Remembering Paul Celan, 1920-1970

November 2020 is the centenary of Paul Celan's birth, and in 2020 it is also 50 years since he died. I have often written about him in this blog, but it has been lovely to see him widely commemorated this year and especially in this past month, even if many events had to be moved online due to the pandemic. And this has its advantages - in the past couple of weeks I attended a couple of excellent Celan events from Deutsches Haus in New York, despite living in the UK. 

While Celan's poetry is often considered difficult, he has managed to gain legions of readers who haven't been put off by this discouraging label and who often (like myself) can't read him in German, the language in which he wrote most of his poetry. Sometimes if I'm looking at Twitter late at night (a bad habit) I find myself searching to see who's tweeting about Celan all over the world (a good habit, or at least a better habit). English is by no means the dominant language, and I'm not sure German is either - he seems particularly popular in Spanish and Turkish. 

Celan's identity is very difficult to pin down in any way. He was Jewish, but that isn't necessary the dominant influence on his work (although it is massive). He was German-speaking but not German. He was Romanian, but his hometown of Chernivtsi is now in Ukraine. His greatest poetic work came from years in Paris, and he worked as a translator with many languages. All of this has probably succeeded in making him more universal. His poems are like radio transmissions directly from his mind and heart, in an new language, untranslated, somehow and mysteriously unmediated in a way that is different from most other poetry. The silences, gaps and elisions in his poems are also like the moments when the radio waves break up - but they are entirely deliberate, an essential part of the work of art, at times the most essential.

My love for Celan's work has sometimes puzzled me. He is not particularly like any other poet or writer that I love. The fact is, though, that he is simply not much like any other poet or writer at all. While his work evidently poses many extreme difficulties for translators, there is no question that the emotions carry across and pierce through. Celan's poems can seem surreal or abstract but they often refer to very specific people, places, events. To know him fully, perhaps these need to be unpicked to a level most of us never will reach. And yet Celan himself said that his work could be understand if readers would simply engage and read the poems again and again. At one of the events I attended, the author Paul Auster said that Celan's intellectual prowess was immense but that the defining factor and what has made his work so loved was the spirit, the emotion that burns from him onto the page. The Celan expert Christine Ivanovic said that even when you engage deeply with Celan and read him again and again, there will be texts that you don't understand, but you still live with the words. This has been entirely my experience. I have lived with Celan since my late teens (which seems to have been a crucial moment at which many enthusiasts and experts encountered him.) I love and admire translations by dedicated translators such as Pierre Joris and John Felstiner, but in English Celan truly lives in me through the work of translator and poet Michael Hamburger, because that was the encounter from which everything else followed. There is always an encounter with Celan - there are many encounters and they persist and can last for a lifetime. He once wrote "I see no difference between a handshake and a poem," and this despite the extraordinarily personal and often mysterious nature of his work. 

In some way I think about Paul Celan and his words every day. I feel as though a small, dedicated area of my mind (or perhaps more accurately, my heart) is occupied with his poetry all the time, even if I may not have read him for a while. He influences my own poetry and beyond that, he takes me to a Celanworld of such unique specificity and beauty that it hurts. His words are a place where no one else had ever gone and where we can all go now, across the threshold. "Louder whirring. Nearer glow. This world and the other." (from 'Under a Picture', translated by Michael Hamburger)

Here are a few of his poems to read if you haven't before or if you wish to revisit him.

Death Fugue (translated by AZ Foreman)

Homecoming (translated by Michael Hamburger)

All Souls (translated by Michael Hamburger)

Corona (translated by Pierre Joris)

Aspen Tree (translated by Pierre Joris)

Image: Paul Celan's passport photo, 1938. Author unknown. 

Anselm Kiefer and Paul Celan at the Royal Academy

In recent weeks I've been reading Paul Celan again. I move in and out of the Celanian moments in my life (when I say "moments", these can last for weeks or months). I don't find it possible to read Celan all the time - I get tired and sad if I go on for too long, though his work can also be very clarifying in the right proportion. I have never been able to forget the comment by Michael Hamburger, one of Celan's most dedicated translators: "From the first my engagement with the work of Celan had been difficult and sporadic. Had it become a full-time occupation and specialisation, it could have driven me into suicide, as it did his friend and interpreter Peter Szondi."

Anyway, I have been reading John Felstiner's wonderful translations, and I have also finally started reading Felstiner's biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. I'm also about to dip (or dive) into Pierre Joris's new translations of Celan's later works, Breathturn into Timestead. But I came back to Celan this time most notably through the Anselm Kiefer exhibition currently showing at the Royal Academy in London, which will end in a few days.

