I remember that when I was twenty, a poem really shook me to my core. It was Death Fugue, the most famous poem by Paul Celan. I was studying in Sarajevo and lived near the Jewish Cemetery, above the city bypass that ran along the route of the former narrow-gauge railway. Sometimes I would go for a walk through the Jewish Cemetery. I would stand above the Sephardic tombstones and instead of praying, I would recite Celan's verses to myself. They were actually the only prayer I knew by heart.
"We drink the black milk of dawn in the evening
we drink it at noon and in the morning we drink it at night
we drink we drink
"We dig a grave in the air where it's not cramped."
During those years, I came across various translations of the Death Fugue. A selection of Celan's poetry, named after this poem, was published in Niš in 1978. The translator was Zvonimir Kostić Palanski. In the preface by Mira Đorđević, I learned that the first translation in Yugoslavia was published by the Zagreb Germanist Viktor Žmegač, back in 1966. Truda Stamać also translated the Death Fugue into Croatian, and in 1985 included it in the anthology “Conversation about Trees: Ten Modern German Poets”.
I bought that book in one of Sarajevo's luxurious bookstores. The closest translation to me, whose rhythm I immediately felt, was the one signed by Zlatko Krasni in his "Anthology of Contemporary German Poetry", published in Novi Sad in 1989.
BLACK MILK OF WHAT?
I visited Auschwitz in the late 1980s. After that visit, I thought about human nature. Are we really just poorly disguised barbarians? I realized then, completely shocked by the mountain of women's hair that the criminals used to stuff mattresses, by the pile of children's shoes, that Paul Celan had found words for an unspeakable horror. And that he never named it. "Death is a master from Germany" is perhaps the most quoted line from that poem. And it is the only poem by Celan that mentions Germany.
Only later, when I myself had stepped deeply into the powerful mother tongue of the German language, did I read the original. I spoke the words in a low voice, trying to catch the unique rhythm. Then I heard a recording of Celan reading the poem. His German, with its slight Austrian accent, would remain his only homeland.
So, back in the 1983s, I realized that every translation, even a superb one, is just one of the possible interpretations of the original. A single word can illustrate this: “Die Frühe”. In the south of the German-speaking world, it is used quite colloquially to mean “early”, “early morning” or simply “morning”. The root of the meaning is “early”. However, we do not have the noun “earliness” or “earlyness”. The second volume of “Modern World Poetry” from XNUMX, edited by Raša Livada, included a translation by Branimir Živojinović, who translated this word as “prematurity”. In this way, he came closer to the German semantic layer that preserves “early”, but Celan’s entire refrain phrase received two extra syllables, and with the changed rhythm, it actually moved away from the original. “Black milk of prematurity” in Živojinović, or “Black milk of dawn” as translated by Zlatko Krasni, Zvonimir Kostić Palanski or Truda Stamać? In my private translation, I chose the word "dawn", although the related word "dawn" was also running through my head.
WHO WAS CELAN?
In Romanian, the surname Ančel is spelled Ancel. If you pronounce the word “šatrovacki”, and pronounce the last syllable first, you will get the surname Celan. Paul Ančel, who will be remembered in world poetry of the last century precisely for this artistic version of his surname as Paul Celan, was 25 years old at the end of World War II. But brutal history has made him an experienced old man. His origin is Jewish, the language of his family is German. The city of Chernivtsi, where he was born, has not moved from its place, but the borders have shifted with the vagaries of history. Kievan Rus, Moldova, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary – from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century – and then Romania after the First and Ukraine after the Second World War. Need I say that the capital of the historical province of Bukovina was multilingual and multi-confessional?
The city on the Prut River was called “Jerusalem on the Prut” or “Little Vienna”. Members of the large Jewish community in Bukovina often had Hebrew as the language of religion and German as the language of education. This was also the case with the family into which Celan was born. Father Leo Ancel-Tajtler and mother Friederike Schrager – everyone called her Fritzi – first sent their only son to a German school, later he switched to Hebrew. This language would much later be echoed in the verse of the song “In Prague”: “Hebrew of bones, ground into sperm…” The young Celan transferred to a Romanian school. After graduating in 1938, he began studying medicine in the French city of Tours, but soon returned to Czernowitz to begin studying Romance languages.
The agreement signed by Moscow and Berlin in August 1939 enabled the Soviet occupation of Bukovina. After Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, German and Romanian troops arrived in Czernowitz. The Jews were expelled to a ghetto. Celan's parents were soon deported to camps - his father died of typhus, and his mother was shot in the back of the head. He himself experienced hard forced labor - which saved him from imminent deportation. After the entry of Soviet troops into Czernowitz, Celan returned to his hometown and began studying English.
The news of the death of his parents, especially his mother, formed the core of his life's trauma. The remorse of conscience of the surviving Jews, who seemed ashamed in front of the dead, because in the midst of mass death they did not share the fate of the majority, did not bypass him either. In 1945 he arrived in Bucharest, worked in publishing, but in 1947 he left Romania, where Stalinization was intensifying. He first published his first book of poems, "Sand from the Urn," in Vienna, but due to a series of printing errors, he destroyed the entire circulation.
