The Iowa Review
Volume 30
Issue 1 Spring/Summer 2000
2000
You. An Introduction to Paul Celan
Joanna Klink
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Article 2
Joanna Klink
You.
An
Introduction
to
Paul
Celan
To Cling
An Die Haltlosigkeiten
to unstable
sich
things:
two fingers are snapping
in the abyss,
is stirring
in the scratch-sheets,
world
(Trans. Washburn
schmeigen:
es
a
Sudelheften
it all depends
on you.
& Guillemin)
schnippen
zwei Finger imAbgrund,
great and incalculable
you to be."
auf es kommt
rauschtWelt
an.
auf dich
?Paul
The
in den
grace of love, which
Celan
says with Augustine,
?Hannah
"I want
Arendt
poet Paul Celan lived from 1920 to 1970. In this respect he is post
someone who inherits the problems and values of those
modern:
people who
lived between the 1890's and the 1930's. He is also a post-war poet: he wrote
The
of his poems after the war, with a steady, incredulous eye upon Europe's
and today Celan is regarded as the great Ger
abrupt return to "normalcy,"
poet of the second half of this century, extending a speculative
man-language
in the eighteenth century
tradition in German poetry that runs from H?lderlin
most
through Trakl
and Rilke
in the twentieth.
In the critical reception of Celan there has been some attempt to appropriate
as
his poetry entirely to the Holocaust,
though the poems were not in them
selves exemplary poems but exemplary of the kind of poem which could only
in response to Auschwitz.
But Celan's practice locates him in the
of
other
and Hart
difficult
company
poets, Uke Mallarm?
poets?so-called
situate their poems close to a symbolic source of meaning,
Crane?who
poets
be written
who
carry their very existence into language, "... wounded
by the real and
in search of it" (wirklichkeitswund
und Wirklichkeit
suchend "Bremen" 35;
1
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186). The extreme doubt that propels their poems is doubt about the stability
of the external world, about language, and especially about sources of mean
ing which might authorize poetic practice. Celan's doubt cannot be separated
from his experience of the Holocaust,
but the poems which
as
doubt should be understood
contending with ontological
clude and exceed those raised by the Holocaust.
arise out of this
issues which
in
"diffi
During Celan's lifetime, critics and readers accused him of writing
cult" and "hermetic" poems because his language was dense, strange, and did
not lend itself to paraphrase. "Hermetic" here means "self-referential,"
"veiled,"
or
seems
the
concealed"?verse
which
turned
from
world,
away
"deUberately
has the markings of a private language. Even today, the predominant
as fundamental
to his
in Celan scholarship regard Celan's hermeticism
has a basis in two distinct Unes of influ
poetics. The charge of hermeticism
ence in Celan's Ufe: his dialogue with Gerschom
Scholem, whose
scholarly
which
schools
with
the Kabbalah
and traditions of herm?tica were of great
engagement
interest to Celan, and the po?sie pure announced by Mallarm?
and taken up in
to
France by poets such as Eluard and Char, which
free
sought
symbols from
their explicitly referential or mimetic obligations. Celan's interest in alchemy,
in poems such as "Solve" and "Coagula," contributes to the associa
as well. But Celan insisted that his poetry was not
tion with hermeticism
and
the
label
hermetic,
upset him a great deal. He inscribed Michael
evident
the phrase ganz und gar nicht
copy of Die Niemandsrose with
Hamburger's
in
hermetisch?"not
the least hermetic." Evidently Celan felt the need to de
fend himself against the charge, to direct his readers away from the anti
to call a poem hermetic
impUcations of that term?because
that it is not ultimately concerned with including you in its meaning.
communicative
means
poems are in search of something he calls Wirklichkeit: the real. What
not a hermetic?poet
makes Celan a difficult?but
is his intense orientation
a
toward the real. Like
great many other poets, Celan does the work of
Celan's
representation between
to translate Wirklichkeit
somewhat
two domains:
the actual and the real. (I have chosen
as "the real" instead of "reality" in order to free it
from conventional
and to better distinguish
of the actual is the domain
associations
it from
the
of appear
of appearances.) The domain
In the first volume of The Life of theMind, Hannah Arendt reconsiders
the primacy of appearances in the phenomenological
tradition that runs from
domain
ances.
Husserl
2
through Heidegger.
In everyday
life as well
as in scientific
study, she
... is determined
by
living thing essentially is
the relatively short time span of its full appearance" on this earth, its "epiphany"
creatures born into a
are, each of us, appearing and disappearing
(22). We
"the criterion for what
writes,
a
"many things, natural and artificial, living and dead,
transient and sempiternal, all of which have in common that they appear and
to be seen, heard, touched, tasted and smelled, to be per
hence are meant
world
which
contains
. . ."
