Breathturn into Timestead (46 page)

The title,
Eingedunkelt
, refers not only to one of the poems in the cycle, but also to a 1966 etching by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, named by Paul Celan, as was their habit,
Enténébrée—Eingedunkelt
.

The more obvious translation of the title would be “Endarkened,” which was my first choice. But despite the fact that Celan's version of Ungaretti's expression
nella tenebra
uses
umdunkelt
, which is closer to
eingedunkelt
, I decided on “tenebrae'd,” which of course recalls the earlier poem titled “Tenebrae” (in
Sprachgitter
) and the title in French he gave
GCL
's engraving (most likely his own back translation—or simultaneous creation—of the German title).

“Bedenkenlos” | “Unscrupulously”

April 3–8, 1966. Written during Passover week (April 5–11). Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 792) points to reading traces in Joseph Conrad's
Secret Agent
(read on April 6) for lines 5–7, namely the sentences (given here in the original English, though Celan read a German translation): “His own skin had sizzled under the red-hot brand, he murmured softly,” and “Stevie knew very well that hot iron applied to one's skin hurt very much.”

“Nach dem Lichtverzicht” | “After the lightwaiver”

March 29–31, 1966. Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 792) points to reading traces in Thomas Wolfe for lines 4 and 5, quoting the lines “Der Frühling hat keine Sprache außer den Schrei, grausamer aber als April ist die Natter der Zeit” (“Spring has no language but a cry; but crueler than April is the asp of time”) from
Of Time and the River
.

“Deutlich” | “Explicit”

March 29, 1966. Further Thomas Wolfe reading traces pointed out by Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 793) of lines Celan marked in the margins of his copy: “The flower of love is living in the wilderness, and the elm-root threads the bones of buried lovers. / The dead tongue withers.” “Beglänztes” (line 7), Wiedemann further suggests, could also link to Wolfe's line “Later, when they left his rooms and went out on the street, the sensuous quickening of life, the vital excitement and anticipation which Starwick was somehow able to convey,” where in German
Beglänzung
is used to translate both “the sensuous quickening of life” and “the vital excitement.” “Ulmwurzel-Haft,” via the German translation of Wolfe's “elm-root,” can also be a pun on his workplace, the École Normale Supérieure, situated on the “rue d'Ulm.”

“Vom Hochseil” | “Forced off”

April 7–19, 1966. Wiedemann points to two reading traces in Conrad: (1) “The Chief Inspector, driven down to the ground by unfair artifices, had elected to walk the path of unreserved openness,” which in German contains the image of “vom Hochseil auf den Boden gezwungen,” not there in the original; (2) “His pasty moon face drooped under the weight of melancholy assent,” again closer in the German translation of “pasty” as
Käse-weißes
face. Wiedemann also cites Theodor Adorno for the expression
unbotmäßigen
from the following sentence (marginally annotated by Celan) in the essay “Zeitlose Mode,” which was translated into English as: “The Element of Excess, of Insubordination in Jazz, Which Can Still Be Felt in Europe, Is Entirely Missing Today in America.”

“Über die Köpfe” | “Heaved far over”

March 28, 1966. Wiedemann (p. 794) points to reading traces in Homer's
Odyssey
(which Celan read on March 27) for the expression “hinweggewuchtet” (line 2). The English version of this section in Charles Stein's translation reads: “Then he put in place / an enormous heavy door-stone, having easily lifted it. / Twenty-two four-wheeled wagons / would not have been able to budge it from the ground, / such was the giant stone he put in the doorway,” where “not able to budge” in the German reads “nicht … wegwuchten können.”

“Wirfst du” | “Do you throw”

March 27–28, 1966. More Homer traces. The “anchor stone” comes from lines 200–201 of
The Odyssey
, in Stein's translation: “so there'd be no need for moorings, / no need to throw anchor stones or secure stern cables.”

