MEMORY ROSE INTO THRESHOLD SPEECH
The collected earlier poetry: A bilingual edition
PAUL CELAN
Translated by Pierre Joris
592pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $45.
MICROLITHS THEY ARE, LITTLE STONES
Posthumous prose
PAUL CELAN
Translated by Pierre Joris
330pp. Contramundum. 20 [pounds sterling].
UNDER THE DOME
Walks with Paul Celan
JEAN DAIVE
Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
160pp. City Lights. Paperback, $15.95.
This year marks the centenary of Paul Celan's birth in Czernowitz and the fiftieth anniversary of his suicide by drowning in Paris. Several significant English-language books have been published to mark the occasion, among them Pierre Joris's Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, the first complete parallel-text edition of Celan's earliest four collections. Anglophone readers are at last able to chart the path to maturity of a writer widely considered to be the most important postwar German-language poet. Joris's book, complete with a thorough commentary--much of it is translated from Barbara Wiedemann's scholarly, complete German edition (2003), itself updated for the centenary year--serves as a prequel to Breathturn into Timestead, Joris's edition of Celan's four final collections (2014). Joris's achievement, fifty years in the making, is an important one.
Celan's earlier poetry, reflecting the influences of Rilke, Holderlin and surrealism, is marked by a considerable lyrical beauty he would eventually dismiss as inadequate. His response to Theodor Adorno's notorious dictum, that "to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric", goes some way to explaining why. "What concept of the 'poem' is being presented here?" asked Celan of himself. "The arrogance of the one who dares hypothetically-speculatively to contemplate or poetically describe Auschwitz from the nightingale- or lark-perspective?" Presumably he is alluding to "Todesfuge" (Deathfugue), his deeply personal evocation of Auschwitz, the poem for which he is still best known.
Er ruft spielt suBer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland Er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng (He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you'll rise in the air then you'll have a grave in the clouds there you'll lie at ease)
Celan referred to "Todesfuge" as his mother's only tomb (Friederike Antschel, like his father, had been murdered by the Nazis in Transnistria.) How goading, then, the assessment of the German literary critic Hans Egon Holthusen, who wrote of "Todesfuge" that, "With very few simple paradoxes Celan was able to master a theme that exceeds all human composure and all artistic imagination: by making it very 'light' and transcending it through a dreamy surrealism already beyond language, it could escape the bloody chamber of horrors of history and rise up into the ether of pure poetry". Worse was the German critic Gunter Blocker's conclusion: he suggested that Celan's poems about the Holocaust were "exercises on music paper" and thus not "meaningful". Celan was functioning "in emptiness", which, Blocker insinuated, with a classically...