Ein Blatt, baumlos,
Was sind das für
Zeiten,
wo ein Gespräch beinah ein Verbrechen ist,
weil es soviel Gesagtes
mit einschließt?
A leaf, treeless,
for Bertold
Brecht:
What times are
these
when a
conversationis nearly a crime,
because it includes
so much being spoken.
Playtime: die Fenster, auch sie,
lesen dir alles
Geheimeheraus aus den Wirbeln
und spiegelns
ins gallertäugige Drüben,
doch
auch hier, wo du die Farbe verfehlst, schert ein Mensch aus, entstummt,
wo die Zahl dich zu äffen versucht,
ballt sich Atem, dir zu,
gestärkt
hält die Stunde
inne bei dir, du sprichst,
du stehst,
den vergleichnisten Boten
aufs härteste über
an Stimme
an Stoff.
Playtime: the windows, they too,
read you all that
secrecyfrom your whirls
and mirror it
in the jelly-eyed beyond,
but
here too,where you miss the color, a human sheers off, unmuted,
where the number tries to ape you,
breath clots, toward you,
strengthened
the hour stops
next to you,you speak,
you stand,
most firm above
the parabelized messengers
by voice
by matter.
der
Vokal, wirksam, mit dem einen
Formanten,
Mitlautstöße,
gefiltert
von weithin Ersichtlichem,
Reizschutz:
Bewußtsein,
unbesetzbar
ich und auch du,
überwahr-
heitetdas augen-, das
gedächtnisgierige rollende
Waren-
zeichen,
der
Schläfenlappen intakt,
wie der Sehstamm.
Open Glottis, airstream,
thevowel, effective,
with the one
formant,
consonant-thrusts,
filtered
by clarity clearfrom afar,
protection
shield: consciousness
uncathectable
I and you too,
overtruth-
edthe eye-
the memory-greedy rolling
commodity
sign,
the temporal lobe
intact,
like the
visionstem.COMMENTARIES
Ein
Blatt | A leaf
Celan’s response to
Bertold Brecht’s poem “An die Nachgeborenen,” the second stanza of which asks:
What kind of times are these when
To talk about trees is nearly a crime,Because it avoids speaking of all that’s evil!
(my translation)
Playtime | Playtime
Allusion to “Playtime,” a 1967 film by Jacques Tati, in which American tourists visit a futuristic Paris. Many scenes are shot through windows and mirrors.
verses 2 to 5: Barbara Wiedemann [BW 849] suggests a possible connection to Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.2, where Horatio recalls the ghostly apparition: “ a figure like your father … Thrice he walked / by their oppress’d and fear-surprised eyes, / Within his truncheon’s length; while they, distill’d / Almost to jelly with the act of fear, / stand dumb and speak not to him. This to me / in dreadful secrecy impart they did.”
du stehst | you stand: see the importance of this stance as detailed throughout Celan’s work.
vergleichnisten | parabelized : Celanian neologism incorporating “vergleichen,” to compare, and “Gleichnis,” parable or allegory.
Offene
Glottis | Open Glottis
Composed on July 19
1968, one of 10 poems written that day. For all of those poems, as for the one
above, his reading of Walter Benjamin imports. The first draft sheet has
Benjamin quotes, and Benjamin quoting Freud on it. This poem can be read as a
poetological statement, or as his French translator Jean-Pierre Lefebvre puts
it, “a brief manifesto of Celan’s philosophy of language… [using] the
linguistic terminology of the 50s and 60s, strongly influenced by [Ferdinand
de] Saussure and [Emile] Benveniste.” [Part de neige, p. 140]Offene Glottis, airstream | Open glottis, airstream: Reading trace in Reichel/ Bleichert: “The narrowing (of the by quiet breathing open) glottis to a slit rests on the collaboration of the muscles of the larynx, that bring the arytenoid cartilage closer together… and tauten the vocal cords.” 9 p. 215)
formant | formant: any of several bands of frequency that determine the phonetic quality of a vowel. The spectral peaks of the sound spectrum |P(f)|’ of the voice [Gunnar Fant]. It also refers to the acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract, often measured as an amplitude peak if the frequency spectrum of a sound. [New Oxford American Dictionary]
Mitlautstöße | consonant-thrusts: In “Mitlaut” one probably hears the “mit” with and “laut” sound/ing better than in “consonant,” though of course our latinate term has the “con,” with, and “sonare,” to sound, and thus the same two meaning syllables. Reading trace in Reichel / Bleichert: “The very variable character of the consonants rest without exception on a typical form of the supraglottic air passages in mouth and nose, through which the air is blown spasmodically or more continuously.”
Reizschutz | protection shield: A term from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Celan underlined it, usually translated as “protection against stimulation [or stimuli].”
As Rainer Nagele, whose term “protection shield” I am using, writes: “Like his name, Freud’s vocabulary gives us no license to translate the poems into psychoanalytic theory. Yet we cannot discard the signals set by this vocabulary. We have to take the poem on its own terms, which includes the recognition that its ‘own terms’ are not entirely its own. We have to recognize the poem as a translation, not a translation of Freud’s text, but a translation like Freud’s text.” [Reading After Freud: Essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche …, p. 157]
[AN ADDITIONAL COMMENT. Joris, who is our great translator of Paul Celan, here adds notes & comments to what will be his translation of the collected later poems, scheduled for publication by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in early 2014. The foregoing affords a small taste of that and a sense, as needed, of the multiple sources behind the poems. (J.R.)]
1 comment:
These are heartbreaking poems and powerful translations. It’s so nice for me to see Celan again after I’ve been reading his brothers Holderlin and Rilke.
I read the last two lines of the first poem as “for what is said as much as / what is disclosed.”
“Jelly-eyed beyond” for “gallertäugige Drüben” is magnificent, but I interpret the second poem a touch differently, speaking to how identity is taken by reflection and the reading of reflection, and the poem as signifier of the reading other solidifies that loss, something to the effect of:
PLAYTIME: the windows, they too,
read you all that's secret
out of the spiral
and mirroring
the jelly-eyed beyond,
but
here too,
where you miss the color, a man swerves , unmuted,
where the number attempts to ape you,
clenches breath, itself, to you,
strengthening
the hour's hold on you,
you speak,
you stand,
the compared parable nests
again through the hardest
of voice
on substance.
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