Breathturn into Timestead (53 page)

“Mapesbury Road” | “Mapesbury Road”

April 14–15, 1968, London. The title names a road in London that connects with Willesden Lane, where Celan stayed from April 3 to April 16 with his father's sister, Berta Antschel (1894–1981). In a letter from April 18 he wrote to Franz Wurm: “And then the darknesses from both ‘farther' sides. But also walking and a walked-up poem, (Mapesbury Road: between the borough of Willesden and the borough of Hampstead, on an Easter—and Passover—Sunday, more accurately: on 14 April of this year” (
PC
/
FW
, #102). Those “darknesses” point to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1968) in Memphis, Tennessee, and the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke (April 11, 1968) in Berlin.

magnolienstündige | magnolia-houred: In a letter to Gisèle, Celan mentioned that the magnolia already blooming in London reminded him of his hometown of Czernowitz (
PC
/
GCL
, #138).

Zeithof | timehalo: See commentary on “Schwimmhäute” | “Webbing” (p. 566) and, below, on the title of the next volume,
Zeitgehöft
|
Timestead
(p. 610). In a letter to his friend Gisela Dischner of April 23, 1968, Celan writes: “By the way: the word timehalo you'll find in Husserl.”

Steckschuß | lodged bullet: The German papers (for example,
FAZ
of April 13, 1968) reported that Dutschke had been hit by “a bullet that lodged in his brain, another hit his cheek and a third one his right torso.” Celan confirmed to Dischner that the “Steckschuß” referred to Dutschke (letter of April 23, 1968).

“Der überkübelte Zuruf” | “The overloaded call”

April 17, 1968, Paris, rue d'Ulm.

die Barrikade | the barricade: Following the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, student demonstrations became widespread and more forceful in Berlin, including the building of barricades.

“Hervorgedunkelt” | “Darkened forth”

April 22, 1968, Paris, rue d'Ulm. The title plays with and against that of the cycle of poems called
Eingedunkelt
|
Tenebrae'd
(p. 222)

Buche | beech tree: A marker of Celan's origins in the Bukovina (
Buchenland
, “land of the beeches”; thus also
Buchenwald
, “beech tree forest”).

“Mit dir Docke” | “With you, ragdoll”

April 25–26, 1968, Paris, rue d'Ulm.

Docke | ragdoll: Celan had nine months earlier (July 1967) made a note concerning the word
Teichdocke
, which he had found in Jean Paul's
Kampaner Thal
(vols. 39–40, p. 40). The word refers to a skein or hank of yarn, and by extension (in southern Germany) to a doll made of yarn.

kungeln | to fiddle: Also
kunkeln
, from the noun
Kunkel
, which in south and west German dialect refers to the distaff in spinning. The verb (similar to another Celan word,
mauscheln
), according to Lefebvre (
PDN
, p. 125), means to talk and to make plans secretly in a lowered voice. Originally it meant to make a mess of a ball of threads, and then referred to doing bad work in the
Kunkelstube
, the room in which the spinning was done. By extension it came to refer to the flirting that went on in the spinning rooms between men and women. Maybe our “spinning a tale” links to this.

“Auch der Runige” | “The runic one too”

Composed on May 4 and 5, 1968, and finalized on May 14 with the dated note “das steht” (it holds up). On May 3 and 4, Celan had been reading several essays by Rudi Dutschke in
Rebellion der Studenten oder Die neue Opposition
, edited by Uwe Bergmann (Rowohlt Verlag, 1968), titled “The Contradictions of Advanced Capitalism, the Anti-authoritarian Students, and Their Relationship with the Third World” and “From Antisemitism to Anticommunism.” In Germany, the student demonstrations had been mounting in intensity for two years already (Benno Ohnesorg, a student, was shot dead by police at a demonstration in June 1967); in France, the “events of May 1968” started with a large student demonstration on May 3, and over the following two days a number of the arrested students got solid jail sentences.

