Breathturn into Timestead (38 page)

February 4, 1965.

“Osterqualm” | “Eastersmoke”

March 1–4, 1965. Easter fell on April 18; Passover fell April 17–23. Passover in the Jewish tradition symbolizes the release from slavery and the gift of freedom, the journey from Egypt to the Land of Israel. The core of the holiday is the Seder ceremony, during which the story of the Exodus is told as it is written in the Haggadah.

This is the most reworked poem of
Breathturn
, with at least five extant drafts. There is also a further addition marked “Tuesday 4 May 1965,” not used in the final version, replacing the final stanza and separated from the rest of the poem by a dotted line, that reads: “But / everything cheers up: / Our son, you and I, / we live, grow, work / free” (not included in the
Atemwende
volumes of either the
BA
or the
TA;
information Badiou to Wiedemann,
BW
, p. 742).

Osterqualm | Eastersmoke: The German
Qualm
—in comparison to the word
Rauch
—refers to a thicker smoke, but the English alternatives to “smoke” (fumes, exhaust, effluvium, pollution, etc.) are not accurate enough here.
Qualm
can also, for example, be the thick smoke from a pipe smoker.

“Kaimauer-Rast” | “Quaywall-rest”

March 11, 1965, Paris.

“Erhört” | “Answered”

March 25, 1965, Paris.

Erhört | Answered: meant here in the sense of “granted.”

“Schaufäden, Sinnfäden” | “Sight threads, sense threads”

April 19, 1965, Paris. Passover was celebrated that year from April 17 to April 23.

Schaufäden | Sight threads:
Schaufäden
translates the Hebrew word
zizit
(tzitzit), literally “tassel,” the fringes or tassels on the corners of the tallith. Literally the word refers to threads (
Faden
) meant to be shown, thus seen (
schauen
) and not hidden. These literal meanings seem, to me at least, to outweigh the purely ritual cult item, especially given the parallel construction with
Sinnfäden
, meaning- or sense-threads, which would lose its meaning if the initial word was not constructed according to its concrete morphology.

Zehn Blindenstäbe | Ten blindstaffs: the number refers probably to the minyan, the quorum of ten Jewish males over the age of thirteen that have to be present for a public religious service.
Blindenstäbe
, or
Blindenstab
in the singular, though clearly a blind man's staff, calls up the word
Buchstab
, that is, letter, thus linking to writing and poetry.

“Ein Dröhnen” | “A roar”

April 6, 1965. Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 745) mentions that the German paper
Die Welt
reported that day, under the title “Witnesses from Nineteen Countries Spoke Out,” that the evidential hearing of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial ended on that day. She further links the word
Dröhnen
, “roar,” to an article in the
FAZ
of November 14, 1964, describing a witness's evidence: “He (Wilhelm Boger) opened them (the canisters of Zyklon B) and handed them on. Other SS-men threw them into the open windows, from which came a roar, as if there were many people below the earth.”

die Wahrheit selbst | truth itself: Wiedemann further quotes Leo Shestov (p. 409 of
Auf Hiobs Waage
, a book Celan had read) quoting Pascal: “Ce n'est point ici le pays de la vérité: elle erre inconnue parmi les hommes” (Here is not the country of truth: she wanders, unknown, among mankind) (
BW
, p. 744).

“Irrennäpfe” | “Lunatic-bowls”

May 9–23, 1965, Le Vésinet. Celan was hospitalized from May 8 to May 21 in the private psychiatric hospital in Le Vésinet (Seine-et-Oise, Haute Yvelines).

“Lichtenbergs zwölf” | “Lichtenberg's twelve”

May 9–10, 1965, Le Vésinet. The poem links to Celan's reading of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's letters to his brother Friedrich August of October 4, 1790, and September 9, 1791, in which Lichtenberg asks for a “beautiful tablecloth with napkins” from his mother's estate, and then offers thanks for it (
TA
,
Atemwende
, p. 156). Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a scientist and satirical writer, today best remembered for what he called his
Sudelbücher
, or scrapbooks, published posthumously.

