45. Celan als Übersetzer

In another spirit, Celan can truly reply with close and clear translation. A century after Emily Dickinson, he shared her solitary, baffled, spiritual yearning and her sense that death dwells close and poems speak truth, if anything can. Here is a lyric whose rhythm and density Celan echoes, and then some.

Let down the bars, O Death —
The tired Flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat
Whose wandering is done —
Fort mit der Schranke, Tod!
Die Herde kommt, es kommt,
wer blökte und nun nimmer blökt,
wer nicht mehr wandert, kommt.
[Away with the bar, Death!
The Herd comes in, they come
who bleated and now never bleat,
who no more wander, come.]

Even without knowing German, we can grasp Celan’s syllables and accents: “Let down/ the bars, / Oh Death — ,” Fort mit / der Schrank- / e, Tod! (Schranke has two syllables.) Then “The tire- / d Flocks / come in,” Die Her- / de kommt, / eskommt. (Herde has two syllables.) These two English and German lines have six syllables first, then a third line with eight, and the forth has six again. Perfect balance, rhythm, and sound.

A century after Emily Dickinson, Celan shared her solitary, baffled, spiritual yearning and her sense that death dwells close and poems speak truth, if anything can.

However! Look at the first line in each language. Dickinson’s “Let down the bars, O Death —” opens with that desperate wish. Celan’s line is blunt command. His Fort mit der Schranke doesn’t say “Let down . . . ” but “Off with . . .” or “Away with the bar.” And Emily’s gentle Psalm-like “O Death —” comes out in rough German: Tod!“ Death!”—plus that added exclamation point. After which we hear Celan’s third kommt!

Dickinson’s second stanza opens tenderly, addressing death. This time her translator finds equivalence, pure likeness:

Thine is the stillest night
Dein ist die stillste Nacht

No need for reinventing what happens in the original. Every word is cognate, related: “Thine” = Dein, “is” = ist, “the” = die, “stillest” = stillste, “night” = Nacht. We should be so lucky. Though Dickinson’s poems are perfect, that didn’t deter Celan from translating again and again according to his axiom, “In a poem, what’s real happens!”

Thine is the stillest night,
Thine the securest fold:
Too near thou art for seeking thee,
Too tender to be told.
Dein ist die stillste Nacht,
der sichre Pferch ist dein.
Zu nah bist du, um noch gesucht,
zu sanft, genannt zu sein.
[Thine is the stillest night,
the surer fold is thine.
Too near thou art to yet be sought,
too tender, to be named.]

With every word cognate in the first line, either the English or the German could have come first. But Dickinson’s soothing parallel—“Thine . . . / Thine . . .”—is inverted by Celan, as if a translation must bear inversely on its source. Of course, the upcoming rhyme counts here, because Celan’s dein (“thine”) is moving toward sein (“to be”).

What is lost is Dickinson’s odd doubling of Death as subject and object: “Too near thou art for seeking Thee.” What is gained is the delay of sein, Celan’s final verb of being, which almost counteracts death. Just one more surprise awaits us in his closing syllables. Death for him is too tender not to be “told” but “named.” “Praise the name of the Lord,” the Psalmist says.

/ John Felstiner, World Literature Today