Breathturn into Timestead (36 page)

ein Wahndock, / schwimmend, | a delusion-dock, / swimming: The notes also have the word
Schwimmdocks
(floating dock), on which the neologism is based.

die / Buchstaben der / Großkräne einen / Unnamen schreiben | the / letters of the / tower cranes write / an unname: Wiedemann, informed by Jürgen Köchel, indicates that the goliath cranes (
Portalkräne
in the notes) in the Hamburg harbor “consisted of an H-shaped structure topped by an A-shaped crane; the initials ‘AH' Celan could possibly have read as ‘Adolf Hitler,' certainly an ‘unname' for him” (
BW
, p. 733).

Laufkatze Leben: An untranslatable compound in which Celan obviously wants the reader to hear
Katze
(cat) and
Lauf
(run) as descriptive of
Leben
, but the word
Laufkatze
is clearly, given the poem's harbor geography, the technical apparatus called in English a “trolley” or “trolley hoist.” So far I have been unable to find an English equivalent that would render this meaning-complex in a satisfactory manner. Paratactic juxtaposition of both meanings seems the only way, combined with the female pronoun “she” rather than the expected “it.”

Ziehbrunnenwinde | draw well winch: An old reading trace locates the word
Ziehbrunnen
in Celan's copy of the translation of James Joyce's
Ulysses
, and in several poem fragments from that time.

eulenspiegelt | owlglasses: The play on
spiegeln
, “to mirror,” “to reflect,” and on the name Till Eulenspiegel, the Saxon
Narr
(fool), clear in German, does not translate well. The name has been translated as “Owlglass” in English versions of the tales and this seems to be here the best—or least deleterious—way of proceeding.

It may be noteworthy that Osip Mandelstam had been falsely accused of unethical translation practices close to plagiarism (as had Celan—see the Goll affair) in a 1928 scandal that came to be known as the Eulenspiegel affair, as it concerned the translation of the Belgian novelist Charles de Coster's novel of that title.

III

“Schwarz” | “Black”

August 3–9, 1964. First notes closely connect to the next two poems.

Kronland | crownland: Celan's homeland, the Bukovina, today part of Ukraine, was a (partly autonomous) crownland of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire.

“Hammerköpfiges” | “Anvilheadedness”

August 3–15, 1964. Lefebvre makes an interesting comment—valid for English as well as for French—concerning the translation of two terms in this poem, the neutral word
Hämmerköpfiges
and
Silbriges
, which, he writes, are “adjectives made into substantives that designate an apparent substantiality (that the proposed translation unhappily reduces into nouns—and thus into metaphors, which is not the status of the original terms)” (
RDS
, p. 92).

Hammerköpfiges | Anvilheadedness: The first drafts add the word
Wolken
, indicating the meteorological origin of the word, as “anvil clouds.” But the vocabulary quickly moves to horse-connected imagery, so that the first image of a possible “hammer-headed” horse cannot be excluded, thus:

Zeltgang | palfrey pace: The ability of certain horses (palfreys—the word comes from the German for horse,
Pferd
) to advance in a smooth, ambling gait rather than at a trot.

kentaurisch / gebäumt | centaurishly / rearing: The “palfrey” here becomes the centaur, half horse, half man, usually shown holding a bow and arrow, as archer, which is Celan's astrological sign.

“Landschaft” | “Landscape”

August 3–16, 1964. Started in Moisville, where Celan noted on the back of the leaf on whose other side he sketched out the poem “Schwarz” | “Black”: “in dieser / Stunde der nuschelnden / Urnenwesen / lebten wir königlich nach / den erfüllten Gesetzen der Liebe” (in this / hour of the mumbling / urnbeings / we lived like kings according to / the fulfilled laws of love); the first actual draft has “Garotten- / Spanisch / von Rauchmund zu Rauchmund” (Garotte- / Spanish / from smokemouth to smokemouth), while the final version has simple “Gespräche” | “conversations” (
TA
Atemwende
, p. 92). Lefebvre suggests that of this Spanish horizon there remains only “the half-shell (Jakobsmuschel | pilgrim's scallop) of the pilgrims of St. James' Way (the pilgrimage route to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostalla in Galicia, Spain) and the possible allusion to an execution. The Spanish state used the garrote to execute its condemned until 1975. But Muschel also calls up, via Mauscheln, the Jewish speech of the exiled, of the wandering pilgrim Jew (just as the urn and the smoke connote the crematory ovens)” (
RDS
, pp. 231–32).

Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 734) adds the following information: “During a visit by Celan's friends Jean and Mayotte Bollack in the summer of 1964 to Moisville, Peter Szondi's letter to the editor (6/25/1964) against Hans Egon Holthusen's review of
Die Niemandsrose
in the
FAZ
of 5/2/1964 was at the center of the conversation: Holthusen had repeated his thesis, already stated in 1954, that phrases like ‘The mills of death' were just made up and had no relation to the real. Afterward, Celan was hosted by the Bollacks in their house in the Périgord region of France.” That visit possibly inscribed in the “Tollhäusler-Trüffel” | “bedlamite's truffle,” as the Périgord is famous for its truffles.

Klinkerspiel | clinker game:
Klinker
is a word of Dutch origin, usually connected to a kind of brick that is partially vitrified, thus very hard and making a clinking noise when hit, used in the construction of buildings. In north Germany
Klinkers
is the name given to small, hard clay marbles used in playing marbles.

“Die Gauklertrommel” | “The jugglerdrum”

October 12, 1963. Written on the same day as the poem “In Prague.” This sequence of poems was composed prior to the one of the first cycle,
Atemkristall
, and, inserted here, disrupts the chronological continuity of the volume.

Odysseus, mein Affe | Ulysses, my monkey: Possibly an allusion to the East German poet Erich Arendt (1903–1984), who had dedicated his poem “Prager Judenfriedhof” (“Jewish Cemetery in Prague”) to Celan, a poem that contained very Celanian elements (imitations, “apings,” of Celan's poetics were fairly common in the early sixties). Arendt had also asked Celan to help him find a West German publisher for a manuscript of poems (
Ägäis
) that he had sent him, poems that made use of the Ulysses theme. Wiedemann further notes that one of the quarters of Prague is called Troy (
BW
, p. 734).

rue de Longchamp: Celan's Paris address at that time, where Arendt had dined with the Celans in late fall 1959.

“Wenn du im Bett” | “When you lie”

September 8, 1963. A Sunday. A poem with clear erotic undertones. The crane (a male bird in German) is a bird Celan associates with Odessa and Russian poetry, such as that of Sergei Yesenin (who has lines such as these: “And the cranes, sad as they flying by, / No longer regret anyone … Alone, I stand on the empty plain, / While wind carries the cranes far away”). Lefebvre (
RDS
, p. 234) also points to “Schiller's ballad ‘Die Kraniche des Ibykus,' and to Georg Heym's story ‘Der Kranich.' The directest reference is, however, to Klebnikov's poem ‘The Crane,' which also plays on the verbal kinship between the animal and the steel contraption.”

Further to the Russian connection, one could also think of Mandelstam's Pindaric ode “The Horseshoe Finder,” specifically with reference to recurrent images of time and coins.

“Hinterm kohlegezinkten” | “Behind coalmarked”

September 1963.

“In Prag” | “In Prague”

October 12, 1963. A much-commented-on poem. Prague, where Celan never went, evokes for him Bohemia, Kafka, Rabbi Loew, and a whole range of connected historical and mythological themes. He thus writes in a letter to Franz Wurm of April 29, 1968 (
PC
/
FW
, pp. 142–43): “You know well that, because of a three-year residence in Bohemia by my mother also … I am somewhat bohemianized [angeböhmt].—also, cf. ‘In Prague,' from one (and another and another) side, and recently I read her that the motto of Bohemia is ‘La Bohème vaincra'—how is that in fact, Czech or Latin?”