Planetengruß | planet-greeting: Goethe has the phrase “Gruß der Planeten” in the first poem, titled “Dämon,” of the cycle
Urworte
. See also the note on the following poem.

in der totzuschweigenden Zeichen- / Zone | in the to-be-silenced-to-death sign- / zone: Wiedemann points out reading traces (underlinings) in the introduction by Wilhelm Grenzman to Lichtenberg's collected works: “He was in the habit of taking everything as a sign, drawing a premonition from everything, and turning plain daily objects into oracles. Every crawling movement by an insect furnished him with answers concerning his fate; if his candle went out, he would take that as an unfavorable omen and would change far-reaching plans … ‘I don't believe in these things, yet it is pleasant for me, when they don't turn out bad'” (
BW
, pp. 744–45).

kein Himmel … Blauspecht | no heaven … nuthatch: This stanza, standing between dashes, functions as an interjection, at the end of which
sein
is repeated and the sentence completed. But this interjection allows for the possibility of reading the first
Sein
not as the possessive pronoun it first was—or at least seems to be—and becomes again later (“sein … weißer Komet”) but as the verbal noun
Sein
, “Being.” Although the stanza looks like a citation, no source has been found so far.

weißer Komet | white comet: In his scrapbooks, Lichtenberg used the code name “white comet” when speaking of his mistress Maria Dorothea Stechard.

das Rotverlorene | the redlorn: Grenzmann mentions that Lichtenberg had the reputation of being distracted, thus “always in danger of losing the thread [den roten faden | the red thread] of his thought.”

“Give the Word” | “Give the Word”

May 13–14, 1965, Le Vésinet. Celan gave his wife a manuscript of the poem on May 15.

Give the word: See Shakespeare,
King Lear
, act 4, scene 6: “Lear: Give the word. / Edgar: Sweet Marjoram. / Lear: Pass.” In his edition, Celan also underlined the following: “Lear: Nature's above art in that respect. There's your press money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper: draw me a clothier's yard. Look, look! a mouse. Peace, peace! Bring up the brown bills. O! well flown, bird; I' the clout i' the clout: hewgh!” (followed by the title phrase) (
PC
/
GCL
, vol. 1, #236).

Ins Hirn gehaun | Cut to the brains:
King Lear
, act 4, scene 6: “Lear: No rescue? What! a prisoner? I am even / The natural fool of fortune, Use me well: / You shall have ransom. Let me have surgeons: I am cut to th' brains.”

Sipheten und Probyllen | Siphets and probyls: See Goethe's poem “Dämon,” opening the cycle
Urworte
: “Wie an dem Tag, der dich der Welt verliehen, / Die Sonne stand zum Gruß der Planeten, / Bist alsobald und fort und fort gediehen / Nach dem Gesetz, wonach du angetreten. / So mußt du sein, dir kannst du nicht entfliehen, / So sagten schon Sibyllen, so Propheten; / Und keine Zeit und keine Macht zerstückelt / Geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt.” (As on that day that lent you to the world, / The sun stood for the greeting of the planets, / Right away you started to prosper and prosper / According to the law you represented. / Thus you have to be, you can't escape yourself, / This already said by the sibyls and the prophets; / And no time nor any power will dismember / Shaped form which, alive, keeps unfolding.)

Aussatz | lepra: The translation is literal, and thus has to miss the word-particle satz in
Aussatz
, which by itself means “sentence,” “phrase.”

“Vom Anblick der Amseln” | “From beholding the blackbirds”

May 20, 1965, 10:00 p.m.–May 21, 1965, Le Vésinet. A first draft was sketched out in Celan's Shakespeare edition. On May 21, Celan leaves the clinic, and this is the last poem composed there. He wrote to Gisèle that afternoon: “A blackbird is walking across the lawn, the weather is fine, the sun is out, calmness comes over me—I write to you” (
PC
/
GCL
, #242).

Amseln | blackbirds: He wrote in French to his wife, using the word
merle
, though the German word
Amsel
calls up immediately the family name Antschel, as well as Kafka's name bird, the jackdaw. See the commentaries to the poems “Anredsam” | “Addressable” and “Frankfurt, September” (pp. 567 and 502).

V

“Große, glühende Wölbung” | “Great, glowing vault”

June 7, 1965, Paris.