The
TA
(
Schneepart
, p. 69) indicates that on one of the typescripts Celan made the following handwritten notes in the lower margin: “Night before last, place Contrescarpe, the young PC [French Communist party]-man who defended leftwing nationalsocialism” and: “Yesterday, the 13th, at the demonstration, the arms stretched ‘ironically' in the Hitler salutation behind the
red and the
black flag-,” and in the left margin: “also: next to the Trotsky portrait in the yard of the Sorbonne: CRS=SS (SS in runic script).”

der Runige | The runic one: In a letter to Franz Wurm, Celan points to both extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing anti-Semitism in French newspapers, and also points it out in Dutschke's essays (
PC
/
FW
, 146f). Celan also cites what became one of the best-known graffiti of May 1968 in France, “CRS=SS,” with the SS usually spelled in runic writing, a formulation Celan disagreed with totally.

Greiftrupp | arrest-squad: Reading trace in Dutschke: “It should be mentioned that on April 6 the police engaged a large number of arrest-squads against the demonstrators for the first time. The arrest-squads had the task to go and arrest the active and leading students and workers within the mass of demonstrators and thus hinder the activity of the masses” (p. 79).

Mohrrübe | carrot: Reading trace (
BW
, p. 843) in Achim von Arnim,
Die Kronenwächter
: “But the woman didn't care for anything Anton undertook in the house, except when he sat down next to her at the window where she was scraping carrots, and spoke good words to her.”
Mohrrübe
is the north German for the usual
Möhre
(carrot); here, Lefebvre suggests (
PDN
, p. 127) a possible reference to Karl Marx's nickname, “the Moor” (which would seem to point to Marx's “Moorish” Jewish origins). In the poem,
Mohr
is picked up by “Moorigen,” and “Morgen,” here probably in the sense of “tomorrow” rather than “morning,” and thus bringing to mind the “tomorrows that sing” of communist revolutions.
Moorig
also recalls Celan's poem “Denk Dir” | “Imagine” and the “moorsoldier from Masada” (p. 220).
Der Morgen
is also a measure of land, and further points to the
Morgenland
, the Orient—with Lefebvre suggesting this may connect to the Mao-influenced students at Celan's school, the École Normale Supérieure.

Zündschwamm | tinder-sponge: Reading trace (
BW
, p. 843) in Arnim,
Die Kronenwächter
: “to wash and clean the marks of the nails and bind them with tinder-sponge” (vol. 1, p. 923).

Hirntransplantat | braintransplant: In a letter to Franz Wurm (
PC
/
FW
, #107) Celan writes: “Because earlier, dining contrescarpishly, and espying Karl Marx too on television and said to my table companion: ‘Eventually we'll be able to transplant heads, but it's not sure that we'll know how to regrow the beards.'” Other traces (
BW
, p. 843) point to the poem “Dunstbänder-, Spruchbänder-Aufstand” | “Vaporband-, banderole-uprising” (p. 102) in connection with his reading of Arno Schmidt's
Gelehrtenrepublik
|
The Egghead Republic
, which describes brain transplants.

Wundstein | woundstone: A stone or mineral composite used for healing purposes.

“Deinem, auch deinem” | “Your, even your”

May 7, 1968, Paris.

fehldurchläuteten | falsenotes: See last sentence of Kafka's “Ein Landarzt”: “Einmal dem Fehlläuten der Nachtglocke gefolgt—es ist niemals gutzumachen” (Once you respond to the nightbell's false alarm, there's no making it good ever again.) In Celan's notebooks from 1962, he already pointed to this Kafka sentence: “The nightbell's false alarm: that is not something falsely, erroneously heard, but belongs most profoundly to the quality of the nightbell itself. (It is not a matter of ‘daybells'!) At least the ‘right' cannot be differentiated from the false-notes—is thus the same.”

Sechsstern | six-star: The star of David has six points.

Zeitunterheiligtes | time undersanctified: In Achim von Arnim's unfinished 1817 novel,
Die Tronenwächter
, which Celan read during May 1968, he makes a note of the word
unterheiligt
(double underline and exclamation point), when he marks a passage that criticizes the era's tendency to oversanctify everything: “This I say earnestly to our era, which likes to oversanctify its temporality with completed, eternal determination, with holy wars, eternal peace and apocalypses” (see
PDN
, pp. 128–29;
BW
, pp. 843–44).

