The Thousand Darknesses of Murderous Speech

To read the Jewish-Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan is also to read commentators, commentators on commentators, and so on and on, until finally the clatter of exposition overwhelms the oracular verse. Pierre Joris, the latest translator intrepid enough to tackle the foremost German-language poet of the postwar period, estimates that there are “a hundred plus books” about Celan and “several thousand—six thousand? seven thousand? it is nearly impossible to keep track worldwide—articles and essays that have appeared and keep appearing at a dizzying rate.” Celan is the subject of monographs or papers by thinkers as prominent as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Charles Taylor, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. There are now more than 15 English translations of his most celebrated poem, “Deathfuge.” The academic cottage industry devoted to his work is predictably formidable.

We talk so incessantly about Celan in part because there is so much to say about him: his recalcitrant lyrics all but invite explication, and the elliptical formulations he favors are as potent as lines from spells or prayers. He delivers cloudy pronouncements in the cryptic yet authoritative tones of a prophet, writing of “untime” and “nolongerhumanday.” In one of his best-known poems, “Corona,” from 1948, he concludes

It is time that the stone took the trouble to bloom,
that unrest’s heart started to beat.
It’s time for it to be time.
 
It is time.

These lines ring not just true but also portentous. But what, exactly, do they mean? What is it time for? Learning that “Corona” is a sort of love poem to the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom Celan had a brief affair in the late 1940s and then a lifelong (albeit complicated and romantically inflected) friendship, yields more questions than answers.

In point of fact, perhaps we spill so much ink over Celan because he is difficult to read without assistance. Though he balked at critics who accused him of unintelligibility—he scrawled “not in the least hermetic” in a volume he gifted to the poet and translator Michael Hamburger—he is at least hermetic enough to demand involved hermeneutics. Memory Rose into Threshold Speech (FSG, 2020), Joris’s careful new translation of Celan’s early work, published to coincide with the poet’s centennial, contains more than 100 pages of commentary, all of it richly elucidating. The poems can be arduous nonetheless, especially as Celan’s early effusions shade into his mature obfuscations. “The foreheads / it beckons, / the foreheads that were lent to us, / for the sake of the mirroring” one daunting poem reads. Another opens “fig-nourished be the heart / wherein the hour remembers / the dead one’s almond-eye.” Joris’s excellent notes shed some light on these obscurities: the “foreheads” may have something to do with a note Celan scribbled in a text by Gershom Scholem, renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, and the “figs” almost certainly echo a line by Friedrich Hölderlin (“I remember well / how the crowns of the elm trees / lean over the mill, / and a fig tree grows in the courtyard”). But even with the benefit of contextualization, many of Celan’s formulations remain essentially uncanny and impenetrable.

The name of the new tome is likewise enigmatic. What is a “memory rose”? What is “threshold speech”? The title of Joris’s previous volume of Celan translations—Breathturn into Timestead (2014)—combines the names of the first and last of the five collections that are included: from Breathturn (1967) and Timestead (1976), we get Breathturn into Timestead. Early Celan, in contrast, had not yet embraced single-word titles, and the shift in his naming practices is emblematic of a shift in his style: as he aged, he drifted away from the soft, quasi-surrealist fruits of his youth toward the spare and notoriously inscrutable lyrics he wrote at a reeling pace from 1967 until his suicide in 1970. Memory Rose contains the four volumes Celan published between 1952 and 1963, but only the final two are titled with the sort of neologisms that became his hallmark: Poppy and Memory (1952), Threshold to Threshold (1955), Speechgrille (1959), and NoOnesRose (1963). Joris’s solution to the problem of the book’s title, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, is jarring—but then, Celan’s work is jolting by design, and the name suits the poems, which often seem to herald from an alien universe. They are indeed pieces of “threshold speech,” less German than the products of a novel language.

