Reading Jean Daive's Under the Dome With Celan's Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech

For On the Seawall, Wayne Catan brings the new edition of Jean Daive's Under the Dome: Walks With Paul Celan (City Lights Books), translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, into conversation with Pierre Joris's much-anticipated translation of Celan's Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG). After a review of the poems, Catan turns to the poet himself, reflected through Daive, who "...offers a curbside view of Celan’s behaviors. Written two decades after Celan’s suicide, Daive’s lyrical fragments drift among the cafés and streets of Paris, and are oriented through his engrossed attention to Celan’s complex mind." Further in:

Pierre Joris says, “Reading a poem of Celan’s at any kind of depth that will honor the poem’s complexity, and translating it, are similar acts with a similar problematic … Anyone who has learned to read Celan’s text knows that it is not a question of deciding on any one meaning.” Celan’s poems may be suffused with grief, but they have no interest in turning that grief into a memoiristic monument. Their language is what remains, is all that remains, after trauma, and they encourage our most open and communal exploration of this disquiet.

Find the full review at On the Seawall.