The New Yorker Revisits Paul Celan

At the New Yorker, Ruth Franklin writes about Paul Celan and Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Pierre Joris's new translation of Celan's first four published books. "No translation can ever encompass the multiplicity of meanings embedded in these hybrid, polyglot, often arcane poems; the translator must choose an interpretation," Franklin writes. Further: 

This is always true, but it is particularly difficult with work as fundamentally ambiguous as Celan’s. Joris imagines his translations as akin to the medical diagrams that reproduce cross-sections of anatomy on plastic overlays, allowing the student to leaf forward and backward to add or subtract levels of detail. “All books of translations should be such palimpsests,” he writes, with “layers upon layers of unstable, shifting, tentative, other-languaged versions.”

Joris has already translated Celan’s final five volumes of poetry in a collection that he called “Breathturn Into Timestead” (2014), incorporating words from the titles of the individual books. The appearance of “Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech,” coinciding with the centennial of Celan’s birth, as well as with the fiftieth anniversary of his death—he drowned himself in the Seine, one rainy week in April—now brings into English all the poems, nearly six hundred, that the poet collected during his lifetime, in the order in which he arranged them. (The exception is Celan’s first collection, published in Vienna in 1948, which printing errors forced him to withdraw; he used some of those poems in his next book.) Not only are many poems available in English for the first time but English readers also now have the opportunity to read Celan’s individual collections in their entirety, as he intended them to be read. What Celan demands of his reader, Joris has written, is “to weave the threads of the individual poems into a text that is the cycle or book of poems. The poet gives us the threads: we have to do the weaving—an invitation to a new kind of reading.”

Continue reading at the New Yorker.