***

Celan is standardly categorized as a German poet. On its face, this is a perplexing mantle for a writer who spent almost none of his adult life in German-speaking countries and never lived in Germany proper. He was born Paul Antschel in 1920, in Czernowitz, a newly Romanian city that had only recently been wrenched from the rubble of the Habsburg Empire. Now located in Ukraine, it was gloriously and cacophonously multilingual when Celan was growing up there. He spoke High German at home with his parents, but elsewhere he maneuvered comfortably in Romanian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and the local German dialect. By the time he was a teenager, he had also learned Hebrew, French, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek at school.

His upbringing was neither wholly assimilationist nor wholly secular. Both of his parents came from devout families, and he attended a Hebrew school for several years before transferring to a Romanian one. Though he was bar mitzvahed, he distanced himself from the religious community when he joined a communist youth group in his adolescence. Still, his abiding passion was never for theology or politics but always for German poetry. His mother, who adored the language and its literature, introduced him to many of the authors he read ambivalently for the rest of his life, among them Schiller and Rilke.

Despite his humanistic leanings, Celan agreed to study medicine in France at his parents’ behest when he came of age. On November 9, 1938—now known as Kristallnacht—he found himself in a train on the way to Tours. The fraught journey is immortalized in the dissociative poem “La Contrescarpe,” in which Celan addresses himself as if from across an impassable distance: “Via Kraków / you came, at the Anhalter / railway station / a smoke flowed toward your glance, / it already belonged to tomorrow.”

By the time he abandoned his medical studies to pursue a degree in literature back home, Czernowitz too belonged to a bleak tomorrow. In 1940, Soviet troops descended on the city. One year later, Nazis invaded, burned the Great Temple, and killed 682 Jews in three days. The Antschels escaped the initial massacre, but their good fortune did not last. Celan never spoke explicitly about what happened in the summer of 1942; available accounts are conflicting. What is certain is that he spent a night away from his house for some reason, possibly after an argument with his father. When he returned the next morning, his parents were gone. Less than a month later, he was sent to a labor camp in nearby Tăbărăşti. When asked what work he did there, he always replied “shoveling,” and he was likely shoveling stones when he learned that both his parents had died in the camps to which they had been deported: his father succumbed to typhus, and his mother was shot when she was deemed unfit to work. For the rest of Celan’s life, loss lacerated even his most sanguine poems.

In 1944, the Soviets closed the camps and liberated Czernowitz from the Nazis. Celan took English literature courses and worked as a translator for a year before departing for Bucharest, where he was swept up in the surrealist movement—and where his first published poem, “Deathfuge,” was printed in Romanian translation as “Tango of Death.” It was there that he changed his name to an anagram of its Romanian spelling: Antschel became Ançel which metamorphosed into Celan. Having shed his old identity, he fled to Austria just as the Iron Curtain was dropping.

“What had to be reached was named Vienna,” he once wrote of eastern Jewry’s prewar fixation on the Habsburg capital. He enjoyed some successes when he finally arrived in the fabled city: he not only met and fell in love with Bachmann but also impressed local literary fixtures and prepared his first book, The Sand from the Urns, for publication. (He later revised and reprinted it as part of his second collection, Poppy and Memory.) For the most part, however, he chafed at the thinly veiled Nazism that he (rightly) perceived all around him, and in 1948, he settled in Paris once and for all. Though he often traveled to Germany and Austria for readings—and, on one memorable occasion, to meet the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom he both admired and reviled—he never spent a prolonged period in a German-speaking nation again. In 1952, he married the French artist Gisèle Lestrange, with whom he had a son three years later.