“Mauerspruch” | “Wallslogan”

First called “Mauerspruch für Paris” (“Wallslogan for Paris”), it was written on May 26, 1968 (after what looks like two weeks without a poem). By now a general strike had succeeded the many student demonstrations and the great student and workers' march of May 13, followed by a range of spontaneous strikes throughout the country. On the twenty-sixth, the unions began negotiations with the Gaullist government. The previous day a regiment of paratroopers had arrived in Paris.

ein Engel, erneut | an angel, anew: reading traces marked in with margins in Walter Benjamin's essay on Karl Kraus: “Like a creature sprung from the child and the cannibal, his conqueror stands before him: not a new man—a monster, a new angel. Perhaps one of those who, according to the Talmud, are at each moment created anew in countless throngs, and who, once they have raised their voice before God, cease and pass into nothingness” (translation by Edmond Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin,
Selected Writings
, vol. 2, p. 457). Further traces in Benjamin's
On the Concept of History
:

There is a painting by Klee called
Angelus Novus
. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [
verweilen
: a reference to Goethe's
Faust
], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm. (Translation by Dennis Redmond)

denkenden Löwen | thinking lions: Celan had written to Franz Wurm on May 7: “Let me greet your and all our lions” (
PC
/
FW
, #108). This was a response to something Wurm had written in a letter of May 5, comparing the heraldic animals of his country (Bohemia) and of Germany: “That the double-tailed (and often tail-wagging) Lion seems more reasonable to me than the two-headed eagle, one of whose heads never knew what the other one's couldn't think anyway” (
PC
/
FW
, #145).

“Für Eric” | “For Eric”

May 31, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort. The dedicatee is Celan's son Eric (b. 1955). Despite his separation from Gisèle at this point, Celan sees his son regularly. See also the poem with the same title farther on in the cycle, page 362.

pfeilende | arrowing: Possible reference to Celan's astrological sign, Sagittarius.

“Wer pflügt nichts um?” | “Who doesn't plough up something?”

May 31, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort.

er kätnert | he roustabouts: A verb Celan builds on the noun
Kätner
, someone who lives in a
Kate
, or shack, a transient or migrant worker.

“Levkojen” | “Gillyflowers”

May 31, 1968, Paris, allée de l'Observatoire.

The German name for a flower native to the eastern Mediterranean seaboard comes from a mispronunciation of the first syllable of the Greek name (leukos = white), and in Lev one can hear the Russian version of Celan's father's first name, Leo, corresponding in Hebrew to the word “heart” (
PDN
, p. 132).

katzenbemündigt | cat-enfranchised:
Bemündigen
(rare) is the opposite of
entmündigen
, meaning “to disenfranchise, to incapacitate legally.” What is lost in the translation is the word
mund
(mouth), here meaning “to give speech,” “the permission to express oneself.”

der / maltesische Jude | the / Maltese Jew: Compare Christopher Marlowe's 1591 play
The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta
. Lefebvre, via the original spelling of the title word with an
I
, “Iew,” suggests that the word here links to Lew, Lev, Leo (
PDN
, p. 132).

“Du durchklafterst” | “You transfathom”

June 1–2, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort/while traveling.

“Für Eric” | “For Eric”

June 2, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort. See poem (and its commentary) with same title earlier in the cycle, pages 356 and 593.

Flüstertüte | megaphone:
BA
, vol. 10.2, p. 143, points to Robert Held's article “Revolutionary Spring” (
FAZ
, June 1–2, 1968) on the expulsion and readmittance of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the French student movement, who, though born in France, designated himself as German and Jewish. Held: “Cool, loud and clear his voice sounds through the megaphone [
Flüstertüte
]. The transistor-powered megaphone has become the tactical weapon.” When Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France by the Gaullist government, the student movement created the slogan “We are all German Jews.”