(19):
ceived
and from
enter, appearing from a nowhere,
coin
into a nowhere, Being and Appearing
In this world which we
we disappear
cide. Dead matter, natural and artificial,
which
changing
and unchanging,
on the presence of
in its being, that is, in its appearingness,
creatures.
and nobody exists in this world
living
Nothing
very being does not presuppose a spectator. (19)
depends
whose
Insofar as "to be" always means to be perceived by a spectator?that
is, to be
unto others?being
and appearing coincide. Each of us appears and is a "re
each appearance is irreducibly singular, we
cipient of appearance." Although
share the fact that we
appear, that the world appears, and that we are of the
we belong to a world which existed before our arrival and which
world?that
is the medium
in which we receive
will survive our departure. Appearance
and encounter
one another. We
have
appearances
Poems attest to appearances. They evidence
the
a certain slant of light appears;
and particular?how
its precise feel; and then, what comes to pass around
come to pass. Indeed in Celan's
also what might
in common.
world
at its most
its outline,
Uteral
its character,
the certain slant of Ught,
this domain
vocabulary,
includes both what is "given" and what is "possible": the world as it seems,
and as it might be ("Reply to a Questionnaire
from Librarie Flinker" 1958).
The actual is always inside time, or subject to time (things come into appear
ance and vanish). Likewise,
it is subject to perception
(we receive it through
our
senses).
The
contradiction
of the actual
is the real. In this context,
real does not
mean material, or empirical, or (as in Plato) the opposite of ideal. The real is,
above all, source: the source of meaning;
that which sponsors our existence in
this world. By definition,
it is outside of time, outside of experience;
it does
it provides a common ground abstract enough to include your
and mine at once. Most essentially, the real provides the category
not set bounds;
experience
3
of existence.
It is transcendent
insofar as transcendence
in moving
included.
self; being among others; being
beyond
Ap
our involvement
in a common world,
but the real is our
pearances
imply
in that world.
In poems the real often figures as the principle of
involvement
the boundaries
discourse,
because
weight:
consists
of one
as those powers which
originate us but are not ourselves. And
it is a term of highest value, it always carries a burdened evaluative
to the actual, authorizes
it lends meaning
the significance
of the
actual, and thereby determines what is most worthy of value.
In Ufe, as in art, we hunger for the real. Certain events get slotted into this
force us to acknowledge
the sanctity?the
category, events which
highest
a person.
value?of
for
events,
Extraordinary
example. Traditionally,
light
associated with the real, as that which
illumines a person or makes
one person visible to another. The value of a person is most
apparent when
to
close
the
real.
As
with
which
has
the
brought
light,
capacity to most
has been
augment and most threaten the identity of a person, the real is both constitu
to self. Personhood
tive of and destabilizing
tends to be most illuminated by
those forces that threaten its Umits, and the real threatens those Umits. Silence
and pain are included in this domain as well, although sites of affliction and
great pain tend to soak up the real and sometimes make us forget that it also
occurs in ordinary Ufe. But because the domain is
symboUc, we do not and
cannot
would
sustain a life in the real. Collapse
be no Ufe, no appearance, nothing
the actual
and the real and there
creaturely, nothing in itself. With
its generaUzing force, the real has the potential to annihilate particularity,
to
extinguish the "polychrome"
design and detail of the actual ("the polychrome
of apparent actuality," das Polychrome des scheinbar Aktuellen, "Reply" 15;167).
a poet
Emily Dickinson,
especially attentive to the violent-beautiful-ephem
eral quaUty of the real, expresses this in 258 when
she calls attention to the
way Ufe seizes up in its presence: "When it comes, the Landscape listens?/
their breath?/When
it goes, 'tis Uke the Distance/On
Shadows?hold
the
look of Death." The threat of the real is that, in breaking into the realm of
an instant?our
it takes?for
breath away (the pause in breath
appearances,
Celan caUs "breath-turn"). The power of the real is its capacity to make our
Uves?in
that same instant?incandescent.
this power and
poems situate themselves at the juncture between
this threat, and seek out the real. Celan was particularly adamant that poems
not take the real for granted, not assume that it exists or is ready-at-hand.
In
Celan's
the poem,
4
he says, the real "is not
simply there. Itmust
be sought and won"
to his acceptance of the City of Bremen Literature
("Reply" 16). Just prior
Prize in 1958, Celan received a letter from a high school teacher in Bremen
students won
and whose
who felt that Celan's poems were incomprehensible
dered
if perhaps
the poems weren't
meant
to be
interpreted
at all. Celan
replied by saying
for poems is in no way something that stands estabUshed,
to be put
already given, but something standing in question, that's
In a poem, what's real happens . . .The poem itself,
in question.
Reality
insofar as it is a real poem,
own beginning.
Wirklichkeit
(Felstiner
ist f?r
is aware of the questionableness
of its
118)
das Gedicht
also Keineswegs
etwas Feststehendes,
in Frage zu Stellendes.
