Paul Celan - Paul Celan: Selections

Introduction "Polysemy without mask"

Thirty-four years after his death, Paul Celan's status as the greatest German-language poet of the second half of the twentieth century seems assured. His oeuvre roughly 900 pages of poetry distributed over eleven volumes, 250 pages of prose, more than 1,000 pages of published correspondence, and nearly 700 pages of poetry translated from eight languages has by now received massive critical attention, amounting to an astounding six thousand-plus entries, including reviews, essays, memoirs, and books in a dozen or more languages. And yet the work continues to be to a great extent terra incognita, a vast territory with uncertain, shifting borders, a map on which the unexplored sections by far outweigh the few areas that have been sketched in, reconnoitered.

Even of those textual areas crisscrossed repeatedly by various explorers, we have widely differing and often contradictory reports: it seems that every time a commentator ventures into an already mapped area, he or she returns with a new map charting different coordinates or a different topography for the same place. A Kafkaesque landscape and trek: the terrain the reader is confronted with appears simultaneously stony and amoebic, composed of multilayered strata continuously shifting in shape and consistency. It is so dense and multiple, in fact, that the various critical tunnels drilled into its layers never seem to cross or link up, constituting at best that is, when the critic-explorer at least manages to get back home from the uncharted territories a self-referential or self-interfering network of reticulated interconnections, often more relevant to the explorer's preoccupations than to the land under hand. It is an inexpugnable fortress, an unconquerable landscape, a "hyper-uranian" cosmos.

But the critics' problems are specific to their undertaking (i.e., their need to prove that the methodologies they are invested in are the right ones and will result in the "true" interpretation of the poem) and should not discourage the reader. It is important to state at the outset that if Celan's poems are often difficult (and get more opaque in the late work) they are not incomprehensible. Celan himself, when asked about the difficulties of the poems, insisted that they were in no way hermetic and that all one had to do was to read them again and again. At the same time he claimed a necessary opacity for poetry today, first because the poem is "dunkel" (dark, obscure) because of its thingness, its phenomenality. In a note toward his essay "The Meridian" he writes: "Regarding the darkness of the poem today, imagination and experience, experience and imagination let me think of a darkness of the poem qua poem, of a constitutive, even congenital darkness. In other words: the poem is born dark; the result of a radical individuation, it is born as a piece of language, as far as language manages to be world, is loaded with world."1

And this world-making, this making of a new world through and in poetry, is what I want to insist on, lest the above description of Celan's relation to Germany would tend to elide the desire for "making it new" and limit Celan's work to a revenge play. It is just that for Celan, as survivor, the poetry that will be that has to be written after Auschwitz has to always remain conscious ofeingedenk the horror of the Shoah. If the past is the abyss and simultaneously the ground on which the work rests, the stance it will take is, however, resolutely forward looking and hopeful (except perhaps in some of the bitter late poems written under the psychic pressure of mental illness). It will certainly not deny the possibility of a new world, of a new and more human age. In early 1946 the American poet Charles Olson suggested in his poem "La Preface" that one world age had come to an end, an age, or yuga, that stretched from the prehistoric caves (among the major discoveries in relation to art of the twentieth century) to the concentration camps: "Buchenwald new Altamira cave/With a nail they drew the object of the hunt." By implication, Olson was simultaneously making the claim for a new age, to begin after Buchenwald. "We are born" he writes, "not of the buried but of these unburied dead" an eerie echo of Celan's "Death Fugue" in which the "we" of the survivors "scoop[s] out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie." All poetry, after that date, will have to be, at some level, a poetry of witnessing. But it cannot stop there if it wants to be of essential use, as both Olson and Celan insist; it cannot simply bear witness to the past but must at the same time be resolutely turned to the future: it has to be open, it has to be imaginatively engaged in the construction of a new world, it has to look forward, to be visionary. It is that forward looking, that vertical stance that I also hear in Celan's question about bearing witness for the witness. Celan's work is that of both a witness and a visionary.2

I. Paul Celan, Der Meridian, Endfassung, Vorstufen, Materialien, edited by Bernhard Boschenstein and Heino Schmull, Tubingen Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999), 84.