Breathturn into Timestead Paul Celan

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.He kept traveling: to Switzerland for holidays and meetings with old friends; to Germany for readings, recordings, and encounters (with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others); and to Israel in 1969—though he broke that trip off after two weeks to return precipitately to Paris.13 He had moved from his small studio apartment on rue Tournefort in the fifth arrondissement to an apartment on the avenue Émile Zola in late 1969, and on the night of April 19–20, 1970, he succumbed to his psychic demons: the Pont Mirabeau, close to his apartment at the end of avenue Émile Zola, is probably where he decided to put an end to his life by going into the Seine.His body was found farther downstream on May 1.He was buried in the Thiais cemetery on the outskirts of Paris, where his son François already rested and where his wife, Gisèle, would join him in December 1991.* * *On his desk Paul Celan had left Wilhelm Michael’s biography of Hölderlin, Das Leben Friedrich Hölderlins, lying open to page 464.He had underlined the following sentence from a letter by Clemens Brentano: “Sometimes this genius goes dark and drowns in the bitter well of his heart.”2.“LESESTATIONEN IM SPÄTWORT”In the early sixties, that is, midway through Paul Celan’s writing career, a radical change, a poetic Wende, or turn, occurred, later inscribed in the title of the volume Atemwende | Breathturn, heralding the poetics he was to explore for the rest of his life.His poems, which had always been highly complex but rather lush, with an abundance of near-surrealistic imagery and sometimes labyrinthine metaphoricity—though he vehemently denied the critics’ suggestion that his was a “hermetic” poetry—were pared down, the syntax grew tighter and more spiny, and his trademark neologisms and telescoping of words increased, while the overall composition of the work became much more serial in nature.That is, rather than insisting on individual, titled poems, he moved toward a method of composition by cycles and volumes.Borrowed from a poem in the volume Lichtzwang | Lightduress, the title of this section—Lesestationen im Spätwort—translates as “reading stations in the late-word.” I have written elsewhere14 on the idea of the individual poem as being, for the reader, a momentary stopping point, a temporary “station” in a (though not religious, even if the term is used in both Christian and Sufi thinking) circumambulation of marked spaces.In Celan’s late work, individual poems are such markers in the ongoing flux of the cycles and volumes, and the reader is well counseled to keep eye and ear on the continuity of this flux, while homing in on, or honing, individual poems as “reading-stations,” as necessary stops at the knotty difficulties the work presents, yet also and simultaneously as restorative moments of rest, of refreshment and nourishment.The place suggested by Celan as such a point of entry, maybe the one most immediately visible and available to the reader is, in fact, infra-poem, that is, a smaller unit inside the individual poem: it is in front of the word that the poet tells us to stop and knock—or beg—for entry.To grasp what is at stake we have to hear what has been erased and simultaneously kept alive in the neologism “Spätwort,” “late-word,” namely the term Spätwerk, “late work.” To get to the “late work,” we have to stop in front of the “late-word,” we have to come to terms with the development away from a poetry of flowing musical lines and lyric melody, as they reign supreme in the early collections, to one consisting of terse, often single-word or -syllable verse structures, thus from a predominantly horizontal to an ever more vertiginously vertical axis.It is singular words, extracted, it is true, from a vast array of rich language-veins that now carry the weight of the poem.George Steiner suggests that “such words must be quarried from far and stony places.They lodge in the ‘wall of the heart’ … Their authority is, in the true sense, radical, of the root (etymological).Or it springs from fusion, from the poet’s right and need to weld neologisms.”15Celan seems to have signaled as far back as 1958 that a change in his poetics was taking place, when he suggested that for him poetry was no longer a matter of “transfiguring” (verklären).The statement came in a short text written as a reply to a questionnaire from the Librairie Flinker in Paris, and needs quoting more fully, as it shows Celan already thinking through changes that will be implemented only in the poetry of the sixties, and which the volume Sprachgitter | Speechgrille, to be published the following year, foreshadows without fully developing.Given “the sinister events in its memory,” writes Celan, the language of German poetry has to become “more sober, more factual … ‘grayer.’” This greater factuality checks a core impulse of the lyrical tradition—in German the common word for poetry is Lyrik—and its relation to the lyre, to music: “it is … a language which wants to locate even its ‘musicality’ in such a way that it has nothing in common with the ‘euphony’ which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors.” The direct effect of giving up this “euphony” is to increase the accuracy of the language: “it does not transfigure or render ‘poetical’; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible.”16Celan underscores this turning point, this Wende, when he uses the word in the title of the volume that incarnates the turn and opens the book underhand: Atemwende | Breathturn—an unusual title in the general economy of the naming of his books, at least until this period.Contrary to the titles of the previous volumes, it is neither a phrase, such as Mohn und Gedächtnis | Poppy and Memory, nor a compound word extracted from a poem and set above the whole collection as title, such as Sprachgitter | Speechgrille [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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