Celan's Work Research Articles

„Einsam und unterwegs“. Wurzellosigkeit im Werk Paul Celans

It is in rootlessness that philosophers like Adorno, Said and Flusser discover a human dignity, a possibility to negotiate and restore or invent the violated identity in the form of a new one. Based on these considerations, the paper regards the paradigm of rootlessness in relation to the metaphors of aerial or flying roots, which are historically and literarily connected with the Jewish concept of fate. Thus, the present article proposes the rootlessness-paradigm beyond the findings of Jewish studies as a structure of thought, forma mentis and approach to the thematic complex of migration – nomadism – displacement and applies it to selected texts by Paul Celan. In this way, new applications of this research paradigm will be stressed; at the same time my contribution aims to complement previous scientific approaches to Celan's work.

„In den Lüften liegt Man nicht eng“. Anmerkungen zur unauflösbaren Tragik des Dichters Paul Celan

"“In the Air Where You Won’t Lie Too Cramped.” Notes on the Irresolvable Tragedy of the Poet Paul Celan. Paul Celan's work is characterized by reflections on the power and possibilities of language and poetry in general in processing personal tragedy and painful borderline experiences, especially the experience of the Holocaust. These experiences range from the persecution of Jews, the deportation and murder of his parents, to the ""Goll Plagiarism Affair"" or to mental illness in the last years of his life. These experiences of persecution and extermination of the Jews and Celan's involvement in the tragedy of his people are reflected in many of his poems, especially in Todesfuge. Keywords: Celan, Shoa, modern German poetry and language, tragedy "

‘Untranslatable Testimony’: Paul Celan in Back-Translation

When writers are called ‘untranslatable’, it is either because of the singularity of the experience they write about or because of their unique use of language. As a Holocaust survivor whose poetry remains largely hermetic, Paul Celan is foremost among authors deemed ‘untranslatable’. This article uses back-translation as an empirical method of exploring the reasons for the untranslatability that tends to be attributed to Celan's work. It back-translates Michael Hamburger's and Pierre Joris’ translations of two poems by Celan, and demonstrates that back-translation can enhance the work of translators and be a creative form of criticism when it renders the scene of literary translation more visible and interpretable. Rather than opposing Barbara Cassin's and Lawrence Venuti's respective approaches to the ‘untranslatable’, the article argues that they can be reconciled through the practice of back-translation, insofar as it makes more visible the decision to domesticate or foreignize ‘untranslatable’ philosophical and poetic terms.

‘TIEF / IN DER ZEITENSCHRUNDE’: READING TIME IN PAUL CELAN'S POETICS

ABSTRACTConcepts of time play a crucial role at the centre of Paul Celan's poetics and poetry, though not in any formal, systematic, or schematic sense, even when they appear to be informed by the philosophy of, for example, Martin Heidegger or Edmund Husserl. Celan expands this notion beyond any mere idea of time as one theme among others, or time as a mere measurable quantity, to include and integrate historical time, especially with reference to the Shoah and the so‐called ‘Goll‐Affäre’. In Celan's work, time becomes a structure upon and around which he explores the limits of the sayable or the ineffable. Examples of this can be seen in his early to late poetry, in his various writings on poetics, and not least in the extensive notes he made when writing Der Meridian, his acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Prize. This article looks at three poems: ‘Regenflieder’ (1943), ‘Köln, Am Hof’ (1957), and ‘Rebleute’ (1970), all of which approach notions of time differently, along with two translations (Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Daive). The consistency inherent in Celan's poetic vision is suggested by the simultaneity of his images and poetic insights.

