72 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
speech.” Celan cleansed the language
by breaking it down, bringing it back
to its roots, creating a radical strange
ness in expression and tone. Drawing
on the vocabulary of such fields as bot
any, ornithology, geology, and mineral
ogy, and on medieval or dialect words
that had fallen out of use, he invented
a new form of German, reconceiving
the language for the world after Ausch
witz. Adding to the linguistic layers, his
later works incorporate gibberish as well
as foreign phrases. The commentaries
accompanying his poetry in the defini
tive German edition, some of which
Joris includes in his translation, run to
hundreds of pages.
No translation can ever encompass
the multiplicity of meanings embedded
in these hybrid, polyglot, often arcane
poems; the translator must choose an
interpretation. This is always true, but
it is particularly difficult with work as
fundamentally ambiguous as Celan’s.
Joris imagines his translations as akin to
the medical diagrams that reproduce
crosssections of anatomy on plastic over
lays, allowing the student to leaf forward
and backward to add or subtract levels
of detail. “All books of translations should
be such palimpsests,” he writes, with
“layers upon layers of unstable, shifting,
tentative, otherlanguaged versions.”
Joris has already translated Celan’s
final five volumes of poetry in a col
lection that he called “Breathturn Into
Timestead” (2014), incorporating words
from the titles of the individual books.
The appearance of “Memory Rose Into
Threshold Speech,” coinciding with
the centennial of Celan’s birth, as well
as with the fiftieth anniversary of his
death—he drowned himself in the Seine,
one rainy week in April—now brings
into English all the poems, nearly six
hundred, that the poet collected during
his lifetime, in the order in which he
arranged them. (The exception is Ce
lan’s first collection, published in Vi
enna in 1948, which printing errors forced
him to withdraw; he used some of those
poems in his next book.) Not only are
many poems available in English for
the first time but English readers also
now have the opportunity to read Ce
lan’s individual collections in their en
tirety, as he intended them to be read.
What Celan demands of his reader, Joris
has written, is “to weave the threads of
the individual poems into a text that is
the cycle or book of poems. The poet
gives us the threads: we have to do the
weaving—an invitation to a new kind
of reading.”C
elan grew up with a multilingual
ism natural to a region where bor
ders were erased and redrawn like pen
cil lines. “It was a landscape where both
people and books lived,” he recalled.
After a few years at a Hebrew grade
school, he attended Romanian high
schools, studying Italian, Latin, and
Greek, and immersing himself in Ger
man literary classics. On November 9,
1938, the date now known as Kristall
nacht, he was on his way to France, where
he intended to prepare for medical stud
ies. His train passed through Berlin as
the pogrom was taking place, and he
later wrote of seeing smoke that “already
belonged to tomorrow.”
After Celan returned to Czernowitz
for the summer, the outbreak of the Sec
ond World War trapped him there. He
enrolled in Romance studies at the local
university, which he was able to con
tinue under Soviet occupation the fol
lowing year. All that came to an end on
July 6, 1941, when German and Romanian
Nazi troops invaded. They burned the
city’s Great Synagogue, murdering nearly
seven hundred Jews within three days
and three thousand by the end of August.
In October, a ghetto was created for Jews
who were allowed to remain temporarily,
including Celan and his parents. The
rest were deported.
“What the life of a Jew was dur
ing the war years, I need not mention,”
Celan later told a German magazine.
(When asked about his camp experi
ence, Celan would respond with a sin
gle word, “Shovelling!”) His parents were
deported during a wave of roundups in
June, 1942. It is unclear where Celan was
on the night of their arrest—possibly in
a hideout where he had tried to persuade
them to join him, or with a friend—but,
when he came home in the morning,
they were gone. His reprieve lasted only
a few weeks: in July he was deported to
a labor camp in the south of Romania.
A few months later, he learned of his
father’s death. His mother was shot the
following winter. Snow and lead, sym
bols of her murder, became a constant
in his poetry.“Deathfugue,” with its unsettling, in
cantatory depiction of a concentration
camp, was first published in 1947, in a
Bucharest literary magazine. One of the
bestknown works of postwar German
literature, it may have persuaded Theo
dor Adorno to reconsider his famous
pronouncement that writing poetry after
Auschwitz was “barbaric.” Felstiner called
it “the ‘Guernica’ of postwar European
literature,” comparing its impact to Wil
fred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” or
Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” The camp in the
poem, left nameless, stands for all the
camps, the prisoners’ suffering depicted
through the unforgettable image of
“black milk”:
Black milk of morning we drink you
evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we
drink you at night
we drink and we drink
we dig a grave in the air there one lies
at easeIn phrases that circle back around in
fuguelike patterns, the poem tells of a
commandant who orders the prisoners
to work as the camp orchestra plays:
“He calls out play death more sweetly
death is a master from Deutschland/
he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly
then as smoke you’ll rise in the air.” The
only people named are Margarete—the
commandant’s beloved, but also the her
oine of Goethe’s “Faust”—and Shulamit,
a figure in the poem whose name stems
from the Song of Songs and whose “ashen
hair” contrasts with Margarete’s golden
tresses. The only other proper noun is
“Deutschland,” which many translators,
Joris included, have chosen to leave in
the original. “Those two syllables grip
the rhythm better than ‘Germany,’” Fe l
stiner explained.
Each of his early poems, Celan wrote
to an editor in 1946, was “accompanied
by the feeling that I’ve now written my
last poem.” The work included an elegy
in the form of a Romanian folk song—
“Aspen tree, your leaves gaze white into
the dark. / My mother’s hair ne’er turned
white”—and lyrics and prose poems in
Romanian. He also adopted the name
Celan, an anagram of “Ancel,” the Roma
nian form of Antschel. After two years
working as a translator in Bucharest, he
left Romania and its language for good.
“Only in the mother tongue can one
speak one’s own truth,” he told a friend