Language and the Holocaust: Reflections on the Poetry of Paul Celan

There can no longer be any doubt in our time that Paul Celan is one of our most important poets, also that he is one of the most many-sided and controversial. He has been called an heir to classicist visionaries and to expressionists, an alchemist of the word and a hermeticist, a surrealist, a Holocaust poet and a language poet, and now, in the title of John Felstiner's magisterial critical biography (Yale University Press, 1995), a survivor and a Jew. None of these epithets ill befits Celan as poet, although he himself disapproved of the designation hermeticist. He preferred to be regarded as a poet of the word, and of the image.

My remarks in this essay are devoted to two questions: Was Celan a Holocaust poet? and: Was he a language poet? Steve Light, in his review essay on Celan's recent bilingual collection Breathturn, translated by Pierre Joris (Michigan QuarterlyReview, Summer 1996), combats either idea, and my views register mild disagreement with his. Mr. Light writes that "for Heidegger, Hölderlin becomes a mere prop."[1] I cannot concur; Heidegger's classic and oft-reprinted Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Commentaries on Hölderlin's Poetry) shows eloquently that for Heidegger Hölderlin was a source of being as a philosopher. And the proposition that philosophy is the child of poetry comes from Hölderlin (from volume I, book 2 of his novel Hyperion). It is also of some interest that Celan and Heidegger met; the distillate of that meeting, in the Black Forest, is Celan's poem "Todtnauberg" (the title is a place name; the poem comes from the collection Lichtzwang [Lightcoercion, 1970]).[2] My point is a twofold one: Celan's fate is inseparable from Hölderlin's; and Celan chose to write in the language of the murderers.

In the deepest and most useful sense, Celan is indeed a Holocaust poet; the horror and shame of our century shapes his poetry as does nothing else. It is a recurrent concern from first to last, and it helps determine not only Celan's imagery, but also his engagement with language and with the question of poetic being. What helped Celan's first book, Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory, 1952), establish his reputation was its inclusion of "Todesfuge" ("Fugue of Death"), by now one of the best-known poems of the postwar period. The scene of the poem is one of the death camps, unidentified save for our being told that it is located outside Germany:

The name Margarete reminds us of the beloved in Goethe's Faust, and of the fact that the commandant of Auschwitz read Goethe during his off-duty hours. The beloved in Germany is safe there, with her golden hair, while Shulamith, "daughter of Jerusalem," is cremated, her hair and her whole being reduced to ashes. In grotesque contrast to theme and imagery stands the poem's lilting dactylic rhythm, presumably present to underscore the commandant's order that those who dig the grave also play and dance. To the atmosphere that this tango of sound with sense creates, the classical origins of the dactyl are irrelevant. Felstiner points out that the poem first appeared in Romanian, in the May 1947 issue of the Bucharest magazine Contemporanul, under the title "Tangoul Mortçii" ("Tango of Death").[3]

"Fugue of Death" bears all the marks of an early poem; such volubility and audible meter seldom recur in Celan's later oeuvre. One place where volume does return, the utterance bearing the marks of great tension, is the long cyclical poem "Eng führung" ("Stretto"), the closing work in Sprachgitter (Language Lattice, 1959) (I, 195-204). Michael Hamburger prefers to avoid the musical term stretto, and offers "The Straitening" instead. Still, he recognizes that the musical term, referring to the climax of a fugal composition, connects "Stretto" with "Fugue of Death," "and a comparison between the two poems shows just how daring, cryptic, and spare Celan's manner had become in the interjacent thirteen years."[4] There is also continuity; one cannot help noticing that the very first syllable of the German title "Engführung" is the adverb eng, "narrow, cramped," occurring in line 4 of the earlier poem: da liegt man nicht eng ("there you don't lie cramped"). Other allusions follow: images of light, "the place where they lay," fragments of a broken world, the text climaxing in the agonized "Ash. / Ash, ash," echoing the weeping line "your ashen hair Shulamith." Yet at the end of this bare, post-Holocaust recitative, the voice sings: "So / temples still stand. A / star / probably still has light. / Nothing, / nothing is lost. // Ho- / sanna" (I, 199, 204). A broken Hosanna gives thanks for a broken but recovered world. Celan's is a courageous affirmation that life can go on; that, pace Adorno, even poetry is still possible after what happened. Celan says this in his own way: "there are / still songs to be sung beyond / humanity" (close of the poem "Fadensonnen" ["Threadsuns"], in Atemwende [Breathturn, 1967] [II, 26]).