Vorgegebenes, sondern etwas im Frage Stehendes,
. . .Das Gedicht selbst ist
In einem Gedicht, ereignet sich Wirkliches
sich, sofern es ein wirkliches Gedicht ist, der Fragw?rdigkeit seines Beginnens
wohl bewu?t.(160)
says "what's real happens" he is caUing upon the history of the
is related to the verb wirken. Wirken (w?rken) first
word Wirklichkeit, which
was used by mystics to mean "to take
appeared in the 13th century. The word
effect," "to bring forth" (herstellen), "to work"
(from the root substantive
When
Celan
on the verb?
Werk) (Kluge 795). In contemporary usage, all the variations
to have an effect, to act
such as Wirkung haben, verwirklichen, einwirken?mean
on something,
to reaUze. As Jonathan Culler suggests in his essay "Apostro
can
be said to "take effect" insofar as they establish a relation
phe," poems
a poet cries out, in apostrophe, "O body
ship to the real. For example, when
or "O Presences/That
passion, piety
swayed to music, O brightening glance"
to
a source of meaning
or affection knows," he is appealing?vertically?to
some
make
take
take
and
of
the
world
into
break
effect,
hold,
appearances
thing happen.
to secure a relationship to the real is part of the ritual activity of
the transac
poems, and each poet has a different strategy for how to manage
overcome
to
on
one
the
seek
the
tion. "Transaction" because,
hand, poems
This
effort
difference
world
between
actual and real, between
as it is sponsored. On
the world
the other hand, poems must
as it appears and the
try to keep the two
5
domains
sufficiently distinct, because
is a difference between
appearances
difference
intelligible when there
a
and source. Poems need to maintain
actual and real in order
between
the relationship.
sible judgments
The
difference
ismost
the world
to maintain
the intelligibility of
and source makes pos
between
appearances
appearances are valuable
are
and which
concerning
are
not
In
all
that
of
value.
other
not, since, evidently,
appear
things
worthy
a
on
the
of
the
sustained, engaged differ
words,
efficacy
relationship depends
ence between
actual and real. Any transaction between
these two domains
ensures
which
the ongoing
the world continues
that it continues
beauty and complexity of appearances: ensures both that
in the poem (it is authorized by a source of meaning)
and
can
to be discussable
be
from
(appearances
distinguished
each other and from
their source).
the real.
poems proceed with profound intention of manifesting
Indeed the anticipatory character of his poetry is due in large part to the way
in which the poems imagine what it would
look Uke for the unmanifest
sym
For Celan,
to say that there is a necessary difference
between appearances and source is to say that, within the dynamic constraints
of representation,
the process of manifestation
is always necessarily
incom
to break into view.
bo?c world
plete. As he explains
movement,
you
But
in the Bremen
see,
something
speech, poetic
happening,
language
being
en
[entails]
route,
an
at
I ask about the sense of it, I
tempt to find a direction. Whenever
sense is
remind myself
that this imphes the question as to which
clockwise.
For the poem does not stand outside time. True, it claims the
infinite and tries to reach across time?but
across, not above. (34)
The
is en route; it never
poem
cannot
reach
the poem
inside time and must
arrives at the real; it "tries to reach." Because
straight "above" for the real, it reaches across: it is
sustain its engagement with the domain of appearances.
character, the poem is arrested between actual and real and
In its processual
fully actuaUze
cannot
its claim on the infinite.
Difficult
inscrutable languages?tend
brilliant, sometimes
poetries?those
to be situated very close to the real. They seem to be oriented so fuUy toward
the symboUc realm that they threaten to lose touch with appearances alto
gether, to lose touch with sense. In fact the closer certain poetic languages are
to the real,
6
the more
they verge
on nonsense.
Those
moments
in a poem
the music
when
to obscure
threatens
and the real are brought closest
"That Nature
phrase of Hopkins'
to condense
in the middle
sical word-string
often occur when
the actual
in the concluding
together. For example,
is a Heraclitean
Fire and of the Comfort of
there is a conflagration of actual and real which causes the
into clusters. It creates what initially seems like a nonsen
the Resurrection,"
nouns
the meaning
I am all at once what
Christ
of the phrase:
is, since he was what
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd,
patch, matchwood,
I am, and
immortal
diamond,
Is immortal
Similarly, in the poem
own tail:
diamond.
"Pain, the syllable," Celan
(106)
describes
a serpent
biting
its
a b?nd
let-there-be
tied itself in
free
and serpent-headed
coils?:
a
knot
(and counter-knot
sand knot)
and anti-knot
and tauto-knot
and double-knot
and thou
ein blindes
Es sei
kn?pftesich in
die schlangenk?pfigen Frei
Taue?:
ein
Knoten
(undWider-
und Gegen- und Aber- und Zwillings-
und Tau
sendknoten)(Popov andMcHugh 15;28)
such as these, which force
Many difficult poems evidence clustering moments
sense of what we're reading. In transact
us to redouble our efforts at making
the actual and the real, difficult poetries need to be especially
ing between
a
tension between what appears and what
productive
vigilant about sustaining
authorizes that appearance, otherwise
sense, or short
they risk not making
7
which was their original intent.
the structure of communication
circuiting
Most poets want to communicate
and difficult
something about the world,
poetries are always
hermeticism
arise.
at risk of losing
their audience.
