you I could hold
when all fell away from me'
It may be something of romantic notion to consider the life of a poet as relevant as the work itself, or at least to it, but in the case of Paul Celan, it can scarce be avoided. In his work 'Poems of Paul Celan', Michael Hamburger wastes little page space on defining the poet through his own life, but rather allows the translations to stand as testimony to the man himself.
It's certainly important to know who Celan was in order to understand the context of the work - born in Czernovitz, Romania in 1920, Paul Celan was the son of Jewish immigrants living in the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This polyglot of nations each spoke their own language, therefore from an early age Paul was fluent in German, the regional tongue, Romanian, the language of the country and Yiddish, the common language of the Jewish community which he was a part of. He later became fluent in French, Russian and Ukranian - but because it was his first language, German remained his dominant tongue and the language he wrote his poetry in throughout the remainder of his life. This subtle irony would not be lost on him in later years of his life, nor to the literary world at large in the time of his greatest renown.
For the world was not a kind place in eastern Europe during the advent of the second world war, and certainly Romania was no exception. In the summer of 1942, both of his parents were interred in labor camps as the result of Nazi occupation. The whereabouts of Paul on that fateful evening are disputed, but it is certain that he was not present when his parents were arrested. Paul would also find himself a victim of the holocaust, but managed to be liberated after the soviet occupation. Tragically, neither of his parents would survive.
And it is here that the great work of Celan first begins to show itself through 'Todesfuge', translated literally as 'Death March', a reference to the accounts witnessed where fellow prisoners were forced to play music for the others waiting to die in the gas chambers. The piece itself is one of Celan's most memorable efforts, and Hamburgers translation does it more than justice by rendering an ineffable quality interweaving angst and terrible beauty within lines of winterdeath and movement without once distorting the original fugue rhythm and tone.
To be certain Hamburger expends 34-odd pages on delivering an effective historical background as well as more academic elucidations on the defense of islabeling Celan as 'hermetic'. The remaining 300-plus pages are entirely devoted to his exceptional translations of the work itself. An added bonus: the tome is bilingual and presents both the original German version as well as the translation itself.
Celan's poetry is far more than any isolationist melancholia, however deserved, at circumstance - rather, it is the work itself which bears the very aspect of the transcendence of human experience through words that renders it exceptional and of such merit. It is easy enough to wax and wane eloquent on the whys and wherefores, but words are often better left to speak for themselves. So be it.
Go blind now, today;
eternity also is full of eyes-
in them
drowns what helped images down
the way they came,
in them
fades what took you out of language,
lifted you out with a gesture
which you allowed to happen like
the dance of words made of
autumn and silk and nothingness.
Postscript: Paul Celan took his own life by drowning in the Siene in 1970. He was 49 years old.
Poems of Paul Celan