The vocabulary of "Fugue of Death," as of the Holocaust itself, recurs in Celan's later books. This happens in "Crowned Out' and in "In the Air" (both in DieNiemandsrose [The Nobody's Rose, 1963] [I, 271-272, 290-291]), also in "In der ewigen Teufe" ("In the eternal depth"), from Fadensonnen (Threadsuns, 1968) (II, 118). In the last-named, we come upon an image of a mixing bowl filled with brains, as we do also in the very late poem "Einen Stiefelvoll Hirn" ("A bootful of brains") (Zeitgehöft [Time-Farmstead, 1976] [III, 103]). Or there is the three-liner, also from Threadsuns: "You were my death: / you I could hold / while all fell away from me" (II, 166). Often a single word brings back the horrors and the poet's preoccupation with them: air, grave, master, milk, morning, shovel; the poetry is penetrated by these vocables, hints at and echoes of an indelible memory. Yet the traces of this memory go deeper than any vocabulary could document the descent; the entire landscape of the soul, of isolation and silence, is reflected in most of the late and latest poems. It is the landscape of Auschwitz today, and of the land that lies around it. It is instructive to juxtapose Celan's work with that of his friend Nelly Sachs; in the latter's oeuvre the preoccupations are there, but the manner, tone, and feel of the texts are very different.

Celan's commitment as an artist to what he remembers and knows is irrevocable. Yet we must not conclude that his concerns are narrowly focused on one historic event, however harrowing or unforgotten. Two remarkable examples of this poet's breadth of engagement are the relatively early poem "Shibboleth" (Von Schwellezu Schwelle [From Threshold to Threshold, 1955]) and the later "Einem Bruder in Asien" ("To a Brother in Asia") (Lightcoercion). The former is a response to the Spanish Civil War; the latter, to the war in Vietnam. In "Shibboleth" the poet admonishes his heart to make itself known, "here, in the midst of the marketplace. / Call it out, the shibboleth, out / into the foreign homeland: / February. No pasarán" (I, 131).[5] Let me juxtapose this with the Vietnam poem, which I will quote in its entirety:

Distance is felt in both poems, in the former in time, in the latter in space, but the responses are as immediate as their occasions, and of unquestioned emotional authenticity. Two rare features the poems share are a title and comprehensibility. The Vietnam poem is also strongly mimetic; the total effect is one of photography, the pictures taken by a war correspondent. Perhaps this is part of what Celan meant when he called his poems messages in a bottle.

Is, then, Celan a language poet? Once again my answer is: Yes, understood in the right spirit. Celan's daring linguistic innovations, his self-renewal and radical change around the time of the collection Breathturn, his relentless experimentation to the finish, are widely acknowledged. There is Celan's love of puns, for example, or his penchant for kenning-like compound formation, the latter so much more invited by German than by English.[7] Innovative compounds, startling in isolation and promising more in the poetry, are present in the wonderful titles of the later books: Languagelattice, Breathturn, Threadsuns, Lightcoercion, Snowpart, Timefarmstead. There is play with syllables and sounds, as in "Keine Sandkunst mehr" ("No more sand art") (Breathturn): "Deepinsnow, / eepinow, / ee-i-o" (II, 39); it feels as if the poet, momentarily, at least, had given up on language; the breaking up of thought and word into their component syllables and sounds, on the surface a whimsical gesture, hides deep and unspoken resistance to the accepted ways of communication. The difficulties only increase as we progress; in the later books there are entire poems that live, as it seems, in universes of their own, and have hermeneutical validity, if any, strictly on a onetime basis. The words are there; it is referentiality that is largely gone, as in a surrealist painting: "Approachable / was the black- / bird hovering single-wingèd / over the firewall, behind / Paris, up there, / in the / poem" (II, 298). That was from Lightcoercion, the first of Celan's three posthumous collections, in a realm past the one in which he sang (Breathturn): "A rumble: it is / truth itself / come among / people, / right into the midst of the / metaphorsquall" (II, 89). No more metaphors, Celan tells us; from here on he will take the rumble, and work with it. This is all the more noteworthy a revocation of language as we understand its workings, since one of the most prominent and productive passages in Celan's poetry is the metaphor, in "Fugue of Death": "Death is a master from Germany."

