Breathturn into Timestead (39 page)

September 1965. Except for the longer, multisectioned poems “Stimmen” and “Engführung” in
Sprachgitter
, only the “Todesfuge” and this final poem of
Atemwende
|
Breathturn
are given a complete cycle of their own. Celan wrote to Gisèle (
PC
/
GCL
, #479): “At the end, preceded by a white page, all alone and simultaneously cycle, the ‘EINMAL.'”

ichten | I'ed: Several interpretations—per direct indication by the poet—point to the verb
ichten
(in the Grimms'
Wörterbuch
, an important helper of Celan's compositional process), used here in the preterit and defined as “‘ich' sagen, eine frage mit ich beantworten” (to say “I,” to answer a question with I). The extraction of
ichten
from the preceding word “vernichtet” | “annihilated” is not as obvious in the English “I'ed”—though maybe the two
i
's of “annihilated” do point to this origin.

FADENSONNEN | THREADSUNS

Published in March 1968, this, Celan's largest single volume, gathers 105 poems written between September 5, 1965 (some, therefore, contemporaneous with the last ones of
Breathturn
) and June 8, 1967. During the same, obviously very fertile period, he composed the cycle
Eingedunkelt
|
Tenebrae'd
(p. 222), which, like all the poems written between November 1965 and the beginning of June 1966 in the psychiatric clinics in Suresnes and Paris, were not included in this volume. Thus, from the final poems of the second cycle through the following three cycles, the poems were all written in 1967 in a creative rush that produced close to a poem a day—and organized chronologically in the volume.

Surprisingly,
Threadsuns
may well be the least commented on and most critically neglected volume of Celan's oeuvre. As the preceding volume,
Breathturn
, initiated the change toward the late work, it rightfully attracted much attention ab initio, given its hinge position in the oeuvre and its programmatic title linking it directly to the most important statement on poetics Celan had published, the speech/essay
The Meridian
. Noting that the book received few reviews, Kai Fischer writes: “This refusal is astounding in view of the fact that this volume is not only the gateway into the late work but also introduces and performs a new way of saying that will be characteristic for the following volumes” (
CHB
, p. 99). Indeed, many of the reviewers expressed the belief that Celan's work had now moved into a hermetic code that made it inaccessible, or into, as the anonymous reviewer of
The Times Literary Supplement
called it, “an esoteric Geheimsprache whose associations are known to the poet alone.” Given that the title of this volume goes back to a poem in
Breathturn
, some such turning back is comprehensible, but not the lazy use by critics of an off-the-cuff remark Celan made to Esther Cameron, reported as suggesting that she not busy herself too much with this volume, as it was something
randgängerich
—a difficult word to translate that suggests someone or something walking on the edge, the boundary, a marginal or fringe event, clearly something with an edge, something liminal. On the other hand, we have Celan's own words in a letter to Nelly Sachs, stating that he “found it infinitely difficult to let go of the previous book—
Threadsuns
—but no doubt you own it.” Kai Fischer proposes that in terms of
Threadsuns
, this last quote, whatever may have been meant by
randgängerich
, “opens the way to a different reading. Without wanting to efface the ambivalence of the first quote, one can recognize in Celan's statement a higher estimation, that made it ‘infinitely difficult to let go' of
Threadsuns
” (
CH
, p. 99).

Another way of explaining the dearth of attention
Threadsuns
received is by taking into consideration the fact that it appeared just one year after
Breathturn
(which received marked attention, even if an attention already afflicted by puzzlement about a perceived “hermeticism” that would greet all the late books) rather than the four or five years usually separating Celan's volumes. Moreover, 1968 saw a plethora of other Celan books come out, including a number of volumes of translations (William Shakespeare, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Jules Supervielle, and André du Bouchet); a complete cycle of poems,
Eingedunkelt
|
Tenebrae'd
, published in a book gathering such “abandoned works” (see p. 543); and, most important in terms of negative impact on the visibility of
Threadsuns
, a volume of selected poems. These
Ausgewählte Gedichte
, offering poems from all the early volumes up to and including
Breathturn
, plus the two essays on poetics, edited by Paul Celan himself, were published in the popular Suhrkamp paperback series. The book was an immediate success and for many readers has remained the best introduction to the oeuvre—so much so that when in 1998 the French publisher Gallimard decided to include a Selected Paul Celan in the prestigious Poésie/Gallimard paperback series, they used that very same volume, translated and presented by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre.

I

“Augenblicke” | “Eye-glances”

September 19, 1965, Paris. The volume opens with a compound noun containing that most loaded of Celan's words:
Auge
, “eye.”

Augenblicke | Eye-glances: The normal English translation would be “moments,” or, if one wanted to insist on the spatial sense of the word rather than on the temporal, “glances.” Although the German compound is in common usage, I have preferred to create an English neologism, “eye-glances,” in order to retain the seed-image of the eye.

steh | stand: See the various notes on Celan's insistence on this upright stance, for example, “Es stand” | “It stood” (p. 617) and “Wirk nicht voraus” | “Do not work ahead” (p. 575). See also my introduction to
PCS
(p. 6).

“Frankfurt, September” | “Frankfurt, September”

September 5–6, 1965, Frankfurt am Main. The title points to the time of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the great annual book fair visited by Celan, and the poem makes use of images from the fair. Celan spent ten days in Frankfurt at that time, working with his cotranslator Kurt Leonard on the volume of translations of poems by Henri Michaux that would be published the following year by S. Fischer Verlag, his last book for that publisher, as he would move to Suhrkamp Verlag. Wiedemann writes that, according to Klaus Reichert (who worked at Suhrkamp and Insel Verlag, and in front of whose house the poem was conceived), Celan saw this poem as his final reckoning with S. Fischer Verlag (
BW
, p. 751). Celan wrote to Gisèle (
PC
/
GCL
, #273): “I am doing fine. This morning, in fact, I am in a little poetic trance, a kind of effervescence: I've written a little poem I'll copy out for you tonight or tomorrow, and that I'll comment for you.” (He never wrote the proposed commentary.)