This
is why
charges
of
Celan came of age during the Holocaust.
his parents were taken
Overnight,
from their home; he heard second-hand of his father's death from typhus, and
likewise the news that his mother had been shot in the neck because she was
thought unfit for work. Essentially, Celan Uved out his Ufe in exile, coming
that hardly existed anymore, writing for a German audi
from "a homeland
ence that he did not live among or trust, residing in France yet unvalued
there" (Felstiner 94), and witnessing waves of neo-Nazi
outbursts in the late
It is fair to say that Celan was not
course, radical doubt about sponsorship
50's and 60's.
able to take the real for
granted. Of
ber of circumstances.
can arise from any num
in the Torah and beyond
The narrative
of Jewish history
of the persistent failure of the real to safeguard the losses of
there is not
Profound doubt about sponsorship occurs when
is itself an account
the community.
for the losses endured?that
is, when the horror of loss
enough compensation
can
is greater than any symboUc compensation
provide. This, it seems, is the
experience
of history.
For Celan,
there
is no
"intrinsic"
situation
of being.
level. Perhaps one
threatened at every
cultural, spiritual?is
Identity?social,
of the reasons Celan's poems appear private or inward is that they do not
claim to speak on behalf of a culture, as Eliot (in "Tradition and the Indi
vidual Talent")
says a poem should. Celan does not assume that there is any
behalf he might speak. Nor does he assume the possibiUty of
a universal reception of his poems. Celan is continually asking the question,
take art for granted, for abso
"May we, Uke many of our contemporaries,
culture on whose
lutely given?"
("Meridian"
43).
poetry there is the strain towards what is most mini
or not
the question of whether
mally given in the world. Because
anything
a
can be said to be authorized
there is in his poetry an
is genuine question,
Everywhere
in Celan's
burden) to secure a source of mean
(and this is a post-modern
either rely on an
effect, to "produce" the real. The High Moderns
ing?in
or
own world
invent
their
estabUshed source of meaning
(Hopkins' God)
extra burden
source (EUot's Tradition, Yeats' System). Yeats' System, for in
legitimating
stance, allows him to be assured that the chestnut tree he addresses at the end
of "Among
8
School Children"
is there, apart from his address; he has enough
cultural assurance
to know
that the reference
is valid. The High Modern
and out of this encounter
poet
source
in
the
of
the
arise
poem,
engages
meaning
the troubled, beautiful, ritual activities of description and address?shuttling
back and forth between
the realm of appearances and what sponsors those
By contrast, in every Celan poem the effort to transact between
appearances and source is also an ongoing
struggle to produce that source.
Celan, drawing on Buber, calls this source "you."
The IYou relation is the irreducible structure in Celan's poetry, the condi
appearances.
the
tion of possibility of anything happening at all within the poem. Beyond
IYou relation, the world is in doubt. "The world
is gone," he writes at the
end of "Great glowing vault," "I must carry you" (Breathturn 323). Conse
for Celan, all Rede (speech) is Anrede?"speaking
towards," speech
at someone or something else. The I alone does not suffice. In "Der
Meridian," the speech he gave when he was awarded Germany's prestigious
B?chner Prize and which
engages the central tenets of his poetics, Celan
quently,
directed
writes
of the poem is a you, a second person, the "for sake
is said to have meaning.
"The poem," says Celan,
that the destination
of whom"
anything
an opposite. It goes toward
is a figure
it, bespeaks it. For the poem, everything and everybody
of this other toward which
it is heading.
("Meridian" 49)
intends another, needs
this other, needs
second person is at once the addressee of the poem, the recipient of the
a figure of
the reader, the listener or silent auditor, the co-perceiver,
message,
The
the "opposite" or the "outside" to the voice that speaks the poem. Itmight be
a stranger, a beloved,
a meadow, Meister Eckart, Mandelstam,
some altered
an
see
to
version of the I,
the rain. In order
what Celan
imaginary companion,
is doing on the page, it is useful to distinguish between at least two kinds of
second person. One kind of you is actually there, the body which appears. It
is immanent, mortal,
intimate, social, reciprocal; the you attached to a par
is irreducibly singular. The other kind is the you
ticular life; the one who
to the general life, the "Thou." This you is abstract; it partakes of
the category of the real; it is the you with respect to which anyone can be said
"to be"; "everything
and everybody
is a figure of this [you] toward which
[the poem] is heading." It is sometimes called the ontic you, or "the Other"?
attached
l'Autre of Levinasian
it "das Andere,"
and Sartrean philosophy. Heidegger,
calls it "das ganz Andere."
with Husserl,
calls
at times Celan
9
The instability of Celan's poetic enterprise?the
blurring between invoking
a source of meaning
a function of his position
and producing
that source?is
as someone who has been denied cultural assurance, denied the institutional
to distinguish a principle of meaning from
an instance of meaning.