We are to meet the poet of language—and languages, and Celan was versed in at least seven. He translated poetry from the English (Shakespeare, Dickinson, Frost), the French (Apollinaire, Char), and the Russian (Blok, Mandelstam, Yesenin); his was a mind widely sympathetic to influences, from classical Jewish learning to Western.[8] Paradoxically, his experiments in poetry do not stand in isolation; they take us back to the work of experimenters of the past. The trend in his poems toward the isolated word reminds me of the austere style defined by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which so strongly marks Hölderlin's late hymnic utterance. Syntax recedes into the background, allowing words to come into full prominence, like jagged rocks jutting out on a rugged coastline. But even in the most laconic of utterances, syntax can also return. This helps redeem that agonized revocation of Hölderlin on Celan's part with which the criticism now rings.[9] I am saving my comments on it until the end of the essay, one specific act of revocation being a point where our two concerns meet.

Celan, the poet committed to a hectic, productive, and in the end also self-destructive relationship with language—to writing "even without / language" ("Stehen" ["To stand"] [Breathturn] [II, 23])—is also an East European poet, Eastern by origins, Western by choice. The Romanians like to call him one of their own, but, with all his tendency toward surrealist vision and technique, Celan reminds me of another East European Holocaust and language poet, the Hungarian János Pilinszky. Mr. Light cites Miklós Radnóti,[10] but he might well have thought of Pilinszky, in whose oeuvre our two themes, in the tertium of annihilation (along with methodical near-annihilation of language), intersect in ways very similar to what we see take place in Celan's writing. An excellent example for this is Pilinszky's dramatic recitative "KZ Oratorio,"[11] in which three victims of a death camp, already gassed, speak—largely past one another. Here the isolated line and word, embedded in a matrix of silence, reach an apex of realization. As Celan affirmed in "Argumentum e silentio," inscribed to René Char (in From Threshold toThreshold): "Laid upon the chain / between gold and forgetting: / the night. . . . // To each the word. / To each the word that sang to him, . . . " (I, 138).[12] Gold and forgetting—how strongly that resonates with the book title Poppy and Memory, and how clearly both phrase and title encapsulate the conflicting impulses that constitute Celan's inner war with the self, with the society for which he wrote, and with the language that audibly fought back.

Let me close with what I see as the one perfect artifact, Celan's dreadful well-wrought urn, the one poem that revokes Hölderlin and yet reaffirms this contemporary's relationship with the older poet. I have in mind "Tenebrae," in Language Lattice, which has been held to be a revocation of Hölderlin's reassuring message of faith.[13] That message is articulated in Hölderlin's Pindaric hymn "Patmos," which opens: "Near, / And hard to hold fast, is God. / Yet where there is danger, / The saving power grows also." In "Tenebrae," dead victims of a concentration camp call God to account for his abandoning them in their hour of need:

"We drank, Lord. / The blood, and the image that was in the blood, Lord." It is a revocation not least of the Eucharist; as Wienold also points out, the bread and wine of the Communion Service are in "Tenebrae" reconverted into human flesh and blood. One detail no one to my knowledge has yet noted: true to Celan's uncompromising poetics, the blood image in the poem is no mere metaphor. The victims in the gas chambers did bleed and taste one another's blood, the blood that flowed from eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as the poison gas burst the lungs. Celan's revocation of a comforting message of rescue, and with it his accusation of the age, is this immediate; Wienold and Glenn are both deeply right when they urge that "Celan's poems are intensely emotional expressions of anguish."[14] Yet it was also this poet who found it in him to revoke the revocation, and to urge, in the late poem "Du sei wie du" ("You be like you") (Lightcoercion) (II, 327), Jerusalem to "rise and shine," and to do so in the language of Meister Eckhart's Bible translation, as well as, at the poem's end, in Hebrew.[15]

Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde. ("Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth.") That late saying of Hölderlin's is one of the mottoes Heidegger attached to his essay, "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry" (in his Commentaries). I submit that the saying deservedly applies to Celan. And we are back with our original two questions. Was Picasso a Spanish painter? He has been called the artist of our century. So Celan, the Romanian Jew from Czemowitz, has every claim to be regarded as the century's poet, at least since 1945, comparable in stature only to Rilke. Not a poet who invites belittling adjectives to the left of poet, but rather an artist who, following the counsel of his own late poem, is like himself, there to ask us to investigate his artistic identity, and to weigh and consider what the poetry shows it to be.

