Arnon Grunberg

Note

Linguist

More on Celan (and translation) – here’s Michael Hofmann in LRB in 1996:

“Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antschel, to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina: ‘a posthumously born Kakanier,’ he once said of himself (the city and province of his birth had been ceded to Romania in 1918, when the Habsburg Empire was broken up). His upbringing reflected the family’s Jewish traditions, but also the deep love of German literature and culture that was often found, especially in Jewish populations, in the Eastern marches of Austria-Hungary (think of the Galician, Joseph Roth). In Celan’s case, this came to him from his mother: German was, in every sense, his mother-tongue. Already as a boy, he loved poetry, first Goethe and Schiller, then Hölderlin, Heine, Trakl, Kafka and in particular Rilke. He spoke German, Hebrew, Romanian and some Yiddish and was obviously an exceptional linguist, later translating poetry from Russian, English, French and Italian. And yet, when he came to write, he had no real alternative to German: ‘Poetry – that is the fateful uniqueness of language,’ he wrote. Only slightly younger Jewish writers like Yehuda Amichai and Dan Pagis – a fellow Bukovinan – emigrated to Israel and wrote their poetry in Hebrew: Celan couldn’t. It is what gives his poetry its desperate distinction. ‘There is nothing in the world,’ Celan said, ‘for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew, and the language of his poems is German.’”

(…)

“‘These killings, especially that of his mother, were to remain the core experiences of his life,’ writes Pierre Joris in a biographical note. Celan himself did forced labour. When the Russians retook the Bukovina, he went back to Czernowitz. In 1945, having anagrammatised himself to Paul Celan, he was in Bucharest, where an early version of his most celebrated poem, ‘Todesfuge’, came out in a friend’s Romanian translation: it was his first publication. In 1947, he went west to Vienna. The following year, he settled in Paris, where he worked as a translator and taught – German – at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He married the graphic artist Gisèle de Lestrange in 1952; they had a son, Eric (having lost another in infancy), and lived in Paris and Normandy, Celan teaching and publishing poems. He visited Germany fairly frequently for professional reasons, giving readings and receiving awards, and in 1969 paid a short but intense visit to Israel. In April 1970, he drowned himself in the Seine.”

(…)

“To anyone raised on Anglo-American biographies of the sort that know everything about their subject and will say anything, Felstiner’s propriety and lack of intrusiveness come as quite a shock. His gentle approach seems to push Celan back into a more dignified past: it is strange to think he died just two years before John Berryman, whose hospitalisations, marriages, alcoholism and so on are all common knowledge – not least because Berryman wrote about them himself. As Hamburger says, Celan ‘had hardly any use for realism of a kind that merely imitates and reproduces, for what Northrop Frye has called “the low mimetic”’. He never wrote anything like Berryman’s ‘I didn’t – I didn’t. Sharp the Spanish blade’ and the corollary is that we aren’t now being told what Celan liked for breakfast. We don’t know with what feelings or even exactly when he went to his death, nor can we picture the scene on 27 June 1942 when his parents were taken away. In part, it is Celan’s difficulty and delicacy that continue to protect him from any intrusiveness. A poem in Breathturn begins, ‘Temple-pincers, eyed by your cheekbone’. Felstiner conjectures it might be about shock therapy. But it’s good not to know, or rather not to be told for sure – and all these dark and heavy biographical facts are left to accrue to the benefit of the poems (and out of range of the trivialisation and inquisition of biography). It is striking, too, how people who knew Celan talk about him in terms that are reminiscent of his own poems. At times, their statements show a mastery of one of his own favourite forms, paradox: his style of reading aloud, with ‘a cold heat’; the poet Henri Michaux’s laconic Möbius-ism ‘we spoke so as not to have to speak’; or Emmanuel Lévinas’s Dickinsonian remark that Celan’s poems testified to his – stunning phrase – ‘Insomnia in the bed of Being’. Clearly, no one is about to write a knock-down-drag-out biography of Paul Celan; in fact Felstiner’s book is the nearest there has yet been to anything of the kind.”