For someone (me) who is mostly drawn to art created one hundred years ago or more, Kiefer's work seemed a bit alien and intimidating. In a post-World War II Germany he created controversial works touching provocatively on Nazi symbolism, and has otherwise explored the threads of German history, its influences, and its own influence on the world. Many of his works are massive in size, overwhelming. My way in, and my main reason for going to the exhibition, was the influence of Paul Celan's works.

Kiefer has many artworks directly inspired by Celan's poems and several of them were in the exhibition. The paintings Margarete and Sulamith, directly inspired by 'Deathfugue', appeared side by side. Next to them, on the wall, was John Felstiner's translation in full of 'Deathfugue' - this translation is particularly famous for how it daringly and effectively weaves lines of the original German in with the English translation. I was glad to see other people reading the poem attentively.


Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers


I really loved For Paul Celan: Stalks of the Night, among others. One of the "lead book" works, Black Flakes, I also found especially striking:

Anselm Kiefer, Black Flakes. Private collection, c/o Museum Kuppersmuhle fur Moderne Kunst. Photo Privatbesitz Famille Grothe/copyright Anselm Kiefer



This painting is embedded with an enormous lead book and it features lines from the poem 'Black Flakes', a particularly heart-wrenching poem Celan wrote after the loss of his mother, from which he never recovered.


Autumn bled all away, Mother, snow burned me through:
I sought out my heart so it might weep, I found - oh the summer's breath,
it was like you.
Then came my tears. I wove the shawl.

(translation by John Felstiner)


I find it difficult to write about visual art, and you will find far more thorough reviews of the exhibition elsewhere. But there were a couple of things I thought particularly worth noting.

The size of many of these works is such that it has a very immersive effect. With works such as Black Flakes, I had a feeling that Kiefer had directly transferred the broken, scratchy, beautiful images in his mind directly onto the canvas. I find it very interesting to think about the pictures in others' minds, and I have sometimes asked people to describe how they "see" their consciousness, the mind's eye, the film inside your head, however you want to describe it. Mine is a mix of constant palimpsest film-reels, often with music or with words faintly (or clearly) heard, sometimes with the written words themselves. Perhaps nothing unusual, but I have a feeling that this is different for everyone. These works were so enveloping that I seemed to be seeing behind the artist's eyes. This was an especially fascinating impression because of my feeling that Celan's poems are transferring the images in his mind directly onto the page, in a way that few other poems achieve.

The other thing is that some of Kiefer's works produced a strange aural impression on me. The gallery wasn't empty and it was far from silent in there, but when I looked at some of the canvases, including the Celan works, I seemed to hear a rustling. I don't know why and I wouldn't say it necessarily represented anything, but it is very unusual for me to have aural impressions when I look at works of art. I had a confused feeling that the rustling I "heard" was something to do with the sounds of silence.

Ilya Kaminsky's 'Author's Prayer': "The Darkest Days Must I Praise"

I saw/heard Ilya Kaminsky read at Poetry Parnassus and it was definitely one of the outstanding moments of the festival for me. Here is a picture from his reading (as usual, apologies for the unimpressive quality - I promise I'll get a new camera one of these days):

I had only just bought his collection Dancing In Odessa when I realised that he was taking the stage in the Clore Ballroom - the timing could not have been more perfect. He apologised for his strong Russian accent, then launched into his poems. I don't remember for certain which other ones he read, but one of them was definitely 'Envoi':


What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts,
the birds force themselves into my lines -
the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats.

(from 'Envoi')


His voice was as though a wave had crashed into the audience; my impression was that people first looked a bit shocked, then amused, then moved. "Passionate" doesn't entirely describe it. Kaminsky, just a couple of years older than I am, lost most of his hearing after an illness at the age of four, and I had a strange sense that this had partially trapped his voice in amber and preserved it in a way that might not otherwise have happened. He has written a long series of poems, Deaf Republic, in part about the experience of deafness.

Kaminsky is originally from Odessa, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His family came to the United States when he was a teenager and he started writing poetry in English when he hardly knew the language. His work was soon championed by an incredible array of poets - in the Acknowledgements to Dancing In Odessa, he gives thanks to the likes of Carolyn Forché, John Felstiner, Louise Glück and Robert Pinsky. Dancing In Odessa is an amazingly impressive and passionate collection, with a flow which suggests that it was written almost as a continuous sequence of poems. Kaminsky explores his family's history and identity, immigrant and refugee experience, and the voices of great Russian and Jewish poets. He sees Paul Celan as he might have been: "His face had an imprint of laughter on it, as if no other emotion ever touched his skin." In 'Elegy for Joseph Brodsky', he writes:


We come back to where we have committed a crime,
we don't come back to where we loved, you said;
your poems are wolves nourishing us with their milk.