NOTES

1. Light is objecting to the statement on the back cover of the volume that "today Celan functions for thinkers . . . much as Hölderlin functioned for the late Heidegger" (see also Joris's Introduction, 13-14).

2. See Paul Celan, GesammelteWerke in fünf Bänden (Collected Works in Five Volumes), ed. Beda Allemann et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), II, 255-256. This edition is cited in my text by volume and page. The English translations of passages from Celan's poetry that I quote throughout the essay are my own. On the meeting between Celan and Heidegger and on "Todtnauberg," see Felstiner, 244-247.

3. Felstiner, 28, with facsimile of magazine appearance, 29.

4. See the Introduction to Paul Celan, Poems: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 1980), 17. Hamburger's translation of "Engführung" will be found ibid., 117-127.

5. The Spanish sentence No pasarán ("They shall not pass") was the revolutionary battle cry of the republicans in Spain. For comment on "Shibboleth," see Felstiner, 81-82, 187-188.

6. Here I cannot agree with Felstiner when he says (326, n. 15) that "To a Brother in Asia" is a "rather unforceful" poem, showing that Celan felt the Vietnam war to be "remote" from him. The poem dates from August 1967. With the image of the "handful of rice / [dying] away" (lines 8-9), cf. "Hohles Lebensgehöft" ("Hollow lifefarmstead") (Breathturn) (II, 42): "A handful / of sleepcom / drifts from the true- / stammered mouth."

7. See Felstiner, Index (on puns); Peter Demetz, Postwar German Literature: ACritical Introduction (New York: Schocken, 1972), 81-82 (on "kenning-like riddles").

8. On Celan's translation of twenty-one of Shakespeare's sonnets, see George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 389-393. For the full range of Celan's translating activity, see the bilingual printings in GesammelteWerke, volumes IV and V.

9. See especially Jerry Glenn, Paul Celan, Twayne World Authors Series (New York: Twayne, 1973). Glenn, following Götz Wienold (see below, n. 13), holds that Celan's entire poetic oeuvre is characterized by a technique of refutation (25).

10. He does so erroneously; the passage in question comes from "Fourth Eclogue," not from "Second." He also mistranslates it; correctly, the two lines read: "Always I would have wanted to be free, / and guards escorted me down the road." See Miklós Radnóti, The Complete Poetry, edited and translated by Emery George (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980), 248.

11. See Metropolitan Icons: Selected Poems of János Pilinszky in Hungarian and inEnglish, edited and translated by Emery George, Studies in Slavic Language and Literature, 8 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 70-95.

12. Felstiner (81) tells us that "To each the word" echoes "the maxim 'To each his own' inscribed over the gate to Buchenwald."

13. See Götz Wienold, "Paul Celans Hölderlin-Widerruf" ("Paul Celan's Hölderlin Revocation"), Poetica, vol. 2, number 2 (April 1968), 216-228.

14. See Glenn, 26.

15. Felstiner (251) points out that in Isaiah the Hebrew imperative forms kumi and ori bear feminine suffixes and address a feminine presence, "calling to a female 'thou': Jerusalem, home of exiles, a woman, as in Lamentations." If this female Jerusalem may be connected with the symbolic "daughter of Jerusalem," then the present poem's exalted call is a far cry from the line "your ashen hair Shulamith" in "Fugue of Death."

    On the rightness of the presence of Hebrew in Celan's poetry, Amy Colin cites Klaus Reichert, who "convincingly argues that Celan's paratactic style—with its recurrent use of conjunctions linking syntactic structures to one another—is more characteristic of biblical Hebrew than of contemporary German." See Amy Colin, Paul Celan: Hologramsof Darkness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 147, and 199 n. 154.