Breathturn into Timestead (48 page)

The next two lines indicate that the traveler … takes a draft of water from a well…, [which is] described as having a
Sternwürfel
, literally a star-dice, on top. This was indeed the case: old photos of Heidegger's
Hütte
show this wooden cube with a painted or carved star-motto on it, which seems to have been a piece of local folk-art …
Würfel
, though indeed a cube, is primarily a dice—here the whole complex of Celan's relation to Mallarmé and his “Coup de dé” comes into play … The topos is … even more complexified by the star on it: think of the six sides of the dice, which no matter how often you throw it, cannot come up with the number seven, Mallarmé's famous “constellation,” Celan's
Siebenstern
, that is, the Pleiades (the seven sisters of Atlas transformed into stars, of which only six are visible to the naked eye) and much more. The star on the dice rimes with the yellow arnica, giving the five-pointed Jewish star: the Jewish poet at the door of the politically suspect philosopher, etc.…

Then, the briefest stanza, three words distributed over two lines: “in der / Hütte” [“in the / cabin,” or “in the / hut”]. I have preferred to retain the German word
Hütte
here, because in a Heideggerian context … the word is heavily and symbolically loaded:… the
Hütte
itself, which Heidegger had built in 1922, was not only his holiday house in the mountains, but also his essential work and thinking place and, maybe more importantly, the refuge he went to in times of trouble. It was from there that he went down to Freiburg to take up the job as rector in 1933 and militate for what can be at best described as his own idiosyncratic version of a Hitlerian Germany. It is there that he took refuge during the denazification years … It was also there that in 1933 Heidegger ran Nazi indoctrination sessions.

Not any hut or cabin or mountain refuge, then … The tight stanza “in der / Hütte” translates the gingerly steps, the hesitations that must have befallen Celan as he enters the
Hütte
as Heidegger's guest. And then the longest—10-line—stanza, about the lines written into the guest-book. Before Celan's actual entry, a further hesitation: Who else recorded his name in the book before him? What to write in a book that probably carries the names of those Nazis that took part in the 1933 indoctrination sessions?

… In the poem … Celan transforms [his] actual inscription only slightly. He adds two important words:
heute
and
eines Denkenden
.
Heute
, “today,” indicates the burning necessity of the need for a word to come now, in this situation, in postwar Germany. The
Denkender
, the one who thinks, is clearly Heidegger, and is as close as Celan comes to naming the philosopher himself in the poem …

The German syntax of this stanza makes, as Pöggeler has pointed out, for an ambiguity: the phrase
im Herzen
, “in the heart,” can mean either “a hope in the [visitor's] heart for a thinker's word” or “a hope for a word in the heart of a thinker [the visited thinker's].” The first meaning is rather banal, associating hope with its traditional topos, the heart. The second possibility—the word in the heart—makes for a much more complex philosophical argument—one that Pöggeler discusses at some length, bringing in Augustin, Meister Eckhart, Heraklitus, Laotse (whom Heidegger translated in the
Hütte
at one point), as well as Pindar. Celan's poetics, and the rhythm of his lines, rather clearly point to this reading …

The rest of the poem consists of 5 short stanzas—only one of which has three lines—and takes us immediately outside again: The two men go for a walk on the moor in the mountains behind the
Hütte
. Celan again uses botany to set the scene: “Orchis und Orchis, einzeln” | “Orchis and orchis, singly.” Whereas in the first line arnica and eyebright, two different flowers, are simply juxtaposed, both part of the same scene, here the same flower, the orchids, standing for the two men, are separated by the word
und
and, as if that was not enough to show their separateness, the last word of the line insists on it:
einzeln
, “singly”/“single.” In German the plant is also known as
Knabenkraut
, “boy's weed,” for its testicle-shaped roots (which, as Pöggeler notes, links it to a number of other Celan concepts and words, such as the
Mandelhode
, the almond-testicle, and the other Orchis poem which talks of the
Fünfgebirg Kindheit
, the five-mountain childhood…).

… The bright, hopeful
A
's of the first line have been replaced by the darker
O
's—have we come from alpha to omega?… [The men] walk on “halb- / beschrittenen Knüppel- / pfade” | “half- / trod log- / trails,” literally on “paths made of wood”—the German
Holzwege
, which refers to a path in a forest, but also, in common parlance, to a dead-end, to a mistaken route, and is, of course, the title of a well-known book by Heidegger. Celan is too subtle to use Heidegger's word, and his “log-trails” complexify the image further, as
Knüppel
—the German word means both “logs” and “rods”—are also used as weapons to beat people, prisoners, etc.

“Half-trod” only:… The walk is interrupted, the walkers return to the car, Celan is driven back. In the car there is talk,
Krudes
, not a common word in German, “something crude” passes between Celan and another passenger, and the poet calls upon the third person present, “he who drives us, the mensch,” as a witness to this exchange (“he also hears it”). Clearly the
Krudes
cannot be the “word in the heart” Celan expected from the visit …

[The word that caused me the most problems, however,] is
Waldwasen
, which is not a common word, and thus something that should make us aware that the poet intends something specific … At first glance one could conceivably think that the poet has simply chosen an erudite or “poetic” word instead of the more obvious and thus banal
Waldwiesen
—forest meadows, forest meadows, literally, or [the translator Robert R.] Sullivan's “glades.” Or that
Waldwasen
was picked because it echoed, darkly [following on the
O
's of “orchis”], via the two
a
's following on the two
w
's, the poem's initial
A
-vowel rhyme of “Arnika, Augentrost.”

