A poet who moved from direct social relevance to difficulty and paradox

books:

	• Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition, Revised Edition Paul Celan Persea Books, 2002 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Classic Collection

This excellent edition of Paul Celan's major poetry (translated excellently by Michael Hamburger) provides the full scope of Celan's considerable genius. Included is the famous 'Death Fugue,' perhaps the most darkly beautiful and profound works of art about the Holocaust yet created. One is left with Celan's transitions; he began immersed in the syle of early 20th century German poets suck as Rilke, and later progressed in Breathturn and Threadsuns to reveal his capacity for highly creative and original linguistic play. The final poems are characterized by a deep morbidity and anguish; they are patently indicative of the poet's distrught spirits. He would later kill himself by drowning.

Celan is now written about intensively by the philosophers Derrida and Lyotard, he is probably as important to them as Holderlin was to Heidegger. The editor has included a poem that Celan did not intend for publication; but you can understand why it was included, as it is a magnificent triumph of expressive sorrow over the loss of his parents during the war. Celan was a very great poet, readers are still trying to catch up with his complexity and deep artistic insight.

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Disturbing Beauty - the Poetry of Life through Death

'you were my death
you I could hold
when all fell away from me'

It may be something of romantic notion to consider the life of a poet as relevant as the work itself, or at least to it, but in the case of Paul Celan, it can scarce be avoided. In his work 'Poems of Paul Celan', Michael Hamburger wastes little page space on defining the poet through his own life, but rather allows the translations to stand as testimony to the man himself.

It's certainly important to know who Celan was in order to understand the context of the work - born in Czernovitz, Romania in 1920, Paul Celan was the son of Jewish immigrants living in the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This polyglot of nations each spoke their own language, therefore from an early age Paul was fluent in German, the regional tongue, Romanian, the language of the country and Yiddish, the common language of the Jewish community which he was a part of. He later became fluent in French, Russian and Ukranian - but because it was his first language, German remained his dominant tongue and the language he wrote his poetry in throughout the remainder of his life. This subtle irony would not be lost on him in later years of his life, nor to the literary world at large in the time of his greatest renown.

For the world was not a kind place in eastern Europe during the advent of the second world war, and certainly Romania was no exception. In the summer of 1942, both of his parents were interred in labor camps as the result of Nazi occupation. The whereabouts of Paul on that fateful evening are disputed, but it is certain that he was not present when his parents were arrested. Paul would also find himself a victim of the holocaust, but managed to be liberated after the soviet occupation. Tragically, neither of his parents would survive.

And it is here that the great work of Celan first begins to show itself through 'Todesfuge', translated literally as 'Death March', a reference to the accounts witnessed where fellow prisoners were forced to play music for the others waiting to die in the gas chambers. The piece itself is one of Celan's most memorable efforts, and Hamburgers translation does it more than justice by rendering an ineffable quality interweaving angst and terrible beauty within lines of winterdeath and movement without once distorting the original fugue rhythm and tone.

To be certain Hamburger expends 34-odd pages on delivering an effective historical background as well as more academic elucidations on the defense of islabeling Celan as 'hermetic'. The remaining 300-plus pages are entirely devoted to his exceptional translations of the work itself. An added bonus: the tome is bilingual and presents both the original German version as well as the translation itself.

Celan's poetry is far more than any isolationist melancholia, however deserved, at circumstance - rather, it is the work itself which bears the very aspect of the transcendence of human experience through words that renders it exceptional and of such merit. It is easy enough to wax and wane eloquent on the whys and wherefores, but words are often better left to speak for themselves. So be it.

'Go blind now, today;
eternity also is full of eyes-
in them
drowns what helped images down
the way they came,
in them
fades what took you out of language,
lifted you out with a gesture
which you allowed to happen like
the dance of words made of
autumn and silk and nothingness.'

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With A Variable Key....

I first discovered Celan last November when I read "With A Variable Key" on the web page for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist." Curious, I checked out a book of his works from the university library and was immediately enthralled with Celan's world. I purchased this book soon after.
Celan gives new meaning to the idea of an artist putting his/her life into their work. His tortured existence replays itself over and over in his work and one can almost feel the agony Celan suffered through dealing with and ultimately losing the battle with his demons. Hamburger's introduction to Celan's life and his methods of translation were also insightful and ironic considering German was the language of Celan's own prison.
There is the darkness found in such sweeping works as "Death Fugue" and "Wolfs Bean." Then there is the subtle beauty which I personally find in "How You" and "Not Until." My favorite of his poems has to be "With A Variable Key."
Celan is hailed by some as one of the greatest poets of German literature and the 20th century. Hamburger's collection and translations do Celan's work justice.