Widders | ram: The German word connotes “wider,” “against,” and
Widerstand
, “resistance” (the manuscript version includes the struck words
was widersteht?
|
what resists
). The image of the ram's horn also links to the shofar, with the ram itself being the iconic sacrificial animal.

“Schieferäugige” | “Slate-eyed one”

July 10, 1965, Paris.

“Schlickende” | “Oozy”

July 11, 1965, Paris.

Riesensporangien | giant sporangia: A sporangium is an enclosure in which spores are formed. All plants, fungi, mosses, algae, and many other lineages form sporangia at some point in their life cycle.

“Du, das” | “You, the”

July 15, 1965, Moisville.

“Der mit Himmeln geheizte” | “The with heavens heated”

July 17, 1965, Moisville.

Die Wer da?-Rufe | The Who's there?-calls: Celan was using Baudissin's German translation of Shakespeare, in which Lear's “Who's there?” is given as “Wer da?” See also the citizens' call at the end of Büchner's
Danton's Death
of “He, wer da?” | “Hey, who's there?” immediately preceding Lucile's “Long live the king,” the phrase Celan called a counterword (
BW
, p. 748).

“Dunstbänder-, Spruchbänder-Aufstand” | “Vaporband-, banderole-uprising”

August 3–5, 1965, Paris. A much-reworked poem that first appeared in the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
on December 3, 1966. On August 4, Celan sent a version to Gisèle in a letter stating: “Moved by your question, at the Fontaine de jade, while meditating on Chinese mushrooms and bamboo sprouts—there was some chicken too [these last five words in English] and then, at my table—where nothing grows, I wrote the poem I'm including. As you can well see, it is insurrectional and glacial at the same time. Banderole uprising, redder than red, under the—astonished?—eyes of the seals. Insurrection of other things too, geological, scriptural ones, matters of the heart.—But no commentaries! Poetry first (France, Germany etc. later)!” (
PC
/
GCL
, #253, notes in vol. 2). Reading traces for some of the vocabulary (“Dunstband” | “vaporband,” “-poller” | “-bollard,” and “vertäuen” | “moor”) in Arno Schmidt's novel
Gelehrtenrepublic
|
The Egghead Republic
, which also contains descriptions of brain transplants by Soviet scientists in a utopian island republic.

In a letter to Gisèle of August 21, 1965 (
PC
/
GCL
, #267), Celan tells of watching the Eisenstein film
October
:

“So, all alone, I saw Petersburg, the workers, the sailors of the Aurora. It was very moving, at times reminding one of the ‘Potemkin,' bringing to mind the thoughts and dreams of my childhood, my thoughts of today and of always, poetry-always-true-always-faithful, I saw my placards, many of them, those that, not very long ago I evoked in the poem I sent you—“Vaporband-, banderole-uprising”—I saw the October Revolution, its men, its flags, I saw hope always en route, the brother of poetry, I saw …

Then, at a certain moment, at the moment when the insurgents occupy the Winter Palace, it began to desert poetry and to become Cinema, motion-picture shots, tendentious and overdone, the intertexts became propaganda—all that was History and its Personages had anyway been, from the very beginning, what was the least convincing, the role of the Left Social-Revolutionaries was completely expunged—, so then the heart loosened, searched for its silences (won, lost, won again), wrapped them around itself and led me outside, alone, as I had come in, running the gauntlet between young cinephile gents and young girls “mit tupierter Frisur,” with too much makeup, in pants, sort of leftist sixteenth arrondissement, erratic and flabby.—But there were some, no doubt, who knew, taking, here too, responsibility for the terrible eclipses.

Long live the sailors of Kronstadt!

   Long live the Revolution! Long live Love!

     Long live Petersburg! Long live Paris!

       Long live Poetry!

“Ruh aus in deinen Wunden” | “Rest in your wounds”

August 17–18, 1965, Paris. In the letter to Gisèle in which he sent her the poem (
PC
/
GCL
, #264), Celan writes: “It works pretty well, it seems to me, maybe not opaque enough, not ‘there' enough. Though at the end it picks up—picks
itself
up.” Many drafts showing much reworking.

VI

“Einmal” | “Once”