Miszellaneen zu Celan: Entwürfe zu Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie by Yoshihiko Hirano

Reviewed by: Miszellaneen zu Celan: Entwürfe zu Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie by Yoshihiko Hirano Laura McLary Yoshihiko Hirano, Miszellaneen zu Celan: Entwürfe zu Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018. 394 pp. Yoshihiko Hirano's extensive study of Paul Celan's poetry, essays, and translations is organized around four thematic principles, paired together under two broader categories. Plants (plantae) and animals (animalia) are grouped together as natural history (historia naturalis). Insanity (alienatio) and death (mors) are paired under anthropology (anthropologia). Hirano's choice of these four topics reflect Celan's own interests and recurring thematic constellations in his body of work. Though it would appear that each of the four sections stands on its own, Hirano develops linkages among the four themes, describing a kind of natural history of plants and animals and human beings intrinsic to understanding Celan's poetry and work. Two "Überleitungen," for example, draw a connection between the plant and the animal sections and between the insanity and death sections, providing deeply layered multilingual investigations of Celan's work as a translator. These two sections are a good example of how Hirano weaves sources from multiple languages into his readings of Celan's works, moving among primary and secondary sources in German, French, English, and Hebrew as well as considering how Celan's poetry is deeply influenced by authors and philosophers such as Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Kafka, Hölderlin, Büchner, and Shakespeare, for example. In the first "Überleitung," Hirano compares Celan's translations of Shakespeare's Sonnet III with those by Stefan George and Karl Kraus, finding in Celan's choices the poet's particular emphasis on agrarian imagery and natural cycles present in Shakespeare's sonnet. Hirano notes, for example, Celan's choice to translate Shakespeare's "For where is she so fair whose uneared womb/Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry"? as: "Wo wäre eine, die veröden wollt,/kämst du daher, ihr Feld zu pflügen?" He notes that Celan's choice to use the word Feld in place of Shakespeare's womb leaves the metaphorical significance of the word Feld somewhat ambiguous and open to a different reading: "Die Metapher [End Page 104] für Eros bei Shakespeare wird bei Celan in die Metonymie für Thanatos verwandelt" (116). The second "Überleitung" considers Celan's translation of ten poems by Emily Dickinson. Hirano's careful reading of Celan's translation of Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" considers the implications of Celan's Meridian-Rede for his particular interest in Dickinson's poetry. According to Hirano, Celan sees the shocking implications of Dickinson's poem, that a glorious personal immortality is subsumed in the coldness of eternity. As Celan writes in the Meridian-Rede, poetry is "Unendlichsprechung von lauter Sterblichkeit und Umsonst" (289). In each of the sections devoted to the four main themes, the author takes into consideration a wide range of entry points into each poem. He carefully analyzes the linguistic intersections of Celan's extensive and personal vocabulary, using multiple reference works to fully expand the meaning of Celan's deliberate word choices. Perhaps most importantly, the author pays considerable attention to Celan's extensive use of cross-reference in his poetry by delving into Celan's personal library and finding there sources of interest to the poet that resonate in his poems. Further, Hirano provides plenty of social-historical context to ground Celan's work in post-Holocaust Europe and the poet's lifelong questioning and exploration of (his own) Jewish identity. Hirano's reading of "Zähle die Mandeln," for example, opens up a multivalent understanding of the word Mandeln that considers its linguistic source as well as its cross-linguistic potential, noting that the Hebrew word for almond tree translates into German as "Wachenbaum," linking the imagery of the "Mandelbaum" with not only the well-known properties of bitter almond but also with the waking metaphor in the poem (40). Hirano finds within this poem contemporary social-historical connections such as Celan's identification with and translations of poetry of the Jewish-Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who was murdered in a Russian concentration camp in 1938. Hirano...

A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida and Celan

A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida and Celan

Meridians: the poem as a place of encounter in Paul Celan and J. H. Prynne

In his 1960 Buchner Prize acceptance speech, the poet Paul Celan used a series of spatial metaphors to assess the various ways in which the poem enables literary ‘encounters’. Celan’s speech is full of reflections on how language shapes relationships of distance and proximity, crystallised in the speech’s concluding image of poetic language as a ‘meridian’ which serves both as a measure of distance and a marker of connection. This article compares treatments of the motif of the poem as a place of encounter in the work of Celan himself and his near-contemporary, the British poet J. H. Prynne. Although both poets frequently present the poetic text as a space of encounters, they also manipulate the connections and ruptures which poetry affects. Both can be seen as seeking proximity through communication while also conceding the inevitability of distance in intersubjective relations.