Celan never fully recovered from the death of his parents, particularly the death of his mother, and he was understandably depressed and paranoid at the best of times. But his spirits plummeted sharply in 1953, when the widow of the poet Yvan Goll alleged that he had plagiarized her late husband’s work. Though her baseless accusations were soon debunked, the damage to Celan’s fragile psyche was irreparable. After several years of turmoil, he attacked Gisèle, then stabbed himself, only narrowly missing his heart. As his conditioned worsened, he was institutionalized, medicated, and given shock therapy. Eventually, he moved out of the apartment he shared with his family. Finally, in April of 1970, he left a biography of Hölderlin open on his desk with a passage prominently underlined. It was a quote from the German man of letters Clemens Brentano: “Sometimes the genius goes dark and drowns in the bitter well of his heart.” Having gestured one last time at the literary tradition he loved, the 49-year-old Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

***

At the time of his death, Celan had been a French citizen for 15 years. In what sense, then, was he a German poet? As he often stressed, his Germanness was vexed but deliberate. He could easily have written in any number of the languages he spoke fluently (and from which he often translated), but he insisted that “only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s own truth.” German was literally his mother’s tongue, and he was loath to abandon it to her murderers.

But then, Celan’s native language was never completely or conventionally German. Although he once claimed that he did “not believe there is such a thing as bilingual poetry,” his own work is a polyglottal patchwork of Hebrew phrases and homophonic puns. Some poems, such as “La Contrescarpe,” have French titles, and an untitled verse in NoOnesRose contains the word Neige, which means “snow” in French and “dwindling” (or, sometimes, “inclination”) in German. (The next line contains the German word for snow, Schnee.) In an untitled poem in Breathturn into Timestead, he writes of Ziv, which means “light” in Hebrew. And even when he does not slip or half-slip into French or Hebrew or Romanian, he writes in a sort of private language of arcane allusions. In what Joris calls Celan’s “referential universe,” roses, stones, and almonds all have pride of place. Each is embedded in a further network of hidden meanings that reach like roots beneath the surface of the works: roses recall Rilke’s series about the flower; stones suggest Celan’s hard labor in the camps; almonds were a central ingredient in his mother’s cooking and also appear in important Biblical verses. (Zyklon B, a lethal gas used in the death camps, also smells like bitter almonds.) Scholars could—and many do—go on and on.

On one hand, much of Celan’s writing chronicles his bruising disenchantment. In poem after poem, he laments that religiosity has drained out of the world. In “Psalm”—actually a kind of anti-psalm—he proclaims, “NoOne kneads us again of earth and clay, / noOne conjures our dust.” Sometimes, he goes so far as to suggest that words too are dry husks: they “refuse themselves,” and one poem ends, “A word—you know: / a corpse.” In place of the language that has been gutted, a hyphen gestures at what must go unsaid. On the other hand, to even begin unearthing a Celan poem from the dense mound of its intimations is to inherit some of its creator’s paranoia—to come to see every sound or piece of punctuation as freighted with import.

It would be impossible to decipher even a small fraction of Memory Rose, but here is one representative example of all that is contained in just one snatch of one poem: in “The Syllable Pain,” which appears near the end of NoOnesRose, the morpheme buch is repeated over and over. This is the German word for book, at least when it is capitalized (Buch); part of the German word for the letter of an alphabet (buchstabe) and part of the cognate verb meaning to spell (buchstabieren); part of the German word for a beech tree (Buche), which is the symbol of the region where Czernowitz was located when it was under Habsburg control; and part of the name of the Buchenwald (literally, “beech forest”) concentration camp. Celan’s is not normal German: it is German charged with electric significance.

Celan most dramatically rejects the mores of his native language when he breaks words apart and pieces them back together, just as he unmade and remade his name. His early poems are full of dismemberments, both of bodies and of words mutilated so as to be recombined into Frankenphrases. Over and over, the self is severed from its eyes, arms, or hair. In Poppy and Memory, “there is someone who wears my hair.” Later, in Speechegrille, Celan writes of “you and the arm,” not you and your arm, and throughout Memory Rose, body parts hover after definite articles. We read of “the mouth,” “the foreheads,” and “the eye” without learning to whom, if anyone, these orphaned organs belong. Words, too, are split apart, then stitched or smashed together. Clumsiness becomes clum-, clum-, clum-, / siness, and everywhere fractures into Every- / where. Meanwhile, disparate words are sutured into NoOnesRose, “shardtone,” and “leafscars.” 

