The New Yorker - USA (2020-11-23)

74 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020

cast its image into our eyes, Lord. / Eyes

and mouth gape, so open and empty,

Lord.” The poem ends on a couplet,

whether threatening or mournful, that

reverses the first: “Pray, Lord./We are

near.” A more searing indictment of God’s

absence during the Holocaust—a topic

of much analysis by theologians in the

decades since—can hardly be imagined.

Celan’s turn to a different kind of po­

etics was triggered in part by the mixed

response to his work in Germany, where

he travelled regularly to give readings.

Though he was welcomed by the public—

his audiences often requested “Death­

fugue”—much of the critical reaction

ranged from uncomprehending to out­

right anti­Semitic. Hans Egon Holthu­

sen, a former S.S. officer who became a

critic for a German literary magazine,

called the poem a Surrealist fantasia and

said that it “could escape the bloody

chamber of horrors and rise up into the

ether of pure poetry,” which appalled

Celan: “Deathfugue” was all too grounded

in the real world, intended not to escape

or transcend the horrors but to actualize

them. At a reading held at the Univer­

sity of Bonn, someone left an anti­ Semitic

cartoon on his lectern. Reviewing “Speech­

grille” for a Berlin newspaper, another

critic wrote that Celan’s “store of meta­

phors is not won from reality nor serves

it,” and compared his Holocaust poems

to “exercises on music paper.” To a friend

from his Bucharest days, Celan joked,

“Now and again they invite me to Ger­

many for readings. Even the anti­ Semites

have discovered me.” But the critics’ words

tormented him. “I experience a few slights

every day, plentifully served, on every

street corner,” he wrote to Bachmann.

P

oetry in German “can no longer speak

the language which many willing

ears seem to expect,” Celan wrote in 1958.

“Its language has become more sober,

more factual. It distrusts ‘beauty.’ It tries

to be truthful.... Reality is not simply

there, it must be searched and won.” The

poems he wrote in the next few years,

collected in “The NoOnesRose” (1963),

are dense with foreign words, technical

terms, archaisms, literary and religious

allusions, snatches from songs, and proper

names: Petrarch, Mandelstam, the Kab­

balist Rabbi Löw, Siberia, Kraków, Pet­

ropolis. In his commentary, Joris records

Celan’s “reading traces” in material rang­

a number of her most important poems;
after Celan’s suicide, she incorporated
others into her novel “Malina,” perhaps
to memorialize their love.
Most of Celan’s poems to Bachmann
were written in her absence: in July, 1948,
he went to Paris, where he spent the rest
of his life. Even in a new landscape, mem­
ories of the war were inescapable. The
Rue des Écoles, where he found his first
apartment, was the street where he had
lived briefly in 1938 with an uncle who
perished at Auschwitz. During the next
few years, he produced only a handful of
publishable poems each year, explaining
to a fellow­writer, “Sometimes it’s as if
I were the prisoner of these poems ...
and sometimes their jailer.” In 1952, he
married Gisèle Lestrange, an artist from
an aristocratic background, to whom he
dedicated his next collection, “Thresh­
old to Threshold” (1955); the cover of Jo­
ris’s book reproduces one of Lestrange’s
lithographs. The volume is haunted by
the death of their first child, only a few
days old, in 1953. “A word—you know:/a
corpse,” Celan wrote in “Pursed at Night,”
a poem that he read in public through­
out his life. “Speaks true, who speaks
shadows,” he wrote in “Speak, You Too.”
The poems in “Speechgrille” (1959)
show Celan moving toward the radical
starkness that characterized the last de­
cade of his work. There are sentence
fragments, one­word lines, compounds:
“Crowswarmed wheatwave,” “Heart­
time,” “worldblind,” “hourwood.” But
“Tenebrae,” the volume’s most effective
poem, is one of the simplest in syntax.
Celan compared it to a Negro spiritual.
It begins as a response to Hölderlin’s
hymn “Patmos,” which opens (in Rich­
ard Sieburth’s translation):

Near and

hard to grasp, the god.

Yet where danger lies,

grows that which saves.

There is no salvation in Celan’s poem,
which reverses Hölderlin’s trope. It is
the speakers—the inmates of a death
camp—who are near to God: “We are
near, Lord,/near and graspable.” Their
bodies are “clawed into each other,”
“windbent.” There is no mistaking the
anger in their voices. “Pray, Lord,/pray
to us,/we are near,” the chorus contin­
ues, blasphemously. The trough from
which they drink is filled with blood. “It

ing from the Odyssey to Gershom

Scholem’s essays on Jewish mysticism.

The French writer Jean Daive, who

was close to Celan in his last years—

and whose memoir about him, “Under

the Dome” (City Lights), has just ap­

peared in English, translated by Rosmarie

Waldrop—remembers him reading “the

newspapers, all of them, technical and

scientific works, posters, catalogues, dic­

tionaries and philosophy.” Other peo­

ple’s conversations, words overheard in

shops or in the street, all found their way

into his poetry. He would sometimes

compose poems while walking and dic­

tate them to his wife from a public phone

booth. “A poet is a pirate,” he told Daive.

“Zürich, Hotel Zum Storchen,” ded­

icated to the German­Jewish poet Nelly

Sachs, commemorates their first meet­

ing, in 1960, after they had been corre­

sponding for a number of years. Celan

travelled to Zurich to meet Sachs, who

lived in Sweden; she had received a Ger­

man literary prize, but refused to stay

in the country overnight. They spoke,

Celan writes, of “the Too Much... the

Too Little... Jewishness,” of something

he calls simply “that”:

There was talk of your God, I spoke

against him, I

let the heart I had

hope:

for

his highest, his death-rattled, his

contending word—

Celan told Sachs that he hoped “to be

able to blaspheme and quarrel to the

end.” In response, she said, “We just

don’t know what counts”—a line that

Celan fragmented at the end of his poem.

“ We/just don’t know, you know,/we/just

don’t know,/what/counts.”

In contrast to “Tenebrae,” which an­

grily addresses a God who is presumed

to exist, the theological poems in “The

NoOnesRose” insist on God’s absence.

“Psalm” opens,“NoOne kneads us again

of earth and clay,/noOne conjures our

dust./Noone.” It continues:

Praised be thou, NoOne...

A Nothing

we were, we are, we will

remain, flowering:

the Nothing-, the

NoOnesRose.

If there is no God, then what is man­

kind, theoretically, as he is, created in