Celan Paul - Economy of the unlost : reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan

Economy of the Unlost

MARTIN CLASSICAL LECTURES

New Series

The Martin Classical Lectures are delivered annually at Oberlin College through a foundation established by his many friends in honor of Charles Beebe Martin, for forty-five years a teacher of classical literature and classical art at Oberlin.

John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics

Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan)

Economy of the Unlost

(READING SIMONIDES OF KEOS WITH PAUL CELAN)

Anne Carson

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright 1999 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carson, Anne, 1950

Economy of the unlost : reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan / Anne Carson.

p. cm. (Martin classical lectures. New series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-03677-2 (alk. paper)

1. Simonides, ca. 556467 B.C.Criticism and interpretation. 2. Celan, PaulCriticism and interpretation. 3. Literature, ComparativeGreek and German. 4. Literature, ComparativeGerman and Greek. 5. Economics in literature. 6. Aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series: Martin classical lectures (Unnumbered). New series.

PA4411.C37 1999

884.01dc21 98-49984

This book has been composed in Baskerville

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(R1997) (Permanence of Paper)

http://pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Contents

Note on Method

T HERE IS too much self in my writing. Do you know the term Lukcs uses to describe aesthetic structure? Eine fensterlose Monade. I do not want to be a windowless monadmy training and trainers opposed subjectivity strongly, I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and exchange judgmentsbut I go blind out there. So writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything I do not know. It is the clearing that takes time. It is the clearing that is a mystery.

Once cleared the room writes itself. I copy down the names of everything left in it and note their activity.

How does the clearing occur? Lukcs says it begins with my intent to excise everything that is not accesible to the immediate experience (Erlebbarkeit) of the self as self. Were this possible, it would seal the room on its own boundaries like a cosmos. Lukcs is prescribing a room for aesthetic work; it would be a gesture of false consciousness to say academic writing can take place there. And yet, you know as well as I, thought finds itself in this room in its best moments

locked inside its own pressures, fishing up facts of the landscape from notes or memory as well as it mayvibrating (as Mallarm would say) with their disappearance. People have different views on how to represent the vibration. Names and activity are euphemisms for the work. You may prefer different euphemisms; I guess the important thing is to copy down whatever vibration you see while your attention is strong.

Attention is a task we share, you and I. To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling. Partly for this reason I have chosen to talk about two men at once. They keep each other from settling. Moving and not settling, they are side by side in a conversation and yet no conversation takes place. Face to face, yet they do not know one another, did not live in the same era, never spoke the same language. With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface on which the other may come into focus. Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.

Think of the Greek preposition . When used with the accusative case, this preposition means toward, upon, against, with, ready for, face to face, engaging, concerning, touching, in reply to, in respect of, compared with, according to, as accompaniment for. It is the preposition chosen by John the Evangelist to describe the relationship between God and The Word in the first verse of the first chapter of his Revelation:

And The Word was with God is how the usual translation goes. What kind of withness is it?

I am writing this on the train to Milan. We flash past towers and factories, stations, yards, then a field where a herd of black horses is just turning to race uphill. Attempts at description are stupid, George Eliot says, yet one may encounter a fragment of unexhausted time. Who can name its transcactions, the sense that fell through us of untouchable wind, unknown effortone black mane?

Lukcs (1917), 19.

Economy of the Unlost

PROLOGUE

False Sail

H UMANS VALUE economy. Why? Whether we are commending a mathematician for her proof or a draughtsman for his use of line or a poet for furnishing us with nuggets of beauty and truth, economy is a trope of intellectual, aesthetic and moral value. How do we come to take comfort in this notion? It is arguable that the trope does not predate the invention of coinage. And certainly in a civilization so unconditionally committed to greed as ours is, no one questions any more the wisdom of saving money. But money is just a mediator for our greed. What does it mean to save time, or trouble, or face, or breath, or shoe leather? Or words? His biographers recount that when the poet Paul Celan was four years old, he took a notion to make up his own fairy tales. He went about telling these new versions to everyone in the house until his father advised him to cut it out. If you need stories the Old Testament is full of them. To make up new stories, Celans father thought, is a waste of words. This fathers sentiments are not unusual. My own father was inclined to make skeptical comments when he saw me hunched at the kitchen table covering pages with small print. Perhaps poets are ones who waste what their fathers would save. But the question remains, What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted? And where is the human store to which such goods are gathered?

There is a poem of Paul Celan that seems to be concerned with the gathering in of certain poetic goods to a store that he calls you. Among these goods are the lyric traditions of the poetry of courtly love, of Christian mysticism, of Mallarm, of Hlderlin, not to say Celan himself. Celan has chosen to contemplate these

M ATIRE DE B RETAGNE

Ginsterlicht, gelb, die Hnge

eitern gen Himmel, der Dorn

wirbt um die Wunde, es lutet

darin, es ist Abend, das Nichts

rollt seine Meere zur Andacht,

das Blutsegel hlt auf dich zu.