Breathturn into Timestead (55 page)

“Einkanter” | “Einkanter”

July 20, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort. The title refers to a stone with a single sharp edge worn by wind-driven sand (compare
Dreikanter
, “ventifact”). Celan found the term in his Brockhaus.

Rembrandt: in 1967 and again in 1968, on his visits to London, Celan saw Rembrandt's painting
A Man Seated Reading at a Table in a Lofty Room
in the National Gallery (mentioned in his letter to Franz Wurm of April 18, 1968 [
PC
/
FW
, #102]).

Bartlocke | beardlock: Traditional Jewish
payot
. Rembrandt painted a number of portraits of Jews in traditional dress as well as illustrations of the Bible.

sechzehnte Psalm | sixteenth psalm: In the King James version, this psalm, named “A Goodly Heritage,” opens: “Preserve me, O God: / for in thee do I put my trust. / O my soul, thou hast said unto the LORD, Thou art my Lord: / my goodness extendeth not to thee; / but to the saints that are in the earth, / and to the excellent, in whom is all my delight.” But see above all verse 8: “I have set the LORD always before me: / because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.” In the poem “24 rue Tournefort” (not included in any volume, but see
BW
, p. 525, and Nomadics blog:
www.pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=9851
), Celan cites the core term of Psalm 16,
Shiviti
, translated in the King James version as “set before me.”

24 RUE TOURNEFORT

You and your

kitchensink German—yes, sink-,

yes, before—ossuaries.

Say: Löwig. Say: Shiviti

The black cloth

they lowered before you,

when your breath

swelled scarward,

brothers too, you stones,

image the word shut behind

side glances.

“Mit Rebmessern” | “With pruning hooks”

July 21, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort. A poem with a nearly exclusive nautical vocabulary, in which Lefebvre sees “an existential, biographico-poetological poem, through the figure of the sailor on great world circumnavigating sail ships, crossing or following the meridians, armed with a pruning knife with curved blade in the shape of a large lunar crescent—used here like a sailor's knife or shackle opener. A number of the terms used were underlined by Celan in books read at different times: Siegmund Günther's
Physische Geographie
for ‘Kalmenzone' | ‘calmzone' (p. 63), Joseph Conrad's
Lord Jim
for ‘die Spaken' (handspike, capstan bar), and Conrad's
An Outcast of the Islands
for ‘das Beiboot' | ‘the dinghy'” (
PDN
, p. 145).

Gebetshub | prayer's tidal range: Neologism based on
Tidenhub
(tidal amplitude or range).

Lößpuppen | Loessdolls

July 21, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort. The title refers to geological formations that in Celan's Brockhaus
Taschenbuch der Geologie
are called
Lößkindel
or
Lößpuppen
(loess-children or loess-dolls). Loess is an aeolian sediment formed by the accumulation of wind-blown silt.

V

“Stahlschüssiger Sehstein” | “Steeluginous visionstone”

July 24, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort.

Stahlschüssiger | Steeluginous: Reading traces in the Brockhaus
Taschenbuch der Geologie
, where Celan underlined
eisenschüssige
, meaning “ferrous” or “ferruginous,” and used it to create the neologism “steeluginous.”

Palmfarne | palm ferns: Also from the Brockhaus. Cycads, of the biological division
Cicadophyta
, are gymnosperm seed plants typically characterized by a stout and woody trunk with a crown of large, hard, and stiff evergreen leaves.

Castrup: Could refer to Copenhagen airport, Kastrup (given some of the other images in the poem); could also refer to a town in the Ruhr region of Germany, called Castrop(-Rauxel), though that would mean a spelling error by Celan, which Wiedemann suggests could be willed, in that Celan may have consciously wanted an interior rhyme with
Vortrupp
(
BW
, p. 855). Near Castrop there are marl pits in which fossil remains have been found.

Vortrupp | vanguard