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Paul Celan, Breathturn. (Bilingual edition). Translated from the German and with an Introduction by Pierre Joris. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995.
Pierre Joris's translations of Atemwende were made over a period of seventeen years: how persistent does a translator have to get? Meanwhile, even before Celan's suicide in 1970, there had been the pioneering translations by Cid Corman, Michael Hamburger joachim Neugroschel and others. There had also been a wave, cresting in about 1976, of brilliant studies commenting on the original cryptic poems,
early or late, exegetic micro-analyses, themselves abstruse, of some of the most obscure writings since Mallarmé to have been academically classified as fresh growths in the Gongora tradition. Even then, what is it all about? Exegetes have certainly "confiscated" Celan, but his poems still stick, barbed, actual and enigmatic, in the imaginations of poets and connoisseurs around the globe: a poetry as utterly remote from the sprawling, bland or strident, linearity of "open mike" confessions as Charles Köchlin's piano is from that of Keith Jarrett.
Pierre Joris's introduction to his bilingual and annotated Breathturn clears a shining path through the thicket of critical opinion which has been gathering around Celan since the mid-1960s. Recently, both biographical and intellectual contexts have been clarified for English-language readers, first by Jerry Glenn, now by Amy Colin (Holograms of Darkness, 199D and John Felstiner (Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, 1995). Much that has been hidden has been revealed in these two books: Celan's origins in Czemovitz, his literary and social antecedents, his beginnings as a poet, his identification (deepened by translation) with other poets, Essenin for one, but much more fundamentally Mandelstam, his paranoia (above and beyond the appalling contretemps with Claire GoIl), his alliance with Henri Michaux. Other aspects come to the fore in Celan's correspondence with Nelly Sachs, the translation of which was published by Sheep Meadow: Nelly Sachs (1886-1970), whose splendid later poems were, surely, inspired by her feeling for Celan, died only a few months after his suicide. - But is Paul Celan, the poet alone, such a Titan? Do his "polyperspectival" later poems (beginning 1963) actually speak, or is this some Vygotskyan "inner speech," in a series of oracles tortuously pronounced from what Celan himself called "word-caves"? Inevitably the...