To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Monday, March 18, 2013

Three Poems by Paul Celan from Snowpart

Translated & annotated by Pierre Joris


 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



Ein Blatt, baumlos,
für Bertolt Brecht:

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 conversation
is nearly a crime,
because it includes
so much being spoken.

 
Playtime: die Fenster, auch sie,
lesen dir alles Geheime
heraus 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 secrecy
from 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.

 
Offene Glottis, Luftstrom,

der
Vokal, wirksam,
mit dem einen
Formanten,

Mitlautstöße, gefiltert
von weithin
Ersichtlichem,

Reizschutz: Bewußtsein,

unbesetzbar
ich und auch du,

überwahr-
heitet
das augen-, das
gedächtnisgierige rollende
Waren-
zeichen,

der Schläfenlappen intakt,
wie der Sehstamm.

Open Glottis, airstream,
the
vowel, effective,
with the one
formant,

consonant-thrusts, filtered                     
by clarity clear
from afar,

protection shield: consciousness

uncathectable
I and you too,

overtruth-
ed
the 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:

WAS said...

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.