THE NEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 23, 2020 75
God’s image? The poem’s image of hu-
manity as a flower echoes the blood of
“Tenebrae”: “the corona red / from the
scarlet-word, that we sang / above, O
above / the thorn.”
Some critics have seen the fractured
syntax of Celan’s later poems as em-
blematic of his progressively more frag-
ile mental state. In the late fifties, he
became increasingly paranoid after a
groundless plagiarism charge, first lev-
elled against him in 1953, resurfaced. In
his final years, he was repeatedly hos-
pitalized for psychiatric illness, some-
times for months at a time. “No more
need for walls, no more need for barbed
wire as in the concentration camps. The
incarceration is chemical,” he told Daive,
who visited him in the hospital. Daive’s
memoir sensitively conjures a portrait
of a man tormented by both his mind
and his medical treatment but who
nonetheless remained a generous friend
and a poet for whom writing was a mat-
ter of life and death. “He loves words,”
Daive writes, recalling the two of them
working together on translations in Ce-
lan’s apartment. “He erases them as if
they should bleed.”
R
eading Celan’s poems in their total-
ity makes it possible to see just how
frequently his key words and themes recur:
roses and other plants; prayer and blas-
phemy; the word, or name, NoOne. (I
give it here in Joris’s formulation, although
Celan used the more conventional struc-
ture Niemand, without the capital letter
in the middle.) As Joris writes, Celan in-
tended his poems to be read in cycles
rather than one at a time, so that the
reader could pick up on the patterns. But
he did not intend for four books to be
read together in a single volume. The
poems, in their sheer number and diffi-
culty, threaten to overwhelm, with the
chorus drowning out the distinct impact
of any particular poem.
Joris, whose language sometimes
tends toward lit-crit jargon, acknowl-
edges that his primary goal as transla-
tor was “to get as much of the complex-
ity and multiperspectivity of Celan’s
work into American English as possi-
ble,” not to create elegant, readable ver-
sions. “Any translation that makes a
poem sound more accessible than (or
even as accessible as) it is in the origi-
nal will be flawed,” he warns. This is
certainly true, but I wish that Joris had
made more of an effort to reproduce the
rhythm and music of Celan’s verse in
the original, rather than focussing so
single-mindedly on meaning and tex-
ture. When the poems are read aloud
in German, their cadence is inescapable.
Joris’s translation may succeed in get-
ting close to what Celan actually meant,
but something of the experience of read-
ing the poetry is lost in his sometimes
workaday renderings.
Still, Joris’s extensive commentary is
a gift to English readers who want to
deepen their understanding of Celan’s
work. Much of the later poetry is un-
intelligible without some knowledge of
the circumstances under which Celan
wrote and of the allusions he made. In
one famous example, images in the late
poem “You Lie Amid a Great Listen-
ing” have been identified as referring to
the murders of the German revolution-
aries Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Lux-
emburg and to the execution of the con-
spirators who tried to assassinate Hitler
in 1944. The philosopher Hans-Georg
Gadamer argued that the poem’s con-
tent was decipherable by any reader with
a sufficient background in German cul-
ture and that, in any event, the back-
ground information was secondary to
the poem. J. M. Coetzee, in his essay
“Paul Celan and His Translators,” count-
ers that readers can judge the signifi-
cance of that information only if they
know what it is, and wonders if it is
“possible to respond to poetry like Ce-
lan’s, even to translate it, without fully
understanding it.”
Celan, I think, would have said that
it is. He was annoyed by critics who called
his work hermetic, urging them to simply
“keep reading, understanding comes of
itself.” He called poems “gifts—gifts
to the attentive,” and quoted the seven-
teenth-century philosopher Nicolas Male-
branche: “Attention is the natural prayer
of the soul.” Both poetry and prayer use
words and phrases, singly or in repeti-
tion, to draw us out of ourselves and to-
ward a different kind of perception. Flip-
ping from the poems to the notes and
back again, I wondered if all the infor-
mation amounted to a distraction. The
best way to approach Celan’s poetry may
be, in Daive’s words, as a “vibration of
sense used as energy”—a phenomenon
that surpasses mere comprehension.
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