Translate This, Part Deux

Even across the gap between German and English, Paul Celan is one of my favorite poets. I’m not sure if one can really be “influenced”? by a writer as singular as Celan, but his work has been an important presence for me for many years. I have written about him twice on my blog, here and here. His intensity of vision, diction, and rhythm, and the inseparability of these things, trying to find new ways of saying to accommodate the previously unsaid or unsayable (especially what can be spoken in the face of the unspeakable enormity of the Holocaust), have made a deep impression on me.

Though Celan often questioned the possibility of communication, he never questioned its necessity; there is in all of his work a communicative urgency, almost a desperation to make contact with the other. This may be one reason why Celan was an important translator as well as a major poet. But, though all are interesting, most of the Celan translations I’ve read are a bit flat-footed or, in attempting to reproduce the idiosyncratic quality of his language (what translator Katherine Washburn calls his “brilliant derangements of sound and sense”), end up feeling a bit awkward, which I’m sure Celan never was.
I have read every book-length translation of Celan’s work into English (there aren’t that many), and there are four translations that most strongly convey the grace, passion, and tension of Celan’s work. Joachim Neugroschel’s Speech-Grille and Selected Poems was first published in 1971 and has long been out of print. Neugroschel’s book has no introduction, and his notes are minimal; he just translates, vividly and compellingly. Katherine Washburn and Margret Gullemin’s Last Poems, also out of print, translates selections from Celan’s last three books, whose profoundly condensed poems are widely considered his most knotty and difficult. Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh’s Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan also focuses on what they call Celan’s “later, less known, and more opaque, elusive, or downright disturbing body of work.” Like Merwin’s Mandelstam co-translations, the participation of a gifted and acoustically acute poet helps produce English versions that follow, in Popov and McHugh’s words, “the intensity of his listening to language itself.” The book’s notes are also extensive and exemplary. John Felstiner, whose biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, contains several translations in which he takes the reader through the process of reading and interpreting Celan’s poetry, reminding us, as he writes, that “translation presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation,” has published a substantial Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan deeply informed by his scholarship but also by an intense sensitivity to Celan’s language and the urgency behind and within that language.