It is the contingency
of a well-functioning
institution
to recognize a difference between
which enables the High Moderns
the ver
in
tical appeal to a source of meaning
of
Crane's
islands, O my
(as
"Adagios
framework
which makes
it possible
a
Prodigal") and the horizontal address to particular, concrete you ("but there
a
a
is Une/You must not cross"). In well-formed
poUty, the abstract sense of
to
the person?the
attached
the
life?is
you
given, and the problem is
general
it. In a poUty that doesn't work,
the abstraction "you" itself
no institution in
because
there
is
it or
troubling,
place to recognize
lend it legitimacy. In the absence of institutional sanction, Celan throws all his
how
to engage
becomes
energies
into acts of address which
an assembly of different
presence,
once.
"you" both actual and real at
In Augustine's
speak to the person as a multiple
kinds of you. He struggles to make each
would
to love someone means to confer ontic
definition,
In love, we will the existence of the other. I desire
celebrated
status upon that person.
that you be, I will that you be what you are: volo ut sis. (Heidegger,
directed Arendt's doctoral thesis Love and St. Augustine, makes frequent
who
refer
ence
to Augustine's
definition
in his letters to Arendt and in the Nietzsche
seminars of the early 1940's. Celan began reading Heidegger
in 1952 and may
have been familiar with Heidegger's
of Augustine
from
understanding
as
to
treat
For
is
love
to
Nietzsche.)
Augustine,
Heidegger's
inseparable the
(how he or she appears) and the existence of the beloved
body of the beloved
is).We will the mortal, creaturely, intimate second person
(that the beloved
into the domain
of the real. As
in the Augustinian model of love, Celan wills
actual and real you: when he says "you,"
them inseparable. As he explains in the "Meridian" speech,
that there be no distinction
he tries to make
between
an encounter is conceivable between this
perhaps
'altogether other'?
a not so very distant, a quite
I am using a familiar auxiUary?and
close 'other'?conceivable,
perhaps, again and again. (48)
effort is to condense
these two forms of second person, and
source within
the poem. He caUs
thereby produce or ground his legitimating
a
so
can
so
to
that
the
world
be
said
be:
that the world can
you
you be,
upon
In effect, Celan's
10
to secure the existence of the thing he is address
is always working
ing as he addresses it. As he says in one poem, addressing a shadow,
be. Celan
slide across my mouth
through the words
midway
you
to you, shadow,
to give you weight.
("With the Voice
I address
and especially
of the poem,
Often,
course
to?and
beings
in Celan's
late work,
the you
so that
people
through what
shape over the
spoken of become
takes
and things initially
Celan calls "desperate conversation,"
the act of address. In this respect, the address calls up
spoken
around
coalesce
they
into life?fills
out, makes
removed
of the Fieldmouse")
concrete?whatever
is lost, estranged,
or helplessly
from the self.
But why does Celan resort to this particular strategy of address? Celan's most
acute loss was the loss of his mother. This most important,
structuring mo
ment
moment
in which
biography?the
a
sense
of
accompanied
by
profound
guilt. Indeed
that Celan felt himself to be an agent in his mother's
in Celan's
love didn't work
there is some
out?is
suggestion
or, at the
disappearance,
a connection
between his choices and her
very least, that he acknowledged
death. In the end, it was impossible for Celan to narrate the concrete details
of her disappearance. As his biographer Felstiner points out, Celan?like
many
no
who
lived
the
almost
factual
people
through
Holocaust?gave
testimony
about his experiences.
But there isn't even a single, reliable second-hand ac
count of what happened the night his parents
In Czernowitz,
in
disappeared.
a
new
June of 1942, the Gestapo began
deportation action: they would arrive
on Saturday nights and rout
people into trucks, then into cattle cars at the
two
such overnight "actions" had just occurred, Felstiner
railway station. After
notes, "Jews were forewarned. Over the weekend
they could stay elsewhere
or send their children
away" (14). In one account, Celan's parents wanted
him safely out of the house. He went to a friend's house and stayed overnight
because of the curfew, and when he returned home the next day, his parents
were gone. In another account, Celan
quarreled with his mother; he wanted
his parents to hide with him in a cosmetics factory, but she was
being taken. (As Felstiner points out, "she had no way of knowing
resigned to
that by this
11
of the Jews deported to Transnistria had died" 14). Celan left
and when
convinced
they would follow him to the hiding-place,
time, two-thirds
the house,
later that night, they were gone.
we do know is that Celan began writing
he returned
with a new intensity in
In
death.
of his mother's
the poems from this period,
1943, with
referred to by critics as his "early" work, Celan frequently addresses his mother
as a source of meaning
("Your hand full of hours" and "Tallow Lamp" are
What
the news
poem
good examples of this). For instance, in the expressly autobiographical
"Wolfs Bean," which Celan took out of his fourth book, there is no differ
ence
the physical, actual you and the ontic
in the speaker's mind between
is a story of the loss of
you. The story that he tells of his mother's murder
source of meaning.