(…)

“On their own, the translations can indeed look a little odd. One has been done as a Dickinson pastiche. The most famous one, the version of ‘Deathfugue’ that Daniel Weissbort used in his anthology, The Poetry of Survival, where I first saw it, goes, as Weissbort describes it, ‘at certain crucial points, back into German, in an almost sacramental completion of the translational circle’. Fugally and incrementally, Felstiner incorporates the original, so that the last two and a half lines are exactly as Celan wrote them: a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein achenes Haar Sulamith (Since they have been translated earlier on in the poem, there can be no possibility of not understanding them.) It is a way of acknowledging – and in a translation! – the untranslatability of Celan. How can the within/without, first/third-person ambivalence of ‘Deutschland’ be rendered by the unfreighted and external ‘Germany’ (with its distinct root of ‘Aleman-’ for ‘Teut-’, all cosy and Western)? What seems at first like a pointless stunt is in fact only doing in a performative way – and only here, in this of all Celan’s poems, ‘the Guernica of postwar European poetry’, Felstiner calls it – what Felstiner does throughout Poet, Survivor, Jew, which is to bring the German within reach of the English reader.”

(…)

“Take ‘Tenebrae’, a transparently great poem in any language, not ‘hard’ but with a howling, desolating coldness to it: ‘Nah sind wir, Herr, / nahe und greifbar. // Gegriffen schon, Herr, / ineinander verkrallt, als wär / der Leib eines jeden von uns / dein Leib, Herr. // Bete, Herr, / bete zu uns, / wir sind nah.’ This is ferocious, terrifying in its insistence, and not a letter – the ‘e’ in ‘nahe’ – out of place. Michael Hamburger’s version goes: We are near, Lord, near and at hand.
Handled already, Lord, clawed and clawing as though the body of each of us were your body, Lord.
Pray, Lord, pray to us, we are near.
Felstiner has it: Near are we, Lord, near and graspable.
Grasped already, Lord, clawed into each other, as if each of our bodies were your body, Lord.
Pray, Lord, pray to us, we are near.
Hamburger’s fifth line is inelegant, and he loses the thudding ds and the gathering movement of ‘at hand’ to ‘handled’; then again, ‘handled’ is really not adequate for ‘gegriffen’, and Felstiner saves a little more of Celan’s terrifying dactylic metre. But where he really scores is in his sourcing of the poem in Scripture and theology, and, still more, of its fourth line, ‘ineinander verkrallt’ to the German translation of The Final Solution by Gerald Reitlinger, which Celan had been reading and which describes a cluster of Jews pressed against the gas chamber door, ‘even in death clawed into each other’. Here and elsewhere, Felstiner shows Celan as a harsh and knowing poet, and any idea of him as advancing Jewish-Christian or Jewish-German reconciliation is not only half-baked but deliberately, even viciously untrue.”

(…)

“My only reservation about Felstiner is that he succeeds too well. Being guided by him through Celan is an experience that is nothing like what I have when I read Celan on my own, and must surely boggle the minds of readers who can approach him only through translation. And to me there’s something wrong about that: these things shouldn’t be so utterly distinct. A commentary ought to be an extension or a deepening of a reading, not essentially, the recovery, revelation, or possibly invention of a poem (although I hasten to add that I follow and believe John Felstiner wherever he goes). By the same token, a translation should be able to do more than just slide the words and punctuation across the page, losing practically everything en route and still leaving the reader utterly baffled as most Celan translations inevitably and unapologetically do. Celan provides the terrain – we are talking about his words – but the authority, the creativity, the freedom and the space all belong to the exegetes: they are the ones who are giving him to us. With other poets, these things are shared out in some measure: the poet does more work on himself, the reader can do more, the translator does more. With Celan’s extremely idiosyncratic, compressed, meta-linguistic poetry, there is even a case for saying there is no point in translating him at all. The syllogism which proposes that, since Celan is just as strange in German and to German, he might as well be translated into English or anything else – and he used to do translations himself too – is just nonsense. His words are defined by – they exist in – their relation to German, their separation from German. Even the very lightest translation – just a sort of Englishing-over, one coat with a camel-hair brush – takes him away. And what sort of translating is that anyway? A translator wants, at some point, to make a difference, to be something other than an autopilot. But how can one aspire to ‘make a difference’ with Celan? The temerity! Even Joseph Brodsky’s argument in favour of ‘bad translations’ – they won’t mislead the reader by any qualities of their own, but will leave his intuition to engage with the original – doesn’t work, because all translations of almost anything by Celan are bound to be ‘bad’, and intuition – or, in Michael Hamburger’s phrase, ‘the gesture of the poem as a whole’ – is all we have to go on anyway. The only possible translation, it seems to me, is the kind practised by John Felstiner in the last two lines of ‘Deathfugue’ (elsewhere, too, he speaks movingly about his success in replicating a break between stanzas). I really think an English reader might as well sit down with the original text and a dictionary, and look up every single word.”