In his 2010 essay on Celan, the philosopher Charles Taylor observes that the modernist demand for authenticity “seems to drive us toward new languages.” Poetry invigorates insofar as it can keep words from going “dead,” from fizzling out, like seltzer gone flat. For Celan, who hoped to deliver German not only from the usual numbings but also from Nazification, the task of linguistic renewal was especially urgent. Still, he never hoped to return his mother tongue to a state of prelapsarian purity, as some commenters have suggested. It is true that he was fond of etymology and often opted for the archaic forms of otherwise familiar words, or even for words that have fallen out of contemporary use altogether. (He frequently revived words such as Gehugnis, an Early New High German artifact that meant “remembrance,” and wasen, which referred to the place where medieval knackers disposed of animal carcasses.) But far from attempting to expunge 20th-century traumas from his poetry, he wanted to imbue a dulling German with a sharper, keener horror. In the speech he gave when he was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958, he reflected,

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through it and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.

This enrichment was scarring, and Celan did all he could to keep the wound from scabbing. His writing apes the plodding rhythms of work in the camps—yet its repetitions often yield semantic saturation that in turn defamiliarizes. He reports, “I braided, / I unbraided, / I braid, unbraid, / I braid” until braid is stripped of sense and reduced to sound. One of the best and most wrenching poems in Memory Rose appeals even more explicitly to Celan’s experience of hard labor:

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.
 
They dug and dug, thus did
their day go, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, knew all this.
 
They dug and heard nothing more;
they didn’t grow wise, invented no song
thought up no language for themselves.
They dug.

Dug—in German, gruben—sounds less and less like a word and more and more like a shovel clanging against stone. The digging itself is conspicuously without meaning; the diggers seek no aid from God, think up “no language for themselves,” extract no comfort from their digging. Yet the poem invests the word with a heaving physicality that makes it newly horrible. 

Celan puts repetition to work most unforgettably in “Deathfuge,” perhaps the greatest Holocaust elegy ever written. The title is a reference to Jews forced to play music in concentration camps, often immediately before they were killed. In a camp near Czernowitz, for instance, Jewish fiddlers were made to play a tango before the whole orchestra was shot. The poem itself is a fugue, a frenzy of lines scrambled and repeated as if accelerating in desperation. It opens with an indelible image, sinister as a nightmare:

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink

And so on and on. The poem is devoid of punctuation. Nothing halts its lethal momentum, and it proceeds at a frantic clip. There is a whiff of oneiric narrative: a commandant “calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland / he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air.” But centrally there is black milk in the mornings, at dawn and at night, at noon and in the eternal evenings, black milk and black milk again. By the end of “Deathfuge” the opening invocations of black milk jostle with other lines that have been echoed and re-echoed throughout, in particular the chilling “death is a master from Deutschland” (der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland). In recordings of Celan reading the poem, his voice is suffused with an eerie and awful force, as if he is possessed.

Celan is infamously difficult to translate, and there is no final or absolute rendering of any of his works. He sought to freshen an ossifying German—and we seek to preserve the harrowing strangeness of his poetry by way of translation, re-translation, and re-re-translation, as if we are translating not only into English but back into stark novelty. Joris is one of many to make the attempt, and, in general, his renditions are thoughtful. If they are sometimes a little too literal, their stiffness is true to the truculence of the stammering originals. But he faces especially tough competition when it comes to “Deathfuge,” which has been translated expertly by John Felstiner, Michael Hamburger, and at least 13 others.