(from 'Elegy for Joseph Brodsky')


The poem I particularly wanted to write about was 'Author's Prayer', which stands on its own and has become famous:


AUTHOR'S PRAYER (Ilya Kaminsky)


This secular-spiritual prayer immediately made me think of 'poetry of witness', which Carolyn Forché has explored so intensively. The opening lines invoke Yeats:


If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body


In 'Sailing to Byzantium', Yeats wrote of his heart being "fastened to a dying animal". Yeats, with his interest in mysticism, wrote in the Byzantium poems about immortality, the supremacy of art and made things outliving humans, so he may have meant this in a fairly literal manner. However, both Yeats and Kaminsky seem to be touching on a crucial and sensitive area in poetry and art; the negation of self, or at least the diminishing of its importance. Yeats, an incredibly personal poet who constantly drew on his own life experiences in the most explicit way, still created something far more universal than the details of one man's life. His ego and life history became subsumed into something greater and more lasting.

Kaminsky, who writes about speaking for the dead so that "the white flag of their surrender" will not be raised, also explores details of his own life and his family's; but again, this seems to be more about bearing witness than about personal testimony, although there is an element of that, as well. He lives "as a blind man/who runs through rooms without/touching the furniture", and speaks "in a language not mine". All of this entails sacrifice, with the idea that it will allow a breakthrough to something greater, for the author and for the readers, and for all who need witness borne to their experiences.

I met Kaminsky very briefly after his reading and he signed the book for me. There was something very friendly and very warm about his demeanour and I've also had that impression from interviews which I have subsequently read. He seems to appreciate the benefits he has gained from the very difficult experiences he has undergone in his life, especially at a young age. In a Maintenant series interview about a year ago, he said: "I don’t think there exists a poet on this planet without a duality. Duality is a mother of metaphors. And, if coming into a different reality by stepping on a different shore, propels a poet into more duality, a poet should only be grateful."

Paul Celan, Ursula Le Guin, and the Rose

This work of art is by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish Art Nouveau designer and artist who was known for his stylised depictions of roses.

For some time, my subconscious mind has been working on a connection between Ursula Le Guin, the great American writer of science fiction and fantasy, and Paul Celan, who needs little introduction on this poetry blog. The connection came through a short story by Le Guin from the 1970s called 'The Diary of the Rose', which appears in a collection titled The Compass Rose. The story is about a totalitarian society where an obedient and repressed "psychoscopist" named Rosa works on patients who are apparently mentally ill, but who are plainly just considered a liberal or democratic threat by the government. She is assigned to a patient named Flores Sorde, which may be transliterated as "deaf flowers", or perhaps more accurately in the context of the story, "muffled" or "voiceless" flowers.

In the world of this story, psychoscopists are able to use sophisticated equipment to literally see the innermost workings of a patient's mind, as visual images. In the complex, multi-layered mind of Flores Sorde, she sees a vivid image of a rose.


I have never seen any psychoscopic realisation, not even a drug-induced hallucination, so fine and vivid as that rose. The shadows of one petal on another, the velvety damp texture of the petals, the pink color full of sunlight, the yellow central crown - I am sure the scent was there if the apparatus had olfactory pickup - it wasn't like a mentifact but a real thing rooted in the earth, alive and growing, the strong thorny stem beneath it. (from 'The Diary of the Rose')


Flores Sorde is showing something to Rosa that she vitally needs to know. She sees it, but the breakthrough is not enough to save either of them.

In the poems of Paul Celan, images of plants and growing things recur, and especially the rose. One of his most famous collections is called Die Niemandsrose, or The No-One's Rose. This title is taken from a poem called 'Psalm', which may be found (among others) in translation by John Felstiner, on this link (scroll down almost to the bottom to find this poem in particular):


PSALM (Paul Celan)


(The link is on the New York Times website and seems to be giving some trouble: if you can't access it, I suggest doing a search for "Paul Celan", "Psalm" and "John Felstiner" and you should be able to find the link and access it that way.)

