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In all interpretations of Paul Celan's poetry, "Meridian," the speech delivered in acceptance of the Buchner-prize in 1960, occupies the central position. This is due not only to its generic rarity (as Celan's longest prose text) but to at least three presuppositions. First, that the speech must be understood as an auto-poetological statement; second, that Celan is the best, or at least the most authentic, interpreter of his own poetry; third, that there exists a theoretical discourse that can seamlessly connect Celan's poetology to his poetic practice.
Despite their near universal acceptance, none of these is an unproblematic assumption. To begin with, the "Meridian" speech, like all acceptance speeches of the eponymous prize, is a speech about Georg Buchner. The recent "genetic" edition of the speech documents that Celan's interest in Buchner's writings antedates knowledge of being awarded the prize, and that he was familiar with the secondary literature on Buchner. 2 This interest is in itself remarkable, since a phalanx of prominent critics, such as Georg Lukacs, Karl Vietor, and Hans Mayer, whose work Celan knew, had proclaimed Buchner a realist-socialist writer -- not exactly a tradition for which Celan had ever professed much admiration. It was -- and still is -- the apparent distance between the Georg Buchner portrayed by contemporary criticism and Celan's own poetic project that has led interpreters to conclude that the "Meridian" speech must be about Celan himself. Is it legitimate, however, to assume that the notions of Dichtung [poetry] and of Begegnung [encounter] developed by Celan in this speech are associated with the name and work of Georg Buchner only by way of a specular self-relation?
2. Paul Celan, Der Meridian. Endfassung, Vorstufen, Materialien. Tubinger Ausgabe. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999) 256. All subsequent references to this edition cited parenthetically in the text as TCA.
While the clarification of this first assumption falls properly under the domain of philology, the second -- that Celan is his own best interpreter -- conjures up age-old questions in hermeneutic theory. The relationship of poetry to knowledge in general, and that of an author to his own work in particular, has led to controversies from Plato to Heidegger and beyond. In the German tradition in which Celan, more or less reluctantly, wrote,...