Jean Daive - Under the Dome

Jean Daives memoir of his brief but intense spell as confidant and poetic confrre of Paul Celan offers us unique access to the mind and personality of one of the great poets of the dark twentieth century.

J.M. COETZEE, Recipient, Nobel Prize in Literature

An intimate portrait in fragments? An utterly singular memoir? An essay in poetics? A poem in prose? All these and more. This fluid and indefinable work by Jean Daive has never been far from my thoughts since I first read it decades ago. It breathes with Celan while walking with Celan, walking in the dark and the light with Celan, invoking the stillness, the silence, of the breathturn while speaking for the deeply human necessity of poetry. Now, we are fortunate once again to have available Rosmarie Waldrops pitch-perfect translation in this most welcome new edition.

MICHAEL PALMER, author of The Laughter of the Sphinx

The world always remembers poetry, says Celan in this staggering epic of talking and silence and walking and translating at tables. It is his poetry that is indeed remembered, however we in the world come to it. The fragments textured together in this more-than-magnificent rendering of Jean Daives prose poem by this master of the word, Rosmarie Waldrop, grab on and leave us haunted and speechless.

MARY ANN CAWS, author of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism and editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry

Written in the rhythm of walking, and in the very particular rhythm of walking beside Paul Celan, this stunning book-length prose-poem honors not only the great Romanian-born poet but also the life-long love affair with the word that poetry requires. One of the most important poets of post-WWII France, Daive alone has the consummate sensitivity and mastery of nuance needed to make Celan present again and to evoke the rich background of time and place that allows the story to attain its proper historic proportions. Rosmarie Waldrops brilliant translation resonates with her profound knowledge of both Celans and Daives poetry and the passion for language that she shares with them. The text brings these three major poets together in a highly unusual and wholly successful collaboration.

COLE SWENSEN, author of On Walking On

We never talk about Paul Celan, certainly not as is done in Under the Dome. In this gem of a poetic memoir, we are as close to breathing and metabolizing the stubborn silences of Paul Celan as it is possible to do so while honoring his life and art. Would you translate me? becomes the code and kernel from which the infinity of Paul Celans tragic genius unfolds. How else to talk, sing, or communicate with Paul Celanwho died trying to unpave the road on which the ineffable treadsif not through unraveling language? If Paul Celans life force is genomic, or elemental, it replicates and transfers itself through us like a Spinozan miracle. Rosmarie Waldrop takes up Celans question to Jean Daive as her own. I cannot unread her inimitable ease in these pages. This is a book that contends with time.

FADY JOUDAH, author of Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

The republication of this arresting translation of Jean Daives writing about his conversations and encounters with Paul Celan lets us imagine the space and time of Celans words as they were uttered on the streets of Paris, in its cafs, under the trees, and by the river. Daives writing is a highly punctuated recollection, a memoir, perhaps a testimony, but also surely a way of attending to the time of the writing, the conditions and coordinates of Celans various enunciations, his linguistic humility. Yet the words sometimes break free of any context, lingering in a separate space on the page; they follow lived memory, the well-worn interruptions whose repetition finds no resolution. Daive offers small stories, but mainly fragments that follow one another in the wake of the destruction of narrative flow; the tenses change suddenly, putting into a shifting modality of writing a complex memory that refuses to leave a friend. Celans death, what Daive calls really unforeseeable, remains as an undercurrent in the conversations recollected here, gathered up again, with an insistence and clarity of true mourning and acknowledgement.

JUDITH BUTLER, author of The Force of Nonviolence

Under the Dome

walks with Paul Celan

translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

City Lights Books

Originally published by Editions P.O.L (Paris, France) as La Condition dinfini 5: Sous la coupole 1996 by Jean Daive

English translation originally published as Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan

(Burning Deck: Serie dcriture No. 22)

Translation Copyright 2009 by Rosmarie Waldrop

First City Lights Edition: 2020

Introduction Copyright 2020 by Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard

Cover photograph: Paul Celan, 1967 Renate von Mangoldt

Author photograph: Jean Daive, 2020 Garrett Caples

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Daive, Jean, author. | Waldrop, Rosmarie, translator.

Title: Under the dome : walks with Paul Celan / Jean Daive ; translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Other titles: Condition dinfini. 5, Sous la coupole. English

Description: San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020022279 (print) | LCCN 2020022280 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872868083 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780872868120 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Celan, PaulFiction.

Classification: LCC PQ2664.A46 C6613 2020 (print) | LCC PQ2664.A46 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022279

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022280

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore,
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

www.citylights.com

Robert Kaufman & Philip Gerard

In this centenary year of his birthlamentably also the fiftieth anniversary of his suicideCity Lights makes a special contribution to the ongoing international commemorations of Celan with a new edition of Jean Daives Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, luminously translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop. City Lights re-publication of Daives superb book, whose point of departure is the experience of two poets translating one another, stands as a kind of recursive poetic justice, for City Lights was the first press here in our Americas to issue a book of poetry featuring translations of Celan. Recounting the history that brought this poetry to Western-Hemisphere audiences allows us to appreciate how Daives work likewise helped foster engagements with Celans art that matteredthat continue to matteron both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

In Winter 195758, The Hudson Review published Jerome Rothenbergs translations of seven poems by the German-Jewish poet Erich Kstner, who had somehow survived the Third Reich while remaining in Germany throughout the Hitler period. Alongside his translations, The Hudson Review also published Rothenbergs commentary about the poems dissident, biting, cabaret-satire form. City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, seeing the work in The Hudson Review