Through this story by Ursula Le Guin, I understood something about what Celan was doing. His poems are abstract and surreal, so often, but what we are "seeing" when we read his poems is a direct projection, from his tortured mind, of the rose. Which is, of course, much more than a rose.

Poetry is so often about access: more direct than in so many other art forms, and that is why it takes us closer to the truth. Le Guin's 'The Diary of the Rose', and Celan's 'Psalm', and other of Celan's poems, are in part about access to the mind and heart - its dangers and its revelatory blessings. I don't know if Le Guin (who is also a poet) has read Celan, but it doesn't even matter. The connection is there and is entirely real, in any case.

Paul Celan's 'With a Variable Key': Language Beyond Loss

(Photo source: www.auschwitz.org)


WITH A VARIABLE KEY (Paul Celan - translated by Michael Hamburger)


With a variable key
you unlock the house in which
drifts the snow of that left unspoken.
Always what key you choose
depends on the blood that spurts
from your eye or your mouth or your ear.

You vary the key, you vary the word
that is free to drift with the flakes.
What snowball will form round the word
depends on the wind that rebuffs you.


(Paul Celan, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle. © 1955 Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH. English translation © Michael Hamburger, taken from Poems of Paul Celan (Third edition, 2007), Anvil Press Poetry. Reprinted by kind permission of the publishers and the estate of Paul Celan.)


It has taken me some time to get to the point of writing this entry, though it has been on my mind for months. This was partly because it took a little while to seek permission to reproduce 'With a Variable Key' in this entry, which I am very grateful to have received. Mainly, I knew that it would be a difficult entry to write, so I have been avoiding it.

In a previous entry about the work of Paul Celan in my life, I mentioned that I had started reading him about fifteen years ago, but that until late 2010 it had been a slow process, rather like walking in the dark. I simply had not put in the effort required to find my way in, and perhaps the timing had not been right until then. In the end, 2011 was the year when Celan really opened up to me.

I am sure that I had read 'With a Variable Key' earlier, but maybe only in passing, like so many of the other poems. It was also in 2011 that I finally realised what I was seeing when I read the poem. It was the gas chamber which I had walked through on my visit to Auschwitz in 2008, with the door open and snow drifting through.

My visit to Auschwitz was part of a quick weekend trip to Krakow, a city that I had wanted to see for a long time. It was very much what I had hoped for; beautiful, friendly, relaxed and mysterious. Auschwitz is nearby, and I had never visited a concentration camp. I felt that it was something that I should do, and I had tried to prepare myself mentally. I was travelling alone and booked onto a tour.

Auschwitz must be a very different experience for different people. Some go for historical interest, some to bear witness, some because they have a personal connection. My connection is not personal, but is still significant. I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses, who were also targeted by the Nazi regime - about 10,000 were imprisoned, and 2,500 to 5,000 died. A relatively small number of Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to Auschwitz, while more were imprisoned in camps such as Dachau.

While the tour at Auschwitz was largely about the experiences of the Jews - quite rightly - I was very pleased to find a book in the bookshop about the experiences of the Witnesses in the camp. I was also touched to find, in a one-on-one conversation at the end of my tour, that my tour guide was also a Witness. The experience necessarily led me to reflect on my own convictions. The Witnesses had the option to sign a declaration renouncing their faith and to be freed, but very few took up this option. I needed to reflect on my faith and my own stand, if I had been born in a different country or at a different time.

I know that some of the people who I saw touring Auschwitz had closer and more directly personal connections. I remember the distress on the face of a crying woman in the room where mounds of human hair sit behind glass walls. There was also a group of young people carrying an Israeli flag. I wondered about the other people I saw, what connection they might have, or if they simply wanted to learn and remember.

I couldn't forget Auschwitz, although some days later I realised that I almost wanted to. I think that it is natural when visiting such a horrible place to go into a kind of low-level shock. It was only days or weeks later that I was aware how painful it had been for me to visit the camp, and how it would leave a lasting mark on me.

Paul Celan is often referred to as a "Holocaust poet", or even the greatest of the Holocaust poets. In large part, this is due to the fame of  Death Fugue, an extraordinary and frightening poem which at the same time is not very representative of Celan's style. There are those who think that calling him a Holocaust poet is the wrong approach; that he must be read from a linguistic perspective, or that he should be read alongside the work of philosopher and critical theorist Jacques Derrida, who himself wrote about Celan.