“Angefochtener Stein” | “Contested stone”

March 17, 1966. Celan offered this poem as present to his wife for her thirty-ninth birthday (
PC
/
GCL
, #373).

“Eingedunkelt” | “Tenebrae'd”

March 8–18, 1966. See discussion of translation of title above.

The word “Schlüsselgewalt” (line 2) most likely goes back to Leo Shestov, a major figure for Celan, who read his “Le Pouvoir des Clefs” (which comments on Jesus's words to Saint Peter concerning the keys to heaven) in 1959 and again in 1967. Shestov, born Yehuda Leyb Schwarzmann to a Jewish family in Kiev in 1866, was a Ukrainian/Russian philosopher who emigrated to France in 1921, fleeing from the aftermath of the October Revolution. He lived in Paris until his death on November 19, 1938.

“Füll die Ödnis” | “Shovel the void”

March 31, 1966. Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 795) points to another Wolfe line for “Äugensäcke” | “eyebags,” which I was unable to locate in the original. The German translation, underlined by Celan, gives: “Die Mutter war eine kleine, volle Frau mit einem weißen, kloßigen Gesicht und Augensäcken.”

“Einbruch” | “Irruption”

March 31, 1966. The two opening lines show reading traces (
BW
, p. 795) from Homer: “Dort stand es (das Trojanische Pferd) nun. Sie aber sprachen viel Ungeschiedenes, während sie um es saßen.” In Charles Stein's translation: “So it stood there while the people discussed it / in long, inconclusive debate, / standing about it.” “Ungeschieden” feels much stronger than “inconclusive,” no matter how accurate the latter is, as I hear a near-biblical tone in the German, the undifferentiated before the beginning, that is, before the Word separates the undifferentiated, as Genesis has it—while in the Celanian universe, the opposite happens: the unseparated breaks into one's language.

Nachtglast | nightshimmer: Wolfe: “Und dieser letzte rote Nachglast [
sic
] des Tags lag auf diesen Leuten” and “der rote Nachglast der untergegangenen Sonne.” I am unable to locate the original phrase.

Sperrzauber | counterspell: Wolfe: “Inständig-augenblicklich, und wie erlöst von einem Sperrzauber, der ihn jahrelang ans Fremdferne gebannt hatte, und mit einem unerträglichen Gefühl von Schmerz und Verlust erinnerte er sich seines Zuhause, seiner Heimat und der verlorenen Welt seiner Kindheit” (“And suddenly, out of this dream of time in which he lived, he would awaken, and instantly, like a man freed from the spell of an enchantment which has held him captive for many years in some strange land, he would remember home with an intolerable sense of pain and loss, the lost world of his childhood”).

Flutgang unterwaschen | floodflow washed out: Underlined in Wolfe: “Du aber bist gegangen: unsre Leben sind zerstört und zerbrochen in der Nacht, unsre Leben sind
unterwaschen vom Flutgang
des Stromes” (“But you are gone; our lives are ruined and broken in the night, our lives are mined below us by the river, our lives are whirled away into the sea and darkness and we are lost unless you come to give us life again”).

“Mit uns” | “With us”

April 9, 1966. Werner Hamacher (
WHH
, p. 195, n. 44) points to motives from Rilke's Fifth Duino Elegy, which in turn picks up motives from Picasso's
Saltimbanques
, depicting a family of traveling acrobats. (It is interesting to note that Celan's son Eric would become a professional acrobat, though a sedentary one), and suggests that Rilke's “Und kaum dort, / aufrecht, da und gezeigt: des Dastehns / großer Anfangsbuchstab” (“And just arrived, / upright, there and pointed out—Destiny's / first letter,” translated by Leonore Hildebrandt and Tony Brinkley) “dynamically becomes the ‘rebellious / grief.'” He argues that “Celan's ‘Leerstellen-Lyrik' [blankspace / gap / poetry] has learned more from Rilke's than from any other German-language poetry.”