It culminates,
simply, in
Mother,
am lost,
I
Mother, we
are lost,
Mother,
my
child who resembles
you.
a child is
the parentheses,
of this poem. Outside
are seven roses in the
sleeping. The only thing the child knows is that there
are
a
tradition?some
of
stable
menorah?there
and
timelessness,
house,
signs
Parentheses
enclose most
Indeed
thing is being kept aUve, but the child does not know against what.
the speaker tries to shut out the story of his mother's
outside the parentheses,
murder. The opening imperative of the poem is "lock the door," keep this
particular horror outside that the child might sleep. But the body of the poem
death filUng up the
the story of his mother's
that imperative,
undermines
to
entire, extended parentheses,
suppress this loss is
implying that the effort
futile. In fact, the speaker states quite openly that he can't get the story out of
more in my
of them came and/killed you/once
the poem?"Yesterday/one
poem."
in it; every
sense, every poem of Celan's has this parentheses
a
a
source
It
is
the prin
of
loss
of
meaning.
poem brackets this narrative of
come to terms with through the poem, the problem
ciple doubt Celan tries to
he is always implicitly addressing. Over his corpus, Celan's poems become
In a certain
less autobiographical
12
and more
complex,
more
ontological,
since he focuses
his energies on restoring that source, on saying "you be," on finding what it
would
take to ensure that the child keep sleeping and that the signs of a
culture of holiness remain intact. In "Wolfs Bean," the speaker is not en
gaged in the process of producing a new source of meaning. The condensed
is present both as perished body and source of
the grief of the poem is that this is not enough. "Wolfs Bean,"
meaning?and
in this respect, is more a statement of the problem than an attempt to find a
this might explain why he
solution. In most of Celan's other poems?and
you
is given?the
mother
Bean" pubUshed?the
effort to make the dead live again
ismade visible. Celan's poems are patterned on the effort to bring his mother
into the domain of the real, to Uft her from the fate of her particular body and
didn't want
will
"Wolfs
that she "be,"
that she authorize
his speech.
to Nelly
to locate
Sachs from August
9, 1960, it is possible
This letter demonstrates
attempt to produce a source of meaning.
In the letter
Celan's
starts to torque his language, to overstrain the communicative
even
in
you see
system
ostensibly "stable" prose sentences; the complexities
of Celan's poetic. Nelly Sachs was Celan's
here are the central complexities
fled Berlin in 1940 and went
into
dear friend, a German-Jewish
poet who
exile in Sweden, and who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1966. They ex
how
the effort
a sense they kept each other alive?
changed letters for sixteen years, and in
the 60's
Sachs suffered from psychic and physical illnesses, and throughout
Celan suffered from severe depression and underwent painful drug and shock
for
therapies. Celan wrote this letter to Sachs just prior to her hospitalization
in response to a letter of hers which made it clear that
breakdown,
to die ("I so long for my beloved dead," Felstiner 160). In this
for death, for whatever
threatens to separate
letter, the net is a metaphor
Sachs from life, to entangle her with those already dead; it drags her down,
a nervous
she wanted
isolates her, and obscures her sight. Over the course of the letter, to banish
death comes to mean to estabUsh reciprocity. Above all, Celan wants to re
mind her that she is part of an exchange which
sustains the world, and it is
secure
to
to
follow Celan's effort
her existence by addressing her into
possible
the real. The mortal
verb-based
complex,
And
you blurs
nouns
take whatever
through your being,
such
into the ontic you when
as
Celan
starts using
"being-at-one-with-yourself-in-the-open":
is a hand and wants
to be helpful through you,
and being-at-one
through your being-there,
13
and being-at-one-with-yourself-in-the-open,
take it,
with-yourself
please, let it be there, by virtue of this being-able-to-come-to-you
(36)
today-and-tomorrow-and-for-a-long-time!