My view is that Celan should be for everyone who can find their way to see through his beautiful, terrible, obliterating vision. I do not believe in closing off the work of an essential poet to those who may not have read all the right theorists (although these approaches could add extremely valuable dimensions). Holocaust poet, philosopher, linguistic genius: Celan is all of these, and all of his readers will probably find a particular aspect to focus on. My own approach to most poetry, and certainly to a poet like Celan, is partly intellectual, but largely emotional. Celan demands persistence and attention, which I was finally able to give; then his work begins to interpret itself. It was then that I really started to realise the strength of what I was dealing with.

Celan certainly did not only write about pain and genocide. He also wrote poems about love and sex ('Corona'), about friendship ('Zurich, the Stork Inn', written for Nelly Sachs), and other subjects. However, his principal themes seem to have been trauma and its aftermath, and how language provides both access and obstruction in the face of such difficulties. Famously, he said of language after the Holocaust:


Reachable, near and not lost, there remained amid the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, "enriched" by all this. (Bremen Prize speech, 1958. Translated by John Felstiner)


Celan had to go on writing in German, as it was his first language and his poetic language. But in his poems, it is a wounded and fragmented language, reflecting the fact that he was himself wounded and fragmented. He lost his parents in the Holocaust, and although he would not speak much of his own experiences in labour camps, it must have been dehumanizing and frightening. Some of his poems explicitly convey imagery of the mass murder of the Jews. In 'With a Variable Key', "the blood that spurts/from your eye or your mouth or your ear" is a realistic description of what happened to the gas chamber victims. In the poem, it is literal, but it also symbolises the various pain of people in various situations, and Celan tells us to choose the key and the word carefully to confront our own version of suffering. A number of poems are also more or less explicit:


Handled already, Lord,
clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.

Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.

(from 'Tenebrae', translated by Michael Hamburger)


[...] heavily
encamped in the shallows, their bodies
piled up into thresholds, embankments [...]

(from 'In the air', translated by Michael Hamburger)


More often, though, the imagery is indirect, and equally if not even more striking:


Eyes, world-blind, in the fissure of dying: I come,
callous growth in my heart.
I come.

(from 'Snow-bed', translated by Michael Hamburger)


I have realised that for me, the images in Celan's poems are so often like the tangible evidence of a psychic wound that cannot heal. How he does this through his pictures of minerals, plants and stars, I am not sure. It is as though he knew the pressure points for pain and loss. I suppose this is why I have to pace myself when I read his poems. I tend to end up feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, though also moved and exhilarated. Michael Hamburger said of translating Celan: "From the first my engagement with the work of Celan had been difficult and sporadic. Had it become a full-time occupation and specialisation, it could have driven me into suicide, as it did his friend and interpreter Peter Szondi." I was shocked when I first read this, but I have found that Celan does not merely show you his trauma - when you pay attention, he takes you inside it. The close engagement with his work - work which witnesses to extreme suffering - required by a translator would at least be very tiring, and potentially dangerous, I think.

E M Cioran, who knew Celan, wrote: "He clung to his biases against one person or another, he sustained his mistrust, all the more so because of his pathological fear of being hurt, and everything hurt him... [H]e lived in fear of disappointment or outright betrayal. His inability to be detached or cynical made his life a nightmare." This is merely confirmation of the testimony of the poems. It is quite obvious that Celan's nerves were permanently raw, that he was suffering a great deal and that his pain eventually led him to suicide.

So, why do I read Celan - why do I find him essential? In a purely poetic sense, he is totally unique: spare and surreal, incredibly precise. Once the reader finds his or her way into these poems, and sees how they reflect and complement and interpret each other, there is a real excitement about tackling the body of work. And Celan was brave. He knew what he was up against. He was an extremely sensitive being who had to deal with loss and feelings of guilt every day of his life after his parents' disappearance and eventual death. He bore witness, to his own personal experience and more broadly to the experiences of the Jewish people and of all innocents who suffer. "Noone/bears witness for the/witness", says Pierre Joris's translation of 'Ashglory' - but he did. He refused to be driven out of the homeland of his own language. He made it his own, almost its own language. Reading Celan has made me wish I understood more than a tiny amount of German. Translated works tend to fill me with anxiety, but I became aware a long time ago that I would rather see Celan's vision through a glass darkly than not at all.

What I find hard is the knowledge of how much Celan must have suffered. This also leads me through to the wider experience. At Auschwitz, what upset me the most was the mountain of suitcases. There were thousands, but I saw the individual names and addresses written on the suitcases, one by one. Then, beyond that, I saw the thousands.

Paul, I love your work, but I wish you could have been an ordinary man with a happy life, even if we had lost all of the poems.