Paul Celan was born on this day in 1920 and I've been reading through my well-worn copy of Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952) - my favorite book of his, perhaps because the poems are more accessible. (Celan ranks #5 on my list of Top Ten German Poets). Sometime in the mid-1970's - entirely by chance, and not that long after Celan had taken his own life in Paris - I attended a reading of Celan's poetry by the poet and translator Michael Hamburger. Hamburger read aloud Todesfuge - first in German and then in his translation (still the strongest effort). I had never heard anything quite as powerful as that poem before and knew that I had to read his entire oeuvre - not an easy task, as I came to learn. Interpreting Celan requires work - as it does for every great poet. But Celan pushed the German language to its limit - inventing a new language. And in the end, with his collection Lichtzwang, published just three months after his suicide in 1970, it is the silent spaces between the words that seem to carry the meaning.
I like this piece that the literary critic and blogger Wolfgang Schnier wrote to commemorate Paul Celan.
Denn die Gedichte von Paul Celan sprechen tatsächlich in einer anderen Sprache: Sie sind nicht leicht konsumierbar wie ein Werbespot, sie fliegen unterhalb des Radars der Kulturindustrie, die alles vereinahmt und alles verkaufen will. Daher sprechen die Gedichte Celans, vermutlich mehr als andere Gedichte, noch den Menschen in uns an, und nicht den Kunden. Und mir scheint, dass uns diese Ansprache fremd geworden ist in unserer postmodernen Konsumgesellschaft und wir daher irritiert sind. Und genau darin liegt aber das Besondere, wenn wir anfangen, Gedichte von Paul Celan verstehen zu wollen: Es besteht die Chance, dass wir wenigstens ein Stück weit immunisiert werden gegenüber den Zumutungen unserer Zeit und uns wieder ein klein wenig mehr als Mensch fühlen können. Doch dafür brauchen wir ein Grundvertrauen in uns selbst, dieses Selbstvertrauen und Selbstbewusstsein, dass wir noch in der Lage sind, die Gedichte von Paul Celan zu verstehen, ohne dass wir jemanden brauchen, der uns die Gedichte erklärt, der uns das Mensch-sein erklärt.
("For the poems of Paul Celan do actually speak to us in an different language. They are not easily to digest like a television commercial, they fly below the radar of the culture industry that is all consuming and wants to sell everything. For this reason Celan's poems - perhaps more than other poems - speak to the human in us, and not to the customer. It seems to me that it has almost become strange to be addressed in this manner in our post-modern consumer society, and thus we find it irritating. And precisely this that is so exceptional when we start wanting to understand the poetry of Paul Celan: we have the chance at least for a while to immunize ourselves against the expectations of the day and can feel a bit more like a human being. But to do this we need a fundamental confidence, a self-confidence and self-consciousness that we have the ability to comprehend the poetry of Paul Celan without requiring someone else to explain it, to explain our own humanity to ourselves.")
See also: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, More Celan Letters Published, 50 Near Perfect Books of German Poetry, Heidegger's One Good Deed
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