On Celan and reality – Mark Glanville in TLS:

‘In his speech on receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen in 1958, Celan had described poetry as a means to “chart my reality”, and on the same occasion wrote about the ambivalence of “wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend” (being wounded by and seeking reality). In her editorial note (translated by Joris) on “Vom Blau” in Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory, 1952) Barbara Wiedemann references a fascinating letter of the same year to a school student in which Celan insists that poems are an attempt to grapple with reality, an attempt to gain reality, to make reality visible. Thus reality for the poem is in no way something fixed, predetermined, but something that is at issue, something to be questioned. In the poem something real happens, … “We compared the rolling pearl with a parting tear!” – No: the rolling pearl is the rolling pearl, it “rolls” at this (and at no other) place of the poem, it stands – at least in its intention – in connection with the poem.
This, Celan wrote, results in “a stipulation for the reader not to ascribe what comes into language in a poem to something that stands outside the poem”.’

(…)

‘In Under the Dome, a book detailing the young French poet Jean Daive’s conversations with Celan during walks through Paris (recently republished, with a new introduction), Daive relates how, following his attempted suicide, Celan was confined in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois psychiatric hospital between February and April 1967. One nurse greeted patients with “Debout, les morts!” (Up, you corpses!). There was no need for barbed wire since the “incarceration is chemical”, and Celan was often “exhibited in an amphitheatre to medical students who take notes”. Crises of delirium had led to other hospital commitments, one following a life-threatening attack Celan had made on his wife, the artist Giselle Lestrange, during the night of November 23, 1965. In April 1967 the couple separated for good. Daive, whose book is as valuable for its insights into Celan the man as for the light it sheds on his later ars poetica, refers several times to the latent violence he witnessed in Celan. “I once saw him threatening. His body threatened me. He advanced into my breathing space. I held his eye. He suddenly changed: became trusting, understanding. All in the space of a millisecond. I was trembling.” Another time Daive observed Celan tearing up paper “with extraordinary violence … His waste basket always overflows with paper torn, but not crumpled into balls as with others I know”. It is against this background that the latter part of Fadensonnen (Threadsuns, 1968), and most of Lichtzwang (Lightduress, 1970), his two final collections, were written.’

(…)

‘Tradurre è tradire (to translate is to betray), say the Italians. Joris’s gratuitous adverb alerts us to the possibility that we might not always be in the safest hands. And so in Celan’s poem “Waldig” (1955), the words “durchglüht von gefristetem Sommer”, which Joris translates as “annealed by an eked out summer”, could have been conveyed more comprehensibly and elegantly with a simpler, direct translation from the German, eg “shone through by passing summer”. Similarly, in “Die Jahre von dir zu Mir”, the rhythm and sound-world of the phrase “und reichen uns rascher die Speisen” are lost in Joris’s prosaic “and hand ourselves the dishes faster”. Michael Hamburger’s translation – “and faster pass food to the other” – is more successful. Elsewhere, in “So Schlafe”, “ein schöner Kahn” becomes “a gorgeous skiff”, the simple German acquiring an inappropriately Wordsworthian echo (“a lovely boat” might have sufficed). And in “Die Winzer”, the self-conscious internal rhyme in “they cellar the seepings, the weepings”, which does not occur in the original German (“sie kellern das Sickernde ein, das Geweinte”), turns out to have been borrowed from the Celan scholar John Felstiner’s version.’

(…)

‘For Celan, post-Holocaust German had become a language “gagged with the ashes of burned-out meaning”, yet it was his mother’s tongue, and “to speak like one’s mother, means to dwell, even there where there are no tents”. Czernowitz (now the Ukrainian city Chernivtsi) had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in 1920 had only recently become Romanian, the kingdom being officially recognized in the year of Celan’s birth. His mother had been a passionate advocate for German language and culture. Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had thrived under the benign rule of Emperor Franz Joseph I. Celan had published a small number of poems in Romanian (available in a translation by Nina Cassian), but in an interview in 1954 Celan remarked that the Romanian language was “no more than a light coat one can take off easily after leaving school”. As for “the dangers of French”, the language of the country in which he now resided, “I can well say that as long as I still dream in German, I know those dangers to be banned. I believe that I remain in the domain of my mother-tongue, thus in the domain of the German language, which I have been speaking for ever”. “This is my fate”, he wrote in a letter to the Swiss writer, Max Rychner, “to have to write German poems.”’

(…)

‘“Humankind cannot bear very much reality”, wrote T. S. Eliot. By the time he gave his Meridian Speech, Celan envisioned his poems not so much as searches for reality but “blueprints for being”. Poetry had become an existential rather than an epistemological endeavour. Celan wrote that he was “an I clarifying itself in the process of writing”. But poetry had to be “antibiographical”. “The poem,” wrote Celan (quoted in Microliths), “takes even its author completely into its understanding only for the duration of its coming into being – and then releases him too … Because of this it knows itself to be on the way to those who are still willing to let themselves be made thoughtful. Is it a surprise that it is thus, given that even the one who lifts the poem into the visible is tolerated as ‘confidant’ only as long as the poem is in the process of becoming?” The poet, by this almost mystical interpretation, is no more than the medium for his verse, a notion that would have been appreciated by the surrealist school of André Breton and their practice of “écriture automatique”, which informed some of Celan’s earlier verse. Arguably, he has come full circle. “The poem”, though, “shows, unmistakably, a strong tendency to fall silent”, wrote Celan, implying an ultimate silence which language, with “shape and direction and breath”, survives. On the day he drowned himself in the River Seine, Celan left a biography of Hölderlin open on his desk, a sentence underscored: “Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the well of the heart”.’

(…)

‘Celan later quotes Nicolas Malebranche: “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul”. His poetry, a monumentum aere perennius if ever there were one, is certainly worth ours.’

Read the review here.

I would say that not only poems are ‘an attempt to grapple with reality, an attempt to gain reality, to make reality visible,’ but literature itself is an attempt to grapple with reality, to make it visible, to gain reality.
Or as Kundera once wrote, to take away the blanket that covers reality.
The question, how exactly we define reality remains. But we all have our inklings, yes, there are hallucinations, nobody is safe from the Fata Morgana, but we are fairly good at distinguishing facts from hallucinations, the sensations of pain and pleasure help us with this endeavor. And where there is doubt, there is literature to help us.