Politics, language, poetic strategies

Hinrich Kuhls kls at mail.online-club.de
Tue Jan 9 13:14:47 PST 2001



>I tried to explain [...] that politics
>and language were closely intertwined

WITH A CHANGING KEY Paul Celan

With a changing key you unlock the house where the snow of what's silenced drifts. Just like the blood that bursts from your eye or mouth or ear, so your key changes.

Changing your key changes the word that may drift with the flakes. Just like the wind that rebuffs you, packed round your word is the snow.

<http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/celan-selected.html>

Review article on recently published poems by Paul Celan:

A POET AT WAR WITH HIS LANGUAGE A German-speaking Romanian Jew needed new and different poetic strategies.

By MARK M. ANDERSON

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation,'' Robert Frost once said, without explaining why it is that certain great poets get translated over and over again. With its fragmented words, multilingual puns and recondite allusions, the verse of Paul Celan -- arguably the greatest European poet in the postwar period -- hovers on the edge of untranslatability. And yet, despite an Everest of difficulties, translators have repeatedly felt compelled to bring Celan's dark laments into English, especially his hauntingly melodic poem ''Deathfugue,'' with its searing evocation of Jewish prisoners forced by the Nazis to play music at their own executions.

[...]

In ''Glottal Stop,'' the translators Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov (she is a poet, he is a professor of comparative literature) take greater risks than either Joris or Felstiner but the poetic rewards are incomparably greater, at times breathtaking. One senses the originality of Celan's language in an English that is resourceful and adventurous, not strained. Language comes alive on the page as both vision and sound: ''Voices, scored into / the waters' green./ When the kingfisher dives, / the split second whirs.''

[...]

[skipping to the last paragraph of an interesting article:]

Himself a gifted and prolific translator of poetry, Celan once famously compared a poem to ''a message in a bottle, sent out in the ... belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps.'' Against Frost's warning that poetry cannot be exported out of its local idiom, the polyglot exile Celan cannot imagine poetry that is not itself already in motion, caught in a condition of wandering between borders and languages and historical epochs...

Full article at: <http://www10.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/reviews/001231.31anderst.html>



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