Mmm
hinzu, was
sonst noch Hand
hilfreich bleiben m?chte durch Dich,
Bei-Dir und Bei-Dir-im-Freien-Sein,
ist und hilfreich?und Hand und
durch Dein Dasein, Dein Da- und
nimm es, bitte, la? es da sein, durch
dieses Heute-und-Morgen-und-lange-zu-Dir-K?nnen!
causes
(57-8)
to coalesce into nouns is the pressure to be actual and
not
is,
merely to [be] therebut to [be] at one with yourself in the
open, or (further in the passage) to be here and to be among people in the same
instant. The real is that by virtue of which anything can be said to be. Celan
What
the verbs
real at once?that
means
"the real" when
he
says by virtue of this being-able-to-come-to-you-today
and-tomorrow-and-for-a-long-time! and something will remain helpful through you and
says "take
through your nearness, such things become visible. Essentially, Celan
effect,"
might
This
"be real,"
"be,"
that the rest of us
(Celan,
Sach's
friend Gudrun)
also live.
letter illustrates
don't
poems
are usually
the principle features of Celan's poems. Of course, the
foUow
this sequence, but the elements of the sequence
always
present. First, often through imperative or petition, he tries to
secure his relationship to source?he
says "you," sometimes repeatedly; then
there is a kind of reciprocal exchange whereby
this source sanctions or vaU
or
dates other people
other things (here Nelly Sachs is asked to send her gaze
in effect, the
"back into the open" and entrust it to them?she
becomes,
source of reality of all the others);
where
something
"happens"?the
and suddenly there is a turn in the poem
real flashes out:
the net is being drawn away! Look Nelly:
there is
Look, Nelly:
she is helping! Look,
Gudrun's hand, she has helped,
there are
other hands helping! Look, yours is helping too! Look: it is getting
are
are
light, you
breathing, you
breathing freely. You will not be
lost to us, I know
that is near from
andwith us! (36)
14
it, you will not be lost to us, we know it, with all
so far away, you are there and here and at home
Schau, Nelly: Das Netz wird fortgezogen! Schau, Nelly: da ist die Hand
Gudruns, sie hat geholfen, sie hilft! Schau, es helfen noch andereH?nde!
Schau: dieDeine hilft mit! Schau: Es wird hell, Du atmest, Du atmestfrei.
bleibst uns, ich wei?, Du bleibst uns, wir wissens, Du bist, mit allem
Dir Nahen, auch mit allem Dir von so weit herNahen, da und hier und bei
Du
Dir und bei uns! (58)
A short-hand way to describe what occurs in a Celan poem is this: the poem
the you is the source of the real; the you is
travels from I to you, where
located, in some respect, through the act of address; a transaction or exchange
I and you (frequently Celan will mark this with a phrase
takes place between
or "my
can see, is deserting to you");
over to
Uke "I'm wintering
grief, I
you"
and out of that encounter, a world begins to emerge, to be witnessed. Often,
when
the real "happens" in a Celan poem, something is broken-through-to;
amore present tense; and things can be said
light appears; the poem shifts into
"to be."
In the context
of this letter, to be in the real means
to be "the ones
In Celan's poems,
the real "happens" or
standing-with-you-in-the-light."
appears when its existence is confirmed by two: "through your nearness, such
things become visible." For this reason, the IYou relation is the condition of
to secure.
possibility which Celan's poems strive
from
his fourth book Die Niemandsrose,
Celan's poem "The Bright Stones,"
bears the same structure as the letter to Nelly Sachs. In this poem, the stones
float through the air, carrying light; they float upwards towards a you, verti
a you is located ("my quiet
cally, in the way that blossoms open upwards;
you, my true one"); and suddenly the world becomes visible ("I see
the I becomes part of
this encounter,
you"). The real "appears." Through
see
this when the speaker says that the I's hands are now
collective Ufe. We
one,
"new
. . .
Everyman's
("Brightness-Again"
Set against Celan's
many Celan poems,
the world
are both
hands."
Likewise,
the
stones
are
returned
to
the
real
or "Bright-once-more"),
where all losses are restored.
this is a fairly idealistic poem. By the end of
other work,
on the kinds of resistance the poet encounters,
depending
is no longer in doubt. ("The Bright Stones" and the letter to Sachs
cases in point.) But everything has to be reestablished again in the
poem; there is always the sense that the world must be called up ex
nihilo. This explains why so many of Celan's poems?notably
"Pain, the syl
like creation
"Behind the sleep deck"?read
lable," "The Straightening,"
next
accounts.
15
Even
in the numerous
poems which chart the speaker's failure to secure a
relationship to source, Celan reminds the reader that the real is there, hanging
in the balance; failure coexists with astonishment.
In those poems where he
most
despairs of the real, when he concentrates his energies upon the act of
start to embed within other words,
to coalesce around the
address, words
If you
entire corpus, from early poems to late, many
survey Celan's
are apparent: he shortens his
styUstic developments
long Unes, dramatically
reduces the length of poems, and eUminates titles altogether. But this word
you.
energy is one structural feature that persists throughout
(or world)-clustering
as
use
his career,
is his
of some form of the word "Du" within the poem (Lyon
114). For Celan, the IYou situation is invariant. The question is never what
the difference between the I and the you, because this basic differ
is given. In other words, relation is something the poet must assume, as
well as something he tries to accomplish.