Reconciliation—No Pasarán: Trauma, Testimony and Language for Paul Celan

This article intervenes in the project of theorizing the politics of reconciliation and transitional justice with the suggestion that (a) more attention be paid to subjective experiences and discursive sensitivities affected/shaped by the trauma of historical violence and injustice, and that (b) the constitutive as well as potentially subversive working of these experiences and sensitivities be recognized. It focuses specifically on Paul Celan (1920–1970), a Jewish-Romanian-German poet and Holocaust survivor, proposing a reading of his work that connects aspects of the poetic, the traumatic and the peripheral that are relevant to political theories of reconciliation and justice. Celan's work is shown to problematize the dominant understandings of communal temporality that are encoded in the reconciliatory transitional project. This temporality approximates a linear and progressive motion: the transitional community (a) leaves behind the legacies of the “violent past” and (b) imagines (and moves towards) its future as an emancipative movement positioned beyond the constraints of the historical violence and injustice. In Celan's work, however, the traumatized subject's experience of temporality is understood metaphorically as an impossible passage. In contrast to the linear and progressive unfolding of the collective imaginary, the movement within a passage is repetitive, elliptical and, quite literally, aporetic (impassible). There is no guarantee of a successful passing through; instead, within the passage, Celan's traumatic and poetic subject encounters the abysmal. This basic contrast suggests that a critical theory of reconciliation should not only account for the fragility of human life in relation to historical violence, but respond to the constant proximity of violence within the reconciliatory project itself.

The Poetic Experience of Language and the Task of Thinking

In Manifeste pour la philosophie, Alain Badiou argues that the work of thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida philosophy to poetry. In general, he defines as the binding of to one of the four procedures of truth he distinguishes: politics, science, love, and art.1 Such a binding would block philosophy's genuine task, which for Badiou consists in thinking the compossibility of the truths invented in these four domains. Although Badiou's analysis is rather bold, it is nevertheless concerned with a typical characteristic of both hermeneutic and deconstructive thought. Even though suture is perhaps not the most appropriate word to describe the relation between philosophy and poetry, it is clear that for both hermeneutics and deconstruction, poetry and the poetic experience of language provide important guidelines for rethinking the question of what is. Using the words of Ricoeur we could say that hermeneutic and deconstructive derives from the experience through which poetic language rise to thought (donnera penser).2 The poem is not only a gift to in the sense that it asks for a thoughtful interpretation, but, as it elicits and quickens thought, it provokes thought. This implies that the disclosure of refers back to an inaugurating poetic moment as its condition of possibility. From this brief description one might be inclined to agree with Badiou and affirm that this poetic orientation of hermeneutics indeed sutures philosophy to poetry. Yet, before giving any assent to Badiou's claim, it is important to examine what this poetic orientation amounts to. In this essay, I want to carry out part of this examination by studying Jacques Derrida's readings of Celan.3 The choice for Celan is not an arbitrary one. It is motivated by two observations. In the first place, Badiou claims that poetry is experienced from Holderlin's work onward as the field in which the question of being is kept and manifested most primordially. Therefore, Holderlin's work would inaugurate the of Poets in which philosophy is sutured to poetry. The work of Celan, however, would end this age. For Badiou, Celan's poetry is the event that gives rise to the necessary de-suturation of philosophy.4 His argument for this claim is rather brief and limits itself to Heidegger's work. He concludes, Paul Celan's work states ... the end of the Age of Poets. Celan completes Heidegger.5 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who is also counted among the philosophers who are said to philosophy to poetry, argues that Badiou's characterization of Heidegger is more or less correct since Heidegger understands poetry as myth. However, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, this does not imply that philosophy could and should be detached from poetry: it should only be detached from poetry as myth.6 This raises the question of how Celan is read by the other thinkers whose work Badiou characterizes as suture: Could Derrida's reading of Celan be considered as an alternative way of letting philosophy be guided by poetry? The second observation is the following. Derrida's reading of Celan and his comments on Celan's famous acceptance speech Der Meridian provide us with the material to reconstruct Derrida's conception of the relation between poetry and philosophy as well as the task or the chance of thinking implied by this relation. The main part of this essay is devoted to this reconstruction along the following three lines of inquiry: (1) In the first place, I want to demonstrate that and how Celan's poetry provides Derrida with the means to criticize philosophy as metaphysics of presence as well as to propose an alternative, poetic conception of time. (2) The second question to be addressed is how Derrida interprets the poetic experience of language. The analysis of the time of the poem discussed under (1) has implications for Derrida's understanding of the poetic dimension and experience of language. …

