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The back cover says 'Snow
Part
is the first translation of Schneepart to be published in English.' This is
not quite true. I take the publisher to be saying this is the first complete translation; to my
knowledge 24 of the 70 poems are translated in Katherine Washburn's and
Margaret Guillemin's bilingual 'Paul Celan Last Poems', 1986; John Felstiner
included 10 of them in his bilingual 'Selected Poems and Prose' of 2001. Michael
Hamburger had translated 12 in 1980 and one more in 1998 (3rd Anvil ed.2007,
bilingual). To have these and probably more translations is a very good
thing, and they must be difficult to translate, but Paul Fairley's have not
come out of nowhere.
I have next to no German and am curious to think, if I had, what choices I
would make. The varieties of them in the above make me wonder if, even for
German speakers, Celan's poems can ever come to rest as settled in one's
understanding.
Which perhaps is as good a way as any into spending time with him: the unsettledness.
Looking at one of the shorter poems, the variety of translation seems both to
show and to confuse the meaning. The German:
DAS
ANGERBROCHENE JAHR
mit dem
modernden Kanten
Wahnbrot.
Trink
aus meinen
Mund.
There is agreement that the second part of this translates as 'Drink / from
my mouth' and it isn't difficult to see that this is relatively
straightforward. The first three lines, though, come through as:
THE BROACHED
YEAR
with its
mouldering crusts
of delusion
bread.
(Hamburger)
THE BROACHED
YEAR
with its
rotting crust of
madnessbread.
(Felstiner)
THE BREACHED
YEAR
with its mouldering crust
of
lunebread.
(Fairley)
The third line's German complex noun makes for the most difference in
translation, difference in nuance and more, and if three respected
translators arrive at these differences, I wonder what happens in the mind of
a German reader. The same possibilities of meaning perhaps.
Another short poem (I am choosing the shorter as examples, the poems are more
usually half a page to a page in length):
SCHLUDERE,
Schmerz,
schlag ihr nicht ins Gesicht,
erpfusch dir
die
Sandknubbe im
weiben Daneben.
FOUL UP,
pain,
spare her
face,
make your
mess
the sandknot
in the
white
amiss.
(Fairley)
BE CARELESS,
pain,
don't strike
her in the face,
scheme to get
the sand-knot
in
the white
Beside.
(Washburn & Guillemin)
Comparing these and other translations, one can see that sometimes word order
and meaning come through in a relatively simple way, which does not mean the
meaning overall is simple; nor that what is conveyed by the sounds of the
words, subtleties of image and so on can readily be carried over.
Even the examples of two short poems above show the difficulties, not least
in the originals. I doubt that for German speakers the poems are clear, for
all that Celan said he wanted and expected them to be.
The wonder might be that he wrote at all. It is well nigh impossible to read
the poems and keep not only in mind but in one's guts the death of his
parents in concentration camps, his writing in the language of the people who
caused their deaths, writing exiled in Paris, accused of plagiarism, living
outwardly a normal married life. What does the reader expect, why read him,
how does poetry
for him connect with what it is for us?
Ian Fairley does not gloss each poem or try to tell us the variables for the
purpose of translation, and he tells us in his helpful fourteen page
introduction he has decided not to do that. And if any reader feels they are
uniquely at something of a loss, they will be helped by Fairley saying this:
Perhaps each
poem, like the sea-coast of Bohemia, is an
horizon which
effects a standstill? To read Celan's poetry
is to wonder what to make of it. Asked
after, our
understanding
may stall in its answer, but the possibility,
like the
necessity, of reading and translating nonetheless
remains.
And the rest of that passage is significant both in allowing the difficulty
and in opening a window on to it.
He wasn't in good health all those years in Paris, not balanced in himself,
and he ended by drowning himself in the Seine. There is not much from behind
the scenes, as it were, by way of talks, letters, diaries. His exchange of
letters with Nelly Sachs, both of them in exile, is an opening on to his life
and to hers, which does and does not give us much really about either of
them, that necessitates the poems. [Perhaps more letters, to others, have yet
to be translated]. It is perhaps more to the point to receive the poems as
secrets shared and impossible to share.
Having begun by saying there have been other translations of some of these
poems, to be able to compare translations is a blessing, and to have the
whole of 'Schneepart' translated is no small thing. Included in the book
there is more, listed as 'Other poems (1968-69)'; the whole of the book
represents Celan's last work, published after his death in 1970.
He was living out a history so disrupted, how could 'making sense' even be
thought possible, more like obscene even. At the same time he was in
possession of that long history by way of the Bible and of rabbinic
literature and tradition, ambivalent, too, about this very tradition; of the
grappling with hard questions.
I know Celan is important to me and I cannot say coherently why. A short poem
(as from Fairley):
THE WORLD TO
BE STAMMERED AFTER
in which I'll
have
been guest, a
name,
sweated down
from the wall
up which a
wound licks.
Felstiner's translation is not very different; Hamburger's, too, but with an
opening line differently nuanced ('WORLD TO BE STUTTERED BY HEART'). The poem
is in the first person, maybe Celan's, maybe taking on a voice. 'Guest' - the
'I' has been a visitor (why Felstiner and Hamburger have 'a guest' and
Fairley has simply 'guest' I don't know). Does the world cause the
stammer/the stutter? The final two lines can be guessed at as conveying
terror, nightmare; but how can I know what it was for Celan to find and write
them?
This 'How can I know?' if I meant it absolutely, would say poetry must be
ordinarily comprehensible, in image routine, in language everyday, without
discovery.
In her book, 'Economy of the Unlost, Reading
Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan', 1999, Anne Carson [quoted in a review by
Mark Glanville in The Jewish Quarterly online] says,
For a poetÕs
despair is not just personal; he despairs of
the word and
that implicates all our hopes. Every time a
poet writes a
poem he is asking the question, Do words
hold good?
And the answer has to be yes: it is the
contrafactual
condition upon which a poetÕs life depends.
Perhaps in Fairley's introduction I have read and forgotten, in Felstiner's
other book, on Celan's life and work ('Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew',
1995); elsewhere in the 'Celan literature' I can find interpretive material
for this poem; and as part of the discovery, so much the better. BUT the poem
as naked poem gets a hold on one's imagination or it doesn't. I would be very
surprised to find (and how could I?) that Celan himself was in total
conscious control of what he was writing; surely he was discovering, risking,
as we as readers discover and risk: the habit of informed imagination is what
is vital to it.
Missed it again.
© David
Hart 2008
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