Have been reading Paul Celan again, in Michael Hamburger translation. Like his introduction, too. Was led back here again after looking at a couple books by Michael Eskin (on Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelstam, Celan).
Feel strongly about all the Celan poetry. Even the early poems - with sort of a generic Surrealist/Trakl/Rilke/expressionist flavor (in translation, anyway) - really get to me. The early poems emanate something from adolescence - an atmosphere...
The later poems speak more clearly & simply, even in their difficulties... want to look into some aspects of Jewish messianism... & there is Celan's love for Mandelstam. Eskin quotes a letter saying that with Mandelstam he had a sense of "walking with the truth" (my inexact trans. from memory) as with nothing else - a brotherly feeling, an inspiration... & I know what he's talking about. I went through a very similar life-changing experience with Mandelstam (long before finding Celan).
Mandelstam wrote a famously (in "On the Interlocutor") about poetry as rooted in dialogue - but a conversation with an unknown reader in the future (the reader Celan felt himself to be). He likened the poem to a message in a bottle, tossed in the sea... & whoever finds the message is that unknown friend, that interlocutor...
It's a sort of "poetics" - the sense that the poet (in & through the poem) is speaking directly to you - you - whoever you are - are the destined recipient, who was meant to find it...
& this idea has a personal meaning for me, since my whole vocation in poetry pivots on a strange series of events way back in 1971-72, when I was 19-20 yrs old (which I've sketched out in various places on this blog, but should try to write up more thoroughly someday) - a disorienting psychic "encounter" with Shakespeare, when I had the uncanny experience of suddenly being addressed in person - across time & space - by Shakespeare himself, through his Sonnets - that I was the destined recipient.... an event so strange & actually frightening that I felt compelled to drop poetry altogether, to change my college major (from English to History), & eventually to start reading the Bible, as a sort of counterweight to what seemed to be moral/psychological disintegration - which decision only led me to even more shattering psychological (inner) experiences & uncanny synchronicities... - I became the loco-locus, the psychological carrier, of a sort of symbolic agon between those two primal literary Powers (Shakespeare, Bible)... so that eventually I had to drop out of college completely, for about 3 years, & wander hitchhiking around the US & London with Bible & guitar...
2 comments:
I'd wager you've already John Felstiner's superb "Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew," but just in case, let me recommend it here, most heartily. Not only because it's a great book on Celan & his work but also because it manages to really question what "literary biography" is at the same time.
Yes, thanks for reminding me, Edmond. I have that book around here somewhere - am going to take another look at it.
Yesterday I noticed in the bookstore a more recent paperback of Felstiner's Celan translations. Didn't like the layout or book design, unfortunately (too large). They don't seem to know how to design paperback books anymore. Will get it from the library.
Post a Comment