Celan repeats “wir trinken und trinken” (“we drink and drink”) and “Schwarze Milch der Frühe” (“black milk of morning”) unaltered over and over, though he shuffles the times of the drinking. Sometimes we drink “morgens und mittags” (“mornings and afternoons”), and sometimes “mittags und morgens” (“afternoons and mornings”). These shifts emphasize not variety but unendurable sameness: time becomes murky, noon precedes morning, but always we drink and drink the same black milk of daybreak. The poem is in the present tense, which signifies that the drinking is constant and even ongoing, that it may never end. Felstiner reproduces “we drink and we drink” and “black milk of daybreak” faithfully, four times each. Joris, in contrast, eases the oppressive repetitions, changing “black milk of morning” to “black milk of dawn” and “we drink and we drink” first to “we drink you and drink,” then to “we drink and drink.” This makes for a poem that unravels more ruthlessly but is less mired in monotony. It is nonetheless racking, albeit differently, to read. Still, if we gag on the black milk in Celan’s and Felstiner’s versions, it is because both the substance and the drinking are so stubbornly unchanging that they obliterate even distinctions between times of day. Just as there is no punctuation dividing one line or sentence of “Deathfuge” from another, just as the liquid of the black milk is dark without differentiation, there was no change or respite in the camps. The atrocity is eternal. In the end, I wonder if Joris’s translation introduces a sort of relief that Celan himself would have rejected.

***

Critics confronted with Celan’s inspired obfuscations tend to fall into two camps: either they attempt impossibly thorough exegesis, as Hans-Georg Gadamer does in his painstaking studies of each of the poems in Breathturn, or they appeal to an alternative epistemology, to something as immediate, intimate, and irrefutable as revelation. Ruth Franklin confesses in the New Yorker that reading Celan feels “mystical,” and John Bayley maintains in the New York Review of Books that despite their apparent difficulty, Celan’s poems “always have the same heroically absolute quality of being themselves.”  

Celan, too, seemed to regard his work as taking quick root in the heart. He once told a perplexed reader, “Keep on reading! Understanding will come of itself,” and elsewhere he explained, “I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.” A handshake is not in the least hermetic: it requires no commentary, no labored excavation. But if Celan’s poems are handshakes, why do we have to write and read so much in order to grasp them? It is only by way of magic that we could infer, from Celan’s words alone, his mother’s cakes or his disagreements with Hölderlin.

As far as I know, Celan never acknowledged that his poetry is demanding, sometimes even antagonistic. On the contrary, he repeated over and over that his work was essentially communicative in spirit. He likened a poem not only to a handshake but also to “a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart.” Many of his poems, both early and late, are addressed to an unidentified “you,” perhaps in virtue of his belief that any “instance of language” is “essentially dialogue” (and almost certainly in reference to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who understood the self as an “I” existing only in relation to a “you”).

Celan probably was convinced that his poetry would kindle a sense of mystical recognition in his readers, its ostensible obscurity notwithstanding, and he was not wholly incorrect: I do not doubt that many of his admirers have experienced the miracles of comprehension they report. But the knotted texture of the work itself belies its author’s stated aims. If Celan never specifies exactly who “you” is, perhaps this is because his ideal addressee often remains hypothetical. No normal, uninspired reader could grip all he gestures at, and many, like me, are never blessed with a flare of preternatural clarity. What is left for us to love in Celan?

Reading Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, I felt not sanctified but confused. The first two books boast many haunting poems, among them “Deathfuge,” but they are uneven and sometimes even maudlin (“[i]n the springs of your eyes / the sea keeps its promise.”) In the last two books, Celan finds his harsher edge and comes into his own. But even—or especially—here the glow of grace is absent. When I read Celan, I feel the way I felt at Halloween parties as a child, when I was instructed to close my eyes and prod eyeballs and viscera. When I blinked to find my hands immersed in grapes and spaghetti, I did not feel any safer: on the contrary, I was appalled to realize how easily everyday foodstuffs could revert into something slick and sickening. Celan’s poetry is above all a reminder of how thoroughly the language that renders the world legible, navigable, and dear can be converted into an instrument of dizzying disorientation. His work is unrelenting in its abrasive inexplicability. It is exhausting to read and grueling to decipher.

But a barbarous world deserves a brutal poetry. A language so mangled can never be wholly redeemed. Celan’s poems are not intended as consolations. The words he grafts onto each other are not intended to fuse. He once warned sternly that German “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.” In other words, German poetry is not supposed to be beautiful. We read on without hope and without revelation, digging and digging, knowing that we may never reach anything, that there may be nothing it is still possible for anyone to reach.