Even across the gap between German and English, Paul Celan is one of my favorite poets. I’m not sure if one can really be “influenced”? by a writer as singular as Celan, but his work has been an important presence for me for many years. I have written about him twice on my blog, here and here. His intensity of vision, diction, and rhythm, and the inseparability of these things, trying to find new ways of saying to accommodate the previously unsaid or unsayable (especially what can be spoken in the face of the unspeakable enormity of the Holocaust), have made a deep impression on me.
Though Celan often questioned the possibility of communication, he never questioned its necessity; there is in all of his work a communicative urgency, almost a desperation to make contact with the other. This may be one reason why Celan was an important translator as well as a major poet. But, though all are interesting, most of the Celan translations I’ve read are a bit flat-footed or, in attempting to reproduce the idiosyncratic quality of his language (what translator Katherine Washburn calls his “brilliant derangements of sound and sense”), end up feeling a bit awkward, which I’m sure Celan never was.
I have read every book-length translation of Celan’s work into English (there aren’t that many), and there are four translations that most strongly convey the grace, passion, and tension of Celan’s work. Joachim Neugroschel’s Speech-Grille and Selected Poems was first published in 1971 and has long been out of print. Neugroschel’s book has no introduction, and his notes are minimal; he just translates, vividly and compellingly. Katherine Washburn and Margret Gullemin’s Last Poems, also out of print, translates selections from Celan’s last three books, whose profoundly condensed poems are widely considered his most knotty and difficult. Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh’s Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan also focuses on what they call Celan’s “later, less known, and more opaque, elusive, or downright disturbing body of work.” Like Merwin’s Mandelstam co-translations, the participation of a gifted and acoustically acute poet helps produce English versions that follow, in Popov and McHugh’s words, “the intensity of his listening to language itself.” The book’s notes are also extensive and exemplary. John Felstiner, whose biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, contains several translations in which he takes the reader through the process of reading and interpreting Celan’s poetry, reminding us, as he writes, that “translation presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation,” has published a substantial Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan deeply informed by his scholarship but also by an intense sensitivity to Celan’s language and the urgency behind and within that language.
“Though Celan often questioned the possibility of communication, he never questioned its necessity; there is in all of his work a communicative urgency, almost a desperation to make contact with the other.”
Posted By: james hoch on January 12, 2008 at 1:53 pmDear Reginald Shepherd,
This distinction, apt and poignant of Celan, is somehow lost in the conversational bi-ways of the poetry world. It’s the kind of observation that destabilizes the poles of poetic discourse and one that I find hopeful.
I appreciate it as I have appreciated much of your commentary.
James Hoch
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Reginald,
Posted By: Pierre Joris on January 12, 2008 at 3:19 pmAlthough, as you say, the Neugroschel translations have long been out of print, I used a number of them in my own Paul Celan: Selections (University of California press), which also contains selections from other early US translators of Celan (Jerome Rothenberg, Cid Corman & Robert Kelly) as well as a large selection of my own translations, both new ones of early and very late poems, and from among the three complete Celan books (Breathturn, Thradsuns and Lightduress) which I translated & published with Sun & Moon and which are now available from Green Integer.
best,
Pierre
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I am motivated to seek out more of his work beyond the few poems I know and love of his. Thanks, Reginald.
Posted By: Major on January 15, 2008 at 12:16 amReport this comment
Since you quote extensively from his introduction in your earlier blog post, it appears that Michael Hamburger (for eg. http://www.forward.com/articles/10977/ ) is a deliberate omission from your “top 4 list”. But why? I like his versions very much. (I haven’t read the Joris yet.) In general in these posts on translation, I’d appreciate it if you went into greater detail, perhaps giving examples, to defend your preferences, because the reasons for your choices are not automatically clear to me.
Posted By: Vivek Narayanan on January 15, 2008 at 5:18 amThere’s also a larger question here. It seemed to me that on one hand you repeat the (potentially irresponsible) cliche that a translator must take liberties to succeed, but on the other you seem to be searching for the most “authentic” Celan translation, rather than taking the point of view (argued by many) that all the translations must be read together, that each Celan translation is valuable for the particular quality of Celan that it brings out. This, it appears to me-who-does-not-have-German, would be especially correct in the case of PC.
Finally, I genuinely like it when you say, “This is how Celan must be”– an act based more on instinct and attempted divination than a knowledge of German. I often have similar reactions, even when reading translations in languages I don’t know, and it comes out of the intimacy one begins to feel with a poet, even in translation. It’s interesting also that with Celan and Mandelstam you seem to have chosen the poets that must be the hardest to translate, how their aura seems to gather even despite this. (Though that aura, alas, also has not a little to do with the romance of their biographies.) At the same time, one must keep in mind that often poets find the idea of the shamanic seductive even when they are clearly not. We ought to be humble when stating our guesses. So my question is, what is it about a translation that seems to tell you, almost beyond language, that it is authentic? What is it about that particular hall of mirrors that a “good” translation generates?
As a series about translation from someone who doesn’t know the originals, I think this series of blog posts could potentially be a profoundly fascinating and important exploration; however, I feel that you are not thinking through that aspect directly enough as of yet.
Hope you find it worthwhile to answer these queries.
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