Blinde, licht- / bärtige | Blind, light- / bearded: Compare the expression “Lichtbart / der Patriarchen” | “lightbeard of / the patriarchs” in the poem “Tübingen, Jänner” from
Die Niemandsrose
(
PCS
, p. 79) with the adjectival form
luftalgenbärtig
in the poem “Die Eine” | “The one” (p. 170). Notice that the (by this time rare) title of the poem is grammatically constructed on the model of the earlier title “Tübingen, Jänner.”

Stellwand | partition: The movable wall or partition with a portrait of Freud that the publisher S. Fischer had set up at the book fair the previous year, but which had been saved and which Celan had seen.

Maikäfertraum | cockchaferdream: Compare Celan's use of the old
Maikäferlied
in the poem “In der Luft” from
Die Niemandsrose
. Given the Kafka quote that follows here, the
Käfer
also calls to mind that author's beetle. Another possible reading could point to the scarabaeus symbolizing resurrection in Egyptian mythology (
SPUR
, p. 289). Compare also the poem “Was näht” | “What sews” from
Snowpart
(p. 326), which contains the line “ein Käfer erkennt dich” | “a chafer recognizes you.” There is also a link with Freud's analysis of a dream involving cockchafers (given as “May beetles” in the English translation) (Freud,
Interpretation of Dreams
, #203, p. 324).

Zum letzen- / mal Psycho- / logie | For the last / time psycho- / logy: Citation from Kafka's ninety-third entry in the posthumous collection
Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg
(Kafka,
Hochzeitsvorbereitungen
, #204, p. 30). Celan had already used the phrase in a withheld letter to Kurt Hirschfeld from January 8, 1961, in connection with the Goll affair: “‘For the last time, psychology!' What is essential, I believe, is not the representation of the motivations and inducements, but the unmasking of the malice (and of its allies)” (
BW
, p. 752).

Simili- / Dohle | imitation / jackdaw: In Czech the word
kavka
means
Dohle
, “jackdaw.” Compare the following comment on the expression “Simili- / Dohle”: “As Kafka's name means ‘jackdaw,' the Kafka family had the image of the jackdaw on its letterhead; at the Frankfurt Book Fair with its tax-deductible work-related conversations, it is, however, an ‘imitation jackdaw' that breakfasts” (
SPUR
, p. 290). See also Kafka's story “A Hunger Artist”: “He was happiest, however, when morning came and a lavish breakfast was brought for them at his own expense, on which they hurled themselves with the appetite of healthy men after a hard night's work without sleep. True, there were still people who wanted to see in this breakfast an unfair means of influencing the observers, but that was going too far, and if they were asked whether they wanted to undertake the observers' night shift for its own sake, without the breakfast, they excused themselves. But nonetheless they stood by their suspicions.” (Translation by Ian Johnston;
http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/hungerartist.htm
.)

Celan's closeness to Kafka has been well documented. An odd coincidence, which certainly did not escape Celan, has to do with their names. Kafka wrote in his diary: “Ich heiße hebraïsch Amschel” (In Hebrew my name is Amschel)—close to the word
Amsel
, “blackbird,” and to Celan's own original name, Ançel or Antschel.

Der Kehlkopfverschlußlaut / singt | The glottal stop / sings: See the Kafka story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” which Kafka wrote as he himself was losing his voice in the final stages of laryngeal turberculosis, in German
Kehlkopftuberkulose
. As Pöggeler notes: “In the final stage of Kafka's tuberculosis, his larynx closed up—he wasn't allowed to even speak anymore, and literally starved to death … Does the glottal stop of the larynx (that k—j as in ‘Kehlkoph' and ‘Kafka') make for a song—Songs beyond mankind?” (
SPUR
, p. 290). In the earliest draft of the poem, Celan had inserted between the two title words the Hebrew letter
(ayin), a guttural sound, as is the glottal stop (
TA
,
Fadensonnen
, p. 6).

“Gezinkt der Zufall” | “Chance, marked”

September 24–26, 1965, Paris, Rosh Hashanah.

Lügen | lies … Meineid schwören | perjure themselves: Probable rumination on the Goll affair.

“Wer / herrscht?” | “Who / rules?”

September 24–October 4, 1965, Paris.

Springkraut | touch-me-not: The plant Impatiens noli-tangere, in German
Großes Springkraut
or
Rühr-mich-nicht-an
, the only representative of the order Impatiens that originates in central Europe, is known in English as touch-me-not balsam, yellow balsam, jewelweed, or wild balsam.

Gauklergösch | juggler jaws: Celan had considered this word (as
Gaukler-Gösch
) as a possible title for the volume
Lightduress
. The term
Gösch
was noted several times by Celan in his German edition of James Joyce's
Ulysses
: “weiß die Pfoten, rot deine Gösch / dein Balg ist auch ganz lieblich” | “White thy fambles, red thy gan / And thy quarrons dainty is.” This is the second stanza of the canting song, “The Rogue's Delight in Praise of His Strolling Mort,” which Richard Head includes in his book
The Canting Academy
(London, 1673, pp. 19–20); in translation: “White thy hands, red thy mouth, /And thy body dainty is” (
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Annotations_to_James_Joyce's_Ulysses/Proteus/047
).