During those years, he had a love affair with Ingeborg Bahmann, another famous German-language poet. This love would leave its mark on Celan's poems such as "The Corona": "My gaze descends to the lineage of my beloved:/ we look at each other,/ we speak something dark,/ we love each other like darkness and memory,/ we sleep like wine in shells,/ like the sea in the bloody air of the moon."
In the summer of 1948, Celan settled in Paris. He translated from Romanian, Russian, and French. But he remained faithful to the German language. In 1952, he published one of the most important books in that language in the post-war period – Poppy and Memory.
DEAD MOTHER AND LIVING SONG
In the poem "Aspen..." Celan says: "Aspen, your leaves turn white in the dark./ My mother's hair never turned white."
Immediately afterwards: "Dandelion, that's how green Ukraine is./ My blonde mother didn't come home."
And in the third couplet, the rhythmic lament for the mother is repeated: "Rain cloud, do you hesitate before the wells?/ My silent mother cries for everything."
The contrast between nature and inner sadness becomes increasingly intense: "Round star, you tie a golden ribbon into a knot. / Lead has wounded my mother's heart."
Finally, there is the door – perhaps the door of a deserted home: “Oak door, who has lifted you from your hinges?/ My gentle mother cannot come.”
After Celan's death, poems from his legacy were also published. One of them is "The Wolfman". In it, he also addressed his mother. "Yesterday one of them came and killed you for the second time in my poem", the poet noted. "Mother, murderers lived there". "Mother, they write poems". A little further on: "Mother, they are silent". Or: "Mother, no one interrupts the murderers".
The poem was written on October 21, 1959. Here we come to an obsessive preoccupation with language, which in Celan's case is not only the language of his poetry, but also the language of his executioners. Celan will not find a way out of the duality of German as his poetic homeland and as the language of the evil fate that destroys his people and family. But he will manage to sing about this evil fate in the beautiful German language.
LANGUAGE AND NULLITY
Back in 1949, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno formulated a provocative thesis: "To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric."
A few years later, Paul Celan published Death Fugue and forced Adorno to revise his claim in the early 1960s: "The authentic artists of this time are those in whose works one feels the aftershock of ultimate horror."
Celan was such a poet. “Whatever word you utter – you thank ruin,” he wrote in the poem “Whatever stone you lift.” And in the poem “The Lattices of the Tongue,” after which he named a collection of poems, he makes his point with “two lumps of silence/ in our mouths.” After Auschwitz, a person’s singing is actually a constant struggle with the need to become silent. In the poem “Nobody’s Rose,” there is a poetic formulation of such a situation of constant gazing into the abyss of soundless nothingness: “The Rose of Nothing” is “with a crown red with the purple word that we sang above, oh above the thorn.”
He dedicated the poem “Tübingen, January” to Friedrich Hölderlin, one of the greatest German poets who lived at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The aging Hölderlin, in his spiritual eclipse towards the end of his life, uttered only incomprehensible words. Celan uses one of Hölderlin’s words, which his contemporaries wrote down, as his final verse: “Shoot, shoot.” It was as if he was suggesting that the path of contemporary poetry is a path into the incomprehensible.
Perhaps the poet felt that the world of man, the world of human horror, was irretrievably lost to poetry. In the poem "Thread of Sun" Celan finds a somewhat salutary formula: "There are still songs to sing beyond the people."
It's as if he's become a poetic program. From book to book, his poems, images, metaphors become less and less understandable.
GLORY AND DEATH
Celan was highly regarded and rewarded in post-war Germany. After his studies in Paris, he remained to live and work in France, and his books were published in Germany. On the occasion of the awarding of the Bremen City Literary Prize in 1958, Celan said, among other things:
"Achievable, close and unlost, this one thing remained amidst all the losses: language. Yes, it, language, remained unlost, despite everything. But it had to go through its own lack of response, go through a terrible muteness, go through thousands of darknesses of deadly speaking. It went through and did not give words for what was happening; but it went through that happening. It went through and dared to reveal itself again, 'enriched' by all these events.
"In that language, in those years and in later years, I tried to write poems: to speak, to orient myself, to figure out where I was and where I was going, to sketch reality for myself."
Two years later, he was awarded the most prestigious prize in the German-speaking world – the Georg Bühner. On that occasion, he read a text in which he said: “The poem shows, and this cannot be overlooked, a strong tendency towards silence”. In the text, he further described this tendency: “The poem keeps itself on the edge of itself”. Celan then describes the poem as a being that needs others: “The poem is lonely. It is lonely and on the way… The poem strives for someone else, it needs that other, it needs someone opposite it. It seeks him, it speaks about him. Every thing, every person is for the poem, which strives for the other, the image of this other”. Celan says that in this way the poem becomes a conversation: “It is often a desperate conversation”.
According to this poet, all literature is an endless discourse on mortality and futility. One of the greatest and most tragic poets of the German language, Paul Celan, surrendered to numbness and futility when he took his own life by jumping into the Seine 55 years ago, on April 20, 1970.
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