14. “More sober, more factual … grayer.”

How do you make language say what it cannot? How do you bear witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust without standing alone in defeated silence? These questions haunt the poetry of Paul Celan, one of the great stylists of the German language in the 20th century, a writer who revolutionized the way we think about poetic diction, taking it to levels it had never reached before, re-inventing it from the recalcitrant, overarching darkness around him. (…)

Released from the labor camp in February 1944, Celan – who rearranged the letters of his last name from the Romanian spelling of “Ancel” – left his hometown for good in 1945, settling in Paris in 1948. By then, German poetry, in his mind, lay exhausted at the feet of history. Given the “sinister events in its memory,” the language of poetry had only one way to recover: It must grow “more sober, more factual … grayer.”

Poetry could no longer invoke its former “euphony, which sounded alongside the greatest horrors.” After the Holocaust, what was needed was a re-created, purified diction that “does not transfigure and render ‘poetical’; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given, and the possible.” Thus the poet had to dismantle and displace the old linguistic order so he could reconstruct it, bringing it to new life.

You outlier
beyond yourself,
out beyond you
lies your fate,
white-eyed, escaped from
a dream, something joins it,
that helps
with the tongueuprooting,
even at noon, outside.*

And so Celan erected in place of his earlier lush, lyric work a verse structure in which singular words carried the entire weight of the poem. Breathturn. Timestead. Threadsuns.

This meant a stripped-down syntax and telescoping of words. This meant the organization of poetic lines by syllable and breath. This meant individual poems as “reading stations.” This meant neologisms, to prove that words were not inadequate to the task at hand, the only task that mattered: Reflecting the real.

/ ARLICE DAVENPORT, THE WICHITA EAGLE 4.1.

“Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, A Bilingual Edition” by Paul Celan, translated and with commentary by Pierre Joris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 736 pages, $40)

 *)

DU LIEGST HINAUS
über dich,

über dich hinaus
liegt dein Schicksal,

weißäugig, einem Gesang
entronnen, tritt etwas zu ihm,
das hilft
beim Zungenentwurzeln,
auch mittags, draußen.

Paul Celan, Im Zeitgehöft, in: P.C.. Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995, S. 351