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Poetry After Auschwitz

Adorno was wrong. There is poetry after Auschwitz, and this is what it looks like. Celan's short poems are compressed visions of horror. He tears at the fabric of language in order to render the torn fabric of reality. Reading Celan, I think of the best paintings by the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer, an artist who, like Celan, attacks his materials with fire, sometimes even burning gaping holes into his vast canvases. Art after Auschwitz must be prepared to show the damage, the tears in the fabric of what makes us human. Celan--and Kiefer, at his best--points toward a new way to be human. I cannot praise an artist more highly than that.

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A poet who moved from direct social relevance to difficulty and paradox

Paul Celan stands as one of the most influential and visible poets of the second half of the 20th-century. The work he produced from World War II to his suicide by drowning in 1970 has been lauded by subsequent poets, taught in German history courses, and set to music by Berio, Birtwistle, and Rihm. The central theme of most of Celan's poetry is the slaughter of European Jewry in the Holocaust, as the poet was born in a German-speaking Jewish enclave in Bucovina and there lost his parents and his home, scars which even a successful new life in Paris could never erase. This volume of selected poems with English translations by Michael Hamburger is a fine introduction to his work.

Celan's poem "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue) is one of his earliest mature pieces and the most common introduction to his poetry. It's opening lines "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night / we drink and we drink it / we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined" are a powerful depiction of the death camps and fully repudiate Adorno's claim that poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Some critics have claimed that "Todesfuge" was Celan's only great poem and had it not been for that, then we would have never heard of him. That poem was certainly his break into the literary world, but other material in this volume is just as fine. "Einfuehrung" (The Straitening) is something of a rewriting of "Todesfuge" in considerably more desperate language and my favourite of Celan's poems. Here the motifs of the first poem are shattered into pieces ("Grass, written asunder. The stones, white / with the shadows of grass blades ... Ash. / Ash. ash. / Night. / Night-and-night.") which in turn are dissolved into their component atoms (Gales, / Gales, from the beginning of time, / whirl of particles.").

In "Tenebrae" Celan reverses the relationship of God and his people in Judaism and explicitly evokes the violence of the camps: "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." One of Celan's main concerns was how speech might remain meaningful when so much of life had become meaningless after the horrors of the war years. In "With a Variable Key" he writes: "With a variable key / you unlock the house in which / drifts the snow of that left unspoken ... You vary the key, you vary the word / that is free to drift with the flakes. / What snowball will form round the workd / depends on the wind that rebuffs you."

While much of Celan's work is haunting, I cannot make much of his last works. With the last collections he saw published in his lifetime ATEMWENDE (Breathturn) and FADENSONNEN (Threadsuns) his poetry became so hermitic and so obsessed with polysemy (multiple meanings) that it effectively means nothing. Take, for example, the poem "Coagula" which in its entirety reads: "Rosa, your / wound as well. // And the hornlight of your / Romanian buffaloes / instead of stars above / the sandbed, in / the talking, red- / ember-powerful / rifle butt."

Now, some of the linguistic games of these late poems are entertaining, but I cannot sketch them here because I'm assuming readers of this review have no German, and they indeed cannot be preserved in English. Hamburger has attempted to give the poems some intelligibility by basing his translations on our knowledge of Celan's life, but in doing so he collapses the possibilities inherent in the German text.

In reviewing this volume of selected poems, and consequently the poet's entire career, I'm not sure how to rate it overall and therefore have given it three stars. Celan is certainly a poet worth getting acquainted with, but I can't help feeling that he was going astray into irrelevance with the late poems that only the author himself would have understood. If you are a fan of modern European poetry, or interested in the Holocaust and its influence on literature, pick up Hamburger's translations if you cannot read the original German. John Felstiner's Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew also makes a good companion for those who might miss the Jewish symbolism found throughout the early poetry.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Paul Celan is among the most important German-language poets of the century, and, in George Steiner's words, "almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945." He was born in 1920 into a Jewish family in Bukovina, a German enclave in Romania which was destroyed by the Nazis. His parents were taken to a concentration camp in 1942, and did not return; Celan managed to escape deportation and to survive. After settling in Paris in 1948, he soon gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in 1952. Language, Paul Celan said, was the only thing that remained intact for him after the war. His experiences of the war years and of the loss of his parents are the recurrent themes of his poetry. In the end they led as well to his suicide by drowning in 1970. This book was awarded the EC's first European Translation Prize in 1990.

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