THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 71
BOOKS
A WORD, A CORPSE
How Paul Celan reconceived language for a post-Holocaust world.
BY RUTH FRANKLIN
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA VENTURA
O
nce, while reading the poetry
of Paul Celan, I had an experi-
ence I can describe only as mystical.
It was about twenty years ago, and I
was working at a job that required
me to stay very late one or two nights
a week. On one of those nights, try-
ing to keep myself awake, I started
browsing in John Felstiner’s “Selected
Poems and Prose of Paul Celan.” My
eye came to rest on an almost impos-
sibly brief poem:
Once,
I heard him,
he was washing the world,
unseen, nightlong,
real.
One and infinite,
annihilated,
they I’d.
Light was. Salvation.
In a dream state or trance, I read the
lines over and over, instilling them per-
manently in my memory. It was as if
the poem opened up and I entered into
it. I felt “him,” that presence, whoever
he might be, “unseen” and yet “real.” The
poem features one of Celan’s signature
neologisms. In German, it’s ichten, which
doesn’t look any more natural than the
English but shows that we’re dealing
with a verb in the past tense, constructed
from ich, the first-person-singular pro-
noun—something like “they became
I’s,” that is, selves. The last line echoes
Genesis: “Let there be light.” As I re-
peated the poem, I suddenly understood
it—more, I felt it—as a vision of a sec-
ond Creation, a coming of the Messiah,
when those who have been annihilated
(the original is vernichtet, exterminated)
might be reborn, through the cleansing
of the world.
From his iconic “Deathfugue,” one
of the first poems published about the
Nazi camps and now recognized as a
benchmark of twentieth-century Euro-
pean poetry, to cryptic later works such
as the poem above, all of Celan’s poetry
is elliptical, ambiguous, resisting easy in-
terpretation. Perhaps for this reason, it
has been singularly compelling to crit-
ics and translators, who often speak of
Celan’s work in quasi-religious terms.
Felstiner said that, when he first encoun-
tered the poems, he knew he’d have to
immerse himself in them “before doing
anything else.” Pierre Joris, in the intro-
duction to “Memory Rose Into Thresh-
old Speech” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux),
his new translation of Celan’s first four
published books, writes that hearing
Celan’s poetry read aloud, at the age of
fifteen, set him on a path that he fol-
lowed for fifty years.
Celan, like his poetry, eludes the usual
terms of categorization. He was born Paul
Antschel in 1920 to German-speaking
Jewish parents in Czernowitz (now Cher-
nivtsi). Until the fall of the Habsburg
Empire, in 1918, the city had been the
capital of the province of Bukovina; now
it was part of Romania. Before Celan
turned twenty, it would be annexed by
the Soviet Union. Both of Celan’s parents
were murdered by the Nazis; he was im-
prisoned in labor camps. After the war,
he lived briefly in Bucharest and Vi-
enna before settling in Paris. Though
he wrote almost exclusively in German,
he cannot properly be called a German
poet: his loyalty was to the language,
not the nation.
“Only one thing remained reachable,
close and secure amid all losses: lan-
guage,” Celan once said. But that lan-
guage, sullied by Nazi propaganda, hate
speech, and euphemism, was not im-
mediately usable for poetry: “It had to
go through its own lack of answers,
through terrifying silence, through
Celan’s centennial, this year, is also the fiftieth anniversary of his suicide. the thousand darknesses of murderous