(…)
“Celan’s dealings with postwar Germany were unbearably and continually wounding: the reviews, the way that ‘Todesfuge’ was taught in schools, the accusation of plagiarism from Claire Goll. Writing was partly revenge – on ‘those football players’ of the Gruppe 47 who took him up and called him hermetic, on that ‘something rotten in the state of the D-Mark’, as he exquisitely said. His two acceptance speeches, for all their hesitancy, were subliminal – and sublime – instances of ‘Publikumsbeschimpfung’ (Handke’s title), ‘insulting the audience’. And then the poems, designed, I would almost say, to compel but not to be read, tying down armies of Germanists.
Celan perfected a style of writing that was able to absorb unprecedented quantities of reality: so much so that the poems don’t require to be read so much as reconstituted. But they have become – and I wonder whether Celan intended this – ideal objects of exploration and explanation, ‘gestures’ so complicated that they can’t possibly be copied, only described. These descriptions, then, are for me the most worthwhile part of Celan translations: in essence, that is the case with Felstiner. Pierre Joris sandwiches his loyally stiff versions between a brilliant Introduction and some helpful and appealingly modest notes; and the Washburn/Guillemin Last Poems, with fallible translation (Celan’s magical verb ‘stand’ – ‘survive’ or ‘endure’, harking back to Rilke’s ‘überstehn ist alles’ – given four times as ‘was’ in one poem, ‘Kolbenschlag’ translated as ‘stroke of the piston’ when I think a blow with the butt of a rifle is meant) and a perfumed Introduction, still has gorgeous quotes in it: ‘We are digging the pit of Babel’ from Kafka, and the amazingly Kafkaesque sentence, from Schönberg on Webern, ‘Though the brevity of these pieces is a persuasive advocate for them, on the other hand that very brevity itself requires an advocate,’ which one would be glad to see anywhere. I suppose in the end a translation should sound as though it understood, even in some sense compassed an original; it is ‘catching’ something and throwing it on to the reader. And I suppose no translator of Celan would have the hubris to say he had caught or could compass Celan: all he is doing is standing in very little light, and waiting to catch something of unknown dimensions.”

(…)

“But I don’t understand how people with a basically uncomplicated relationship to their own blameless language can think they are learning from Celan. ‘What a game!’ he once said, of poetry.”

Read the article here.

We can read this piece as a footnote to Benjamin’s essay on the task of the translator, an essay that borders on mysticism and incomprehensibility. I needed the English translation to understand it better, even though my command of German is in alle modesty fairly accurate.
A good example of Hofmann’s dictum that the translator should show that he has understood the original. (Translators in my experience are the best readers.)

Then there’s Hofmann’s idea that an English – non-German reader in general – should translate Celan’s poems with a dictionary word by word.

A theologian once told me that the bible consisted mostly of errors in translation and he suggested the same: translate word for word, even when the sentence appears not to make much sense.

Whether only Celan and the bible deserve this treatment is an open question – no Celan without the bible. (On a sidenote: can we imagine authors without the bible? Undoubtedly, but I’m not sure which writers we should nominate.)

Also this: English is a blameless language? Well, this essay was written in 1996. Another era. Nowadays, we know that there are no blameless languages, just people who forgot to blame themselves and their language.
(Could we say that Yiddish is a blameless language? That would be slightly absurd. It’s the language of the victims of the mass murderers, it was unlike German or Hungarian their own language)

The assimilated European Jews strove to talk and write in German (or English or French, mostly German), Yiddish was for the less ‘civilized’ comrades. Note that I.B. Singer was not much interested in sounding civilized or clever. He is as far from Walter Benjamin as I can imagine.

A publisher in Israel told me ten years ago or so that the most important success of Zionism was the resurrection of Hebrew.

But for Celan there was no alternative to German. (You can interpret this as: he was despite everything not ready to give up on the idea of assimilation.)
The language remains a mother tongue and a motherland. In some cases, more than others.

Where the untranslatability begins mysticism and God come into being. They lie together in the bed of being.

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