Gram | grief: See also the occurrences of
Gram
in the title of the uncollected poem “Niemals, stehender Gram” (Never, standing grief), and in the uncollected poem that starts: “Diese / freie, / grambeschleunigte / Faust (sie / bahnt sich den Weg):” | “This / free / griefquickened / fist (it / clears its way):”

LICHTZWANG | LIGHTDURESS

The poems in
Lichtzwang
|
Lightduress
were written between June and December 1967, gathered by Paul Celan in the chronological order of their composition, and organized into six cycles. The book itself appeared in July 1970, roughly three months after the poet's suicide, thus constituting the first posthumous volume of his work, yet being simultaneously the last book Celan himself saw through publication. Nineteen sixty-seven was a very difficult year for Celan. On January 30, he tried to kill himself with a knife (or a letter opener) that missed his heart by an inch. His wife had him transported to the Boucicaut hospital, where he was operated on immediately. From mid-February until mid-October he was interned at the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, though from late April on he was allowed out for work and travel. In April he and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, after long and difficult discussions initiated by his wife, concluded that a separation was necessary, and Celan reluctantly started looking for an apartment in Paris. Throughout these difficult months, he was, however, able to concentrate on his work, and during this period of internment he composed more than half of the poems that make up
Threadsuns
, as well as a major part of
Lightduress
—the first four cycles and a few poems of the fifth cycle. In March he sent the final manuscript of
Breathturn
to his publisher; in April he started teaching again at the École Normale Supérieure; in early June he took part in a pro-Israel march and wrote several poems concerned with Israel and the Six-Day War; from June to August he translated a book of poems by Jules Supervielle. Between June 9 and July 17, he composed a cycle of fourteen poems first published with engravings by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange under the title
Schwarzmaut
in March 1969, in a limited edition of eighty-five copies by Brunidor, Paris, which became the opening cycle of
Lightduress
. Between July 22 and August 2, he traveled in Germany, where on July 24 he gave a reading at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau attended by more than one thousand people, among them the philosopher Martin Heidegger. The next day the poet visited Heidegger in the philosopher's Todtnauberg “Hütte” in the Black Forest—an unsatisfactory meeting for Celan, who had great expectations for it, as his inscription in the guest book shows: “Into the Hütte-book, while gazing on the well-star, with a hope for a word to come in the heart / July 25, 1967 / Paul Celan.” (See the poem “Todtnauberg” on p. 254, written on August 1 in Frankfurt am Main as response to the meeting.) From August 12 to August 23, Celan was in London, visiting with his aunt Berta Antschel, and in September he spent two weeks in Switzerland, mainly with his old friend Franz Wurm in Tegna in the Tessin. On the latter's counsel, once returned to Paris later that month, Celan met with the neurophysiologist Moshé Feldenkrais (1904–1984) in the hope of finding an alternative treatment to the antidepressants he had been undergoing for his anxiety attacks. October saw the publication of his translations of twenty-one Shakespeare sonnets in book form, and of the first reviews of
Breathturn
on the occasion of the Frankfurt Book Fair—a book from which he would give a private reading at the house of his publisher, Siegfried Unseld, in Frankfurt am Main on October 12. Five days later he was definitively released from Sainte-Anne hospital after eight months of therapeutic supervision, first as an inpatient and then as outpatient, and on November 20 he moved into a small studio apartment on rue Tournefort in the fifth arrondissement, where he would live until late 1969. Later that month he again traveled to Germany to record a reading of poems from
Breathturn
for German television. His reading during that year, established via diaries and letters, included a wide range of authors, among them Adorno, Thomas Bernhard, Leo Shestov, his prefacer Benjamin Fondane, Adolf Faller on anatomy, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabès, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Thomas Mann, Shakespeare, John Millington Synge, and Osip Mandelstam. All the poems that make up
Lightduress
were composed by December 15, as the finished manuscript was referred to (though still under the early title
Schwarzmaut
) in a testamentary note Celan wrote that day.