Communist Party', '[Valente's] historical experiences as an exile from a country that had borne the brunt of decades of fascist violence and repression' (p. 112). While O'Dwyer announces at the outset that '[Valente's] poetry and poetics imply a specific political stance' (p. 9), the reader, or at least this reader, is left at the end with the sensation that it is not so much specific as implicit. This, is however, a minor quibble to level at a ground-breaking and informative book that will change the way readers and scholars appreciate this towering figure of Spanish and Galician verse. [End Page 147] Ricardo Fernández Romero University of St Andrews Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Milk and ashes poets Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs confront the trauma of the shoah

Both Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs were survivors of the Shoah who emerged deeply traumatized by the phenomenon. Both poets were thus displaced from their country of origin and linguistic environment. Their poetic strategies post-Holocaust were defined by the unspeakable enormity of the crime of genocide and the (contradictory) need to bear witness. In Celan’s famous poem “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue) the poet adopts the voice of a prisoner in a German death camp. Celan subsequently abandoned traditional formal poetic devices. His poetry became increasingly hermetic. The title of Celan’s poem contains the word “death,” as does that of Sachs’s first post-Shoah cycle “In den Wohnungen des Todes.” it is the unspoken thread in their work. Sachs turned to her Jewish background to construct a historical vision of the people of Israel and applied the notion of metamorphosis (Verwandlung) to articulate her status as a survivor. In his poem “Und mit dem Buch aus Tarussa” Celan links his fate to that of Marina Tsvetaeva, adumbrating his future suicide. Sachs survived the trauma, by embracing a solid set of religious values. Keywords: Celan; Sachs; Shoah; trauma; suicide

Ментори та Інґеборґ Бахман: письменницька майстерня успішного старту

The article studies the image of a mentor for the development of a novice author on the example of the work of the successful Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). The role of a tutor is analysed from her first texts to the status of a Viennese intellectual in the middle of the 20th century. The direct influence of older writers and artists from the same generation on the formation of her author’s style is gradually investigated. The figure of the first mentor, the Carinthian writer and teacher Joseph Friedrich Perkonig is emphasized in the example of her early story “The Cross of Hondich” („Das Honditschkreuz”, 1943/1944) and “Letters to Felician” („Briefe an Felician”, 1946). The figure of the second mentor, the Austrian repatriate writer Hans Weigel and his writing workshop (“Group 50”) is examined. Attention is focused on H. Weigel’s autobiographical novel “Unfinished Symphony” („Unvollendete Symphonie”, 1951) and I. Bachman’s first novel “Nameless City” („Stadt ohne Namen”) on his consulting during 1947–1952. Attention is turned to the I. Bachman’s acquaintance with Paul Celan in Vienna, started the artistic dialogue between two young authors: the collection of poems “Deferred Time” („Die gestundete Zeit”, 1953) and “Invocation to the Big Dipper” („Anrufung des großen Bären”, 1956) by I. Bachman and “Poppy and Memory” („Mohn und Gedächtnis”, 1952) by P. Celan. The parallel correspondence of the author with H. Weigel and P. Celan is also compared. We study the role of Hans Werner Richter, the leader of the prominent “Group 47”, whose prize (1953) finally convinced the young author to become a professional writer. Communication with the German composer Hans Werner Henze is stressed as a coexistence of “twins in spirit” and successful intermedial tandem.

Metaphors and hermeneutical resistance

AbstractIn this paper, I explore ways in which metaphors contribute to hermeneutical resistance, that is, to practices that overcome and/or ameliorate hermeneutical injustice. I distinguish two aspects of hermeneutical injustice and two corresponding kinds of resistance: exoteric and esoteric hermeneutical injustice/resistance. The former injustice consists in unjust harm due to an inability to make one's experience understood to others. The latter consists in such a harm due to an inability to fully understand one's own experiences. In exoteric hermeneutical resistance, metaphors can overcome resistances in others to understand oppressed agents' contributions because of its automatic processing and anti‐deniability. In esoteric hermeneutical resistance, metaphors may highlight common structures in various aspects of marginalised agent's experiences, they can provide means of denoting social properties obscured by hermeneutical injustice and they can exhibit hermeneutical injustice by resisting interpretation. I illustrate these practices through works by Emily Dickinson, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. Those examples show the power of metaphors in hermeneutical resistance.

Elegy, Form, and the Inorganic: Geoffrey Hill, Paul Celan, Ice

This essay considers the problematic presence of the inanimate in elegiac form. Focusing on Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) as translator/elegist of Paul Celan (1920–1970), this essay argues that Hill’s poetry responds to the challenge of addressing the nonliving by way of Celan’s own poetics of the inanimate. This doubled incorporation of the inanimate puts under pressure concepts of poetic form and of reading that are structured by organic animation. Hill’s poems emerge as structured by a principle of inorganic production that finds its aesthetic paradigm in Kant’s concept of “crystallization.” Reading the emergence of nonorganic processes from organic spaces in Hill’s work, the reemergence of a postindustrial pastoral in elegiac form, and the translation of the crystal-image of ice from Celan’s poetry into Hill’s own, this essay addresses the possibility of thinking form as a nonorganic process in elegy, and of thinking an elegiac poetics of form.

Reflections on the healing power of collaborative filmmaking

Reflections on the healing power of collaborative filmmaking

Displacing Autobiography and Intermediality: Elisa Biagini and Sabrina Mezzaqui

Abstract By looking at intermedial works of the poet Elisa Biagini and the artist Sabrina Mezzaqui as well as their most recent collaboration for the Galleria Continua's exhibition c’è qui nell'aria la parolaramo, this article investigates the relationship between poetic texts and textiles. The “intra-action,” to use feminist physicist Karen Barad's term, between the language of poetry and that of textile emerges through a paradigm of entanglements that expands the semantic capacity of both words and textiles. The verses displayed by Biagini in Mezzaqui's installations belong to Da una crepa (2014), which weaves imaginary dialogues with Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan. Da una crepa will be central to this paper's investigation together with Le ossa non sono poi così solide exhibited at Museo della Specola in 2010 and poems from Biagini's most recent work, significantly entitled Filamenti (2020). In this collection, the thread emerges as a key tool not only to recompose a body that is represented as fragmented and disjointed, but also as a “filo memoria” that can reconstitute an identity understood in highly corporeal terms (especially in the section “Moto perpetuo (un'autobiografia)”. A reflection on identity and autobiography is also central to Mezzaqui's practice, especially in Appunti per autobiografia del rosso (2017–2018), where through 33 woven and decorated books, she attempts to weave an autobiography. In both Biagini's and Mezzaqui's intermedial textile poems, the viewer/reader engages with a thread endowed with a strong vitalistic, almost biological power able to weave together identity, biography, and memory.

Paul Celan Today: A Companion ed. by Michael Eskin, Karen Leeder, Marko Pajević

Paul Celan Today: A Companion ed. by Michael Eskin, Karen Leeder, Marko Pajević