The critic Bernd Witte argues that this poem, and the one preceding it, commemorate a meeting with Celan's friend and former lover, the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, and include references to Bachmann's poem “Prag Jänner 64,” whose lines “Unter den berstenden Blöcken / meines, auch meines Flusses / kam das befreite Wasser hervor” (Under the bursting blocks / of my, yes even my river / the freed water appeared) are echoed in the previous poem's lines: “there the rods dipped royally before our eye, / water came, water.” Lefebvre, on the other hand, does not endorse the Bachmann connection. Witte goes on to read the poem as a metapoem, or statement of poetics (which is true of many Celan poems). Witte: “So baut ‘der halbe Tod,' der Tod-im-Text, sich ins ‘Wohin,' auf den offenen Ausgang des Gedichtes zu” (Thus “half death,” death-in-the-text, builds itself into the “whereto,” toward the open exit/conclusion of the poem). According to Otto Pöggeler's more hermeneutical reading (
SPUR
, p. 366), the
wir
concerns essentially “die Begegnung des Dichters mit seinem Du” (the encounter of the poet with his You).

einer der Wieviel- / unddreißig | one of thirty- / and-how-many: Possibly the number of steps that lead to the Hradčany castle's entrance, but possibly also a reference to the legend of the thirty-six Just Ones. Pöggeler asks: “Are the stairs those of the Hradshin, and are those holy figures meant that stand on the Karlsbrücke, something like a thirty-figure group? One should rather think of the thirty-six just men, who vouch their own lives to help the persecuted, who perhaps outweigh the extermination machinery of evil in the scales of time, to which in any case they don't leave the last word” (
SPUR
, p. 354). According to Jewish tradition, as formulated by the Talmudic sage Abaye (a rabbi who lived in Babylonia, and died in 339), who gets to the number thirty-six by using gematria: “There are never less than 36 just men in the world who greet the Shekhinah [God's worldly presence] every day, for it is written [in the book of Isaiah 30:18], “Blessed are all who wait for Him” [
ashrei kol h.okhei lo
], and [the word]
lo
[“for Him,” spelled Lamed-Vav] is numerically equal to 36.” (Cited by Philologos in “The Thirty-Six Who Save the World,”
Forward
, May 30, 2008, available at
www.forward.com/articles/13406/the-thirty-six-who-save-the-world
[accessed May 30, 2014].)

Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, in a short essay published in in 1962 under the title “The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men,” speculates that the number thirty-six “originates in ancient astrology, where the 360 degrees of the heavenly circle are divided into thirty-six units of ten, the so-called ‘deans' [‘decans,' in astrological parlance]. A dean-divinity ruled over each segment of the thus divided circle of the zodiac, holding sway over ten days of the year … [In Egyptian Hellenistic sources] the deans were regarded also as watchmen and custodians of the universe, and it is quite conceivable that [in Hellenistic astrology] the number thirty-six, which Abaye read into Scripture, no longer represented these cosmological powers or forces but rather human figures.”

Hradschin | Hradčany: The great castle in Prague, said to be the biggest castle in the world and housing the St. Vitus Cathedral and a number of noble historical palaces.

Goldmacher-Nein | goldmaker's No: A reference to the Alchimistengasse, situated close to the Hradčany in Prague, and the street on which Kafka lived when he wrote the short stories gathered in the
Landarzterzählungen
.

Knochen-Hebräisch, / zu Sperma zermahlen | bone-Hebrew, / ground to sperm: Compare in the volume
Mohn und Gedächtnis
the poem “Spät und tief” with the line: “Ihr mahlt in den Mühlen des Todes das weiße Mehl der Verheißung.” (In the mills of death you grind the white flower of Promise.) See also the poem “Aus Engelsmaterie” | “Out of angel-matter” from the volume
Threadsuns
(p. 192).

“Von der Orchis her” | “Starting from the orchis”

September 11, 1963.

Orchis | orchis: The other German name,
Knabenkraut
(boy's weed), and the etymology of the Greek word, ὄρχις, “orchis,” also “testicle,” due no doubt to the testicle-shaped paired root, link this flower from the orchid family to matters of childhood, manhood, and reproduction. See also the poem “Todtnauberg” (p. 254). There is, further, an interesting rhyme with Colchis on the Black Sea (Lefebvre,
RDS
, p. 238).

Zwölfnacht | twelfth-night: A festival marking the coming of Epiphany in some Christian churches. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, it is “the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking”; it also describes the period of the twelve nights that separate Christmas from Epiphany, in German also known as
Rauhnächte
(raw/rough nights).

“Halbzerfressener” | “Halfgnawed”

August 4, 1964.

“Aus Fäusten” | “From fists”