"Poems are en route," Celan writes,
are
headed
toward":
"they
constitutes
ence
what? Toward
something open, inhabitable, an approach
able you, perhaps, an approachable
reaUty.
Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem. ("Bremen" 35)
Toward
Worauf? Auf etwas Offenstehendes, Besetzbares,
vielleicht, auf eine ansprechbare Wirklichkeit.
Um solche Wirklichkeiten
sets for himself
auf ein ansprechbares Du
geht es, so denke ich, dem Gedicht.
(186)
a
to the real,
relationship
one
address every thing and every
into that domain. In this respect, Celan
a love poet, since love is the
practice of valuing persons as real.
In the end, what Celan finds intolerable is an extreme version of what
The
task he
is to reconstruct
to
is
it
means
to be a human being in
history, indeed an extreme version of what we
in ordinary Ufe: our separateness from the real. Poetry tries to
experience
overcome
the difference between
the actual and the real, but it also acknowl
edges that that separateness is necessary. The difference between appearances
and source is what holds the world of appearances together; it makes value
visible, allowing us to determine what is most worthy of our attention and
care, and what
is not.
ible minimum?what
In this Ught, the IYou relation is, for Celan, the irreduc
be given?and
the unobtainable maximum?what
must
can never be
accomplished. As he says in one of his most beautiful late poems,
the loss is always there: "The Poles are inside us, insurmountable."
16
in the con
poems, like so many brilliant poems, create confidence
to
continue
will
in
and
that
the
fact
things appear
tinuity of the human world,
on
appear, that this appearance is sponsored. Poetry, Celan reminds us, has
the
tology in it; poetic languages hold out the possibility of reintroducing
Celan's
a relation between an I and a you, by assuming
ground of being. By imagining
that the two are connected and indicating how the two might be connected,
In this way, poetry reconstructs
the
a poem holds out a common world.
an actual, particular life and the general life, between
the
between
to those appearances, between
of appearances and what lends meaning
comes to pass and what ismost valu
experience and holiness, between what
selves are sum
in
In
Celan's poetry, separate and provisional
able.
poetry,
relation
world
moned
out of their personal
Consulted
Works
Unless
noted,
Hannah.
Harcourt,
_.
translations of poems are by Michael Hamburger.
The Life of theMind. Volume One: Thinking. New York:
1980.
Brace, Jovanovitch,
otherwise
Arendt,
_.
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lives into the ground
Love and Saint Augustine. Eds. Joanna Scott and Judith Clark. Chi
of Chicago Press, 1996.
cago: University
des Literaturpreises
der Entgegennahme
Celan, Paul. "Ansprache Anl???ch
der freien Hansestadt Bremen." Gesammelte Werke inf?nf B?nden. Frank
1986.
furt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
der Librairie Flinker, Paris (1958)."
"Antwort
auf eine Umfrage
1986.
Gesammelte Werke inf?nf B?nden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
Breathturn. Trans.
_.
Sun and Moon
Pierre Joris. Los Angeles:
Press,
1995.
_.
Collected Prose. Trans. Rosmarie
Meadow
_.
_.
_.
York:
The
Sheep
1986.
Gesammelte Werke
"Der Meridian."
1986.
Verlag,
Die Gedichte
aus dem Nachlass.
inf?nf B?nden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Eds. Bertrand
Badiou,
Jean-Claude
1997.
Surhkamp Verlag,
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in
Frankfurt:
Gesammelte Werke
Suhrkamp Verlag,
f?nf B?nden.
and Margret
and eds. Katharine Washburn
Last Poems. Trans,
Rambach
_.
Press,
New
Waldrop.
Guillemin.
and Barbara Wiedemann.
San Francisco: North
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Frankfurt:
Point Press,
1986.
Sachs: Briefwechsel. Berlin:
Suhrkamp Verlag,
1993.
17
_. Paul Celan Nelly Sachs: Correspondence. Trans. Christopher Clark.
Barbara Wiedemann.
New York: The Sheep Meadow
Press, 1995.
Ed.
_.
Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael
1988.
Books,
_.
"Wolfs Bean." Trans, with commentary
by Michael Hamburger.
Times Literary Supplement.
100 Poems of Paul Celan. Translated and edited by Nikolai
Popov and
Heather McHugh. Middleton,
Conneticut: Wesleyan
University Press, 2000.
_.
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York:
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Rouge:
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Johnson.
Felstiner,
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Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
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Haven:
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H.
Yale University
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Gadamer, Hans-Georg.
Fioretos,
Other Essays. Trans, and eds. Richard
Albany: SUNY Press, 1977.
Hatley,
James.
"Celan's Poetics
Heinemann
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and Bruce Krajewski.
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Heidegger,
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Krell.
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Gerard Manley.
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Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie.
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86, no. 1 (1971): 110-120.
Mazzeo,
18
Anthony.
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PMLA