[But on closer inspection] the choice is much more deeply and complexly motivated than by mere
Tonmalerei
, “sound-painting.”
A Wase
, according to Grimm's
Dictionary of the German Language
, is, first of all, a piece of sod together with the plants that grow in it … Celan is not talking of some grassy surface, a pleasant meadow, but has in mind something that goes deeper and incorporates the network of underground roots. His thought is, as usual, directed below the surface. Further, in North Germany, the term
Wasen
is used essentially as a homonym for
Torf
, “turf,” “peat”—a word, and substance, that … plays a role in other Celan poems (something that can be used for making a fire and something that preserves matter, for example, the Danish peat bogs of prehistoric fame). From being a nicely romantic glade, the
Waldwase
has already become something slightly
unheimlich
, “uncanny”—to use one of Heidegger's favorite terms.

… Grimm further glosses
Wasen
as “the piece of land on which the knacker or
Wasenmeister
(the ‘Master of the
Wasen
') guts and buries the dead livestock, also known in South Germany and on the Rhine as
Schindanger
—‘the knacker's yard,'” which one could nearly translate as the “killing fields.”

… Walking singly over the
Wasen
, Celan cannot but be close to that realm he is most familiar with: the realm of the dead. The walk is over a cemetery … the all-pervasive topos of Celan's work. This is made even clearer by the next word,
uneingeebnet
, “unevened,” thus hilly, giving the image of grassy graves, over which the two walk on
Knüppelpfaden
—paths made out of logs, pieces of wood; we have seen above that these pieces of wood, at least under the German form of
Knüppel
, remind us of deadly weapons …

As I was reading Grimm on
Wase
, and found the
Schindanger
, I thought I had gotten to the bottom … Then my eye fell on yet another
Wase
, a word current in North Germany, and used to describe a bundle of dead wood, the etymology of which Grimm leads back through French
faisceau
to Latin
fasces
, the curator's bundle of rods, which became the symbol of, and gave the word for, “fascism.”

… I have not found a word in English that would be truly “accurate” to [the polysemic richness of] the German
Waldwasen
, though “sward,” the word I am using at this point in the infinite project of revising, refining, reworking these translations (the same word is used by Michael Hamburger), which my dictionary glosses as “land covered with grassy turf; a lawn or meadow … from OE
sweard
,
swearth
, skin of the body, rind of bacon, etc.” comes close and does have that
a
. But then again it does not include the difference, that essential difference Celan's
a
makes in the movement of its substitution for the ie of
Wiesen
. What in the original poem is truly a
mise-en-abîme
becomes in the English translation only a “poetic” word, albeit solid and useful enough per se, as its etymology, via the connotations of the “skin” root, creates a membrane that could possibly be porous enough to lead the reader through and into the dark underground Celan points to—without, however, creating that chain of meanings leading to the “fasces” connotation of
Wasen
.

Further reading: The most compelling hermeneutical approach to the poem can be be found in the “Todtnauberg” section of Otto Pöggeler's book
Spur des Wortes
(1986). Useful also is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's
Poetry as Experience
(1999) and James K. Lyon's monograph
Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970
(2006), especially pp. 173–91.

“Sink” | “Sink”

August 10, 1967.

“Jetzt” | “Now”

August 10, 1967.

“Einem Bruder in Asien” | “To a Brother in Asia”

August 11, 1967. The first version had “Eiter-Geschütze,” “pus-cannons,” when Celan showed the poem to Peter Szondi. The latter questioned the word “pus,” and Celan took his advice and removed it in the final version. The poem coincides with a period of marked intensification of America's war in Vietnam via bombing raids, napalm attacks, and further troop landings.

“Angerempelt” | “Jostled”

August 10, 1967.

“Wie du” | “How you”

August 15, 1967. In August 1967 Celan spent ten days in London, visiting with his aunt Berta (his father's sister). On August 15 he wrote to
GCL
: “This past night I dreamed—literally:
dreamed
—a little poem, I woke up instantly and was able to write it down: such a thing has only happened very rarely to me” (
PC
/
GCL
, #544).

“Highgate” | “Highgate”

August 17, 1967, London. Highgate is a section of north London with a cemetery of the same name where Karl Marx is buried. The toponym had already been noted by Celan when working on
Die Niemandsrose
in 1962 (
BW
, p. 809).

“Blitzgeschreckt” | “By lightning scared”

August 23, 1967. Celan had seen Théodore Géricault's painting
Cheval effrayé par la foudre
|
A
Horse Frightened by Lightning
in the National Gallery in London and owned a postcard reproduction of it.

Trittstein | stepstone: may refer to a fall from horseback Géricault took, which, combined with his tuberculosis, led to his early death (
BW
, p. 810).

III

“Wurfscheibe” | “Discus”

August 24, 1967, Paris.

“Klopf” | “Knock”

August 25, 1967.

“Die entsprungenen” | “The escaped”

August 27, 1967.

“In den Dunkelschlägen” | “In the darkclearings”

August 27, 1967.

Dunkelschlägen: Plural of
Dunkelschlag
, in German defined as “Samen-, Besamungsschlag, in der Forstwirtschaft die erste Lichtung … eines alten Bestandes zum Zwecke der Verjüngung,” that is, a first clearing in a forest, leaving enough trees standing for the crowns to still touch and give protection to seedlings. My translation creates a pun on light and dark that is not there in the original.

“Streubesitz” | “Scattered property”

August 29, 1967.

Klage- / vögte | grievance- / reeves: Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 811) proposes to link this term to the
Klage-Fürsten
of the Tenth Duino Elegy, where Rilke writes: “And she leads him gently through the wide landscape of Lament, / shows him the columns of temples, the ruins / of castles, from which the lords of Lament / ruled the land, wisely” (as translated by A. S. Kline).

“Der von den unbeschriebenen” | “The letter read from”