'Je stem gekust'

In The Anxiety of Influence Harold Bloom describes how all budding poets come under the influence of a predecessor and how they subsequently have to extricate themselves from that example. Those who consider the work of Leonard Nolens in the light of this theory can identify such a process, as Paul Celan fulfills this role for Nolens. Drawing upon Bloom's concept, this article investigates the importance of the work of Celan on the poetic practice and the literary philosophy of Leonard Nolens. It discusses passaages in Nolens's poetry and poetics where Celan is actively present, as well as passages where he is suppresed or (apparently) absent but where his influence is nonetheless tangible. By reading a number of Nolens's poems, this article contributes to a better understanding of his poetics and makes his relation to Celan explicit.

Wyobraźnia wzrokowa Paula Celana - das Aug, dunkel

The article "The Visual Imagination of Paul Celan - das Aug, dunkel" raises the problem of the poet's search for language and "the place, from where you can see the best perspective". It shows the number of methodological dilemmas which inevitably result from analysing the visual imagination. It speaks of "the eye" understood as the crucial element of Celan's poetics. The author questions in his article the common percepcion of Celan as a poet of Shoah (as if) shifting the momentum to the eye. The eye, reduced in the very grammatical form of the word (Auge is turned into Aug), gives the unity to Celan's work. The eye, the restless wanderer, accompanies this poetry from the first to the last poem. The author of the article ventures to elucidate various aspects of the use of the organ of vision in Celan's poetry and draws a conclusion that the consistent theory of visual perception is central to Celan's work.

The discourse of nature in the poetry of Paul Celan: the unnatural world

Paul Celan has long been regarded as the most important European poet after 1945 but also the most difficult owing to the numerous references in his work to his personal history and to a cultural heritage spanning many disciplines, centuries, and languages. In this insightful study, Rochelle Tobias goes a long way to dispelling the obscurity that has surrounded the poet and his work. She shows that the enigmatic images in his poetry have a common source. They are drawn from the disciplines of geology, astrology, and physiology or what could be called the sciences of the earth, the heavens, and the human being. Celan's poetry borrows from each of these disciplines to create a poetic universe-a universe that attests to what is no longer and projects what is not yet. This is the unnatural world of Celan's poetry. It is a world in which time itself takes physical form or is made plastic. Through a series of close readings and philosophical explorations, Tobias reflects on the experience of time encoded and embodied in Celan's work. She demonstrates that the physical world in his poetry ultimately serves as a showcase for time, which is the most elusive aspect of human experience because it is based nowhere but in the mind. Tobias's probing interpretations present a new model for understanding Celan's work from the early elegiac poems to the later cryptic texts. An interdisciplinary project, the study combines readings of Celan's poetry with discussions of ancient and modern science, mystical cosmology, and twentieth-century literature and thought. Tobias's original approach to Celan illuminates his complex verse and contributes significantly to the theory of metaphor as it applies to modern verse.

Senselessness in Paul Celan's Mohn Und Gedachtnis

This article proposes the concept of senselessness as a way of understanding the poems in Paul Celan's Mohn und Gedachtnis (1952) and as a model which might usefully be extended to the whole of his poetry. The terms ‘poppy’ and ‘memory’ are thematically significant for an understanding of Celan's traumatic remembrance of death and suffering during the Holocaust, as well as informing the process of negation of sensuous memory within individual poems. Celan's rendering senseless of Christian meaning gives important emphasis to the Jewish suffering wrought by the Holocaust. The model of senselessness is upheld in Celan's accounts of his own poetics in his acceptance speeches for the Bremen and Georg Buchner prizes (1958, 1960). Senselessness is one way of characterising the ineffable space beyond the boundaries of the poem, with which Celan's poetic language is always in dialogue. Jean Francois Lyotard and Wolfgang Welsch develop notions of aesthetics with close parallels to this idea of senselessness. A consideration of their notions of the sublime and ‘anaesthetics’, respectively, forges a closer understanding of Celan's work, in which sensory memory is always threatened by the catastrophic knowledge of the Holocaust, and the resulting tension sustains the paradoxical operation of senselessness.

Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan (review)

New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 294 pp. $85.00. Michael Eskin's project is an interesting, ambitious, and in my view finally successful one. He would like to read Emmanuel Levinas's notion of ethical in context of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of and both as a theoretical background for understanding Paul Celan's engagement with poetry and prose of Ossip Mandel'shtam as well as development of Celan's own poetic practice. While Levinas's notion of ethical and Bakhtin's of dialogic have certainly been studied before (although Bakhtin's notion of metalinguistic perhaps less so), implications of work of both writers for an actual third poetic practice has not, and no one has put them together in context specifically of Celan's engagement with Mandel'shtam. The strategy appears to work. An introductory chapter informs us that study follows the method of a detailed phenomenological description (p. xiii) which means a series of more or less independent studies, although thesis argument is developed throughout. A chapter on Levinasian ethics (distinguishing it on one hand from Kantian ethics and on other from Heideggerian ontology) is followed by one on Bakhtin. In this chapter, both differences between Bakhtin's socially dependent understanding of dialogic and Levinas's pre-existential ethics, and identicality of reliance of both writers upon some logic of social, some logic of intersubjective or interdividual realities, are developed. The third chapter follows Celan's inter-textual dialogue or encounter with Mandel'shtam and his practice of a poetics that confers upon his interlocutor an infinite respect while assuming by its practice an infinite responsibility for it. Chapters four, five, and six develop a close reading of Celan's work, Die Niemandsrose (The No One's Rose). The final concluding chapter asks whether a generalized poethical method is possible. Can method developed in Celan's reading of Mandel'shtam be universalized? That would mean, Eskin tells us, taking it beyond circumscribed context. Against grain of Levinas's, Bakhtin's, Mandel'shtam's, and Celan's insistence on enunciatory and ethical singularity, Eskin claims finally, it appears to be possible. If I have a criticism or two to make of Eskin's book, they are minor in comparison to book's enormous achievement. Eskin might have made more use of Walter Benjamin's theories of translation on one hand, and of Martin Buber's understanding of dialogue, ethical, and answerability (from which in fact both Levinas and Bakhtin historically derive a great deal) on other. Benjamin's essay on Task of Translator (which eschews customary ways of thinking about translation as representation for its understanding as survival, as echo of original language in target language), seems a natural for this study, if only as a point of departure. Moreover, as Buber and Rosenzweig invented discussion that in different ways all four writers pursue (think of importance of Buber's I and Thou to these writers), it would seem appropriate that their intertextual influence be brought into discussion. Moreover, more could be made of Levinas's not uncomplicated view of poetic. …

Ethical Encounters: Reading Paul Celan

Ethical Encounters: Reading Paul Celan BRIDGET THOMSON UniversityofSouthampton Paul Celan, Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Ed. by Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. 2003. 1000 pp. 39,90. isbn 3-518-41390-2. Kommentar zu Paul Celans 'Die JS?emandsrose*. Ed. by J?rgen Lehmann. Heidel berg: Universit?tsverlag Winter. 2003. 430 pp. 42,00. isbn 3-8253-1513-4. 'Im Geheimnis derBegegnung'. IngeborgBachmann und Paul Celan. Ed. by Dieter Burdorf. Iserlohn: Institut f?r Kirche und Gesellschaft. 2003. 100 pp. 9,00. isbn 3-931845-68-0. Grenz?berschreitungeninder Dichtung Paul Celans. By Simone Schmitz. Heidelberg: Universit?tsverlag Winter. 2003. 411 pp. 58,00. isbn 3-8253-1674-5. Die ?eitlichkeit des Ethos. Poetologische Aspekte im Schreiben Paul Celans. Ed. by Ulrich Wergin and Martin J?rg Sch?fer W?rzburg: K?nigshausen & Neumann. 2003. 232 pp. 29,80. isbn 3-8260-2592-x. Paul Celan is an extremely important presence in European poetry, and yet his unusual diction, painstaking syntax, and the breadth of his emotional, cultural and philosophical reach make his work difficult to locate. Celan's poems read like pacts with absent others. They both seek and disdain under standing. And their taut inflections of experience continue to elicit a vigorous range of critical attention. The complexity and force of Celan's work derive from his fraught and self-reflexive response to catastrophe. He bears witness to the Shoah, and the losses which remain one of its lasting consequences, in ways which refuse thematization, articulating trauma and the isolation of exile with a precision that sometimes brings us unbearably close to the expe rience of dislocation, towhat itmight mean to have lost family, community and home. This sense of injury haunts the poetic project of representation, but is nowhere disclosed directly. At the same time, however, Celan's work involves an incessant reaching into new or forgotten lexical strata in an effort to reproduce the physical and mental reality of experience, to expand our sense of its texture and detail, and to open onto other things. Poems, he suggested, are a means of orientation ? enabling experience as they trace it, BRIDGET THOMSON 267 seeking paths tomeaning through the disquieting folds and intense exposure of their writing. Now, more than thirty years after his death, readers have more tools with which to explore the tensions of Celan's work. The gradual release of archival material has resulted, since the early 1990s, in a range of annotated editions of his poetry, poetics and correspondences. These illuminate some of themore recondite elements of the poetry, as well as bringing us closer to the personal conditions and historical climate from which it emerges. The pub lication of the lettersCelan exchanged with his wife goes perhaps the furthest in revealing how details of the physical world encountered in his movements across Europe become traceable as topoi in the poetry, as well as showing the care with which he attended to the very structure of relationship invoked by writing to an intimate other in her absence, the mutual I-Thou relationship.1 But the usefulness of documentation for understanding Celan's poetry turns on its empirical status within the poem. While close reading is now vastly enabled by the elucidation of references, the relation of text to context is never a mimetic one, but deranged by the poetry's structures of displace ment and delay. Celan is known to have recorded and then erased the place and date of a poem's writing before publication, as ifremoving too direct a link to an event, object or theme. And so recent scholarship has necessarily become more reflexive in its critical responsibility to a vulnerable private knowledge and the heightened legibility of its traces. Celan criticism, in the diverse forms represented by these five books, would seem to be probing the conscience of his work, looking at how poetry relates to, recalls or evokes the lost others of history, how it represents the ruins of cultural memory, and how its structures of difference and specific acts of address embody a non-totalizing ethics of remembrance. Barbara Wiedemann's is the first complete edition of Celan's poetry to be published as a...

‘Give it the Shade’: Paul Celan and the Politics of Apolitical Poetry

This article analyses the political impact of Paul Celan's poetry to illustrate the potential for social transformation contained in seemingly apolitical practices of speaking and writing. Celan's work epitomizes the search for thinking space in the immediate post-war period. Much of the German language at the time was so closely associated with the horrors of the Nazi regime that it was difficult to address critically many important social issues. In dealing with this dilemma, Celan recognized that politics ought to deal with language, with how we have come to objectivize the dilemmas that surround us. His poetry tried to stretch the boundaries of the German language such that it became possible to speak once more, critically, dialogically, humanely. By scrutinizing the potential and limits of this process, the present article addresses various issues that are at stake in the interaction between language, politics and society.

Simiente de lobo: Celan, Adorno y la poesía después de Auschwitz

A partir de un poema póstumo de Paul Celan, el presente artículo analiza el dictum de Theodor W. Adorno sobre la imposibilidad de la lírica después de Auschwitz y busca determinar el impacto de tal proposición en la obra de Celan. Al mismo tiempo, indaga la recepción de la poesía de Celan en las ideas mismas de Adorno, particularmente en Negative Dialektik y Ästhetische Theorie. Por último, explora las paradojas de cualquier lenguaje poético que pretenda dar cuenta del Holocausto artísticamente.

Jewishness in Paul Celan's Work

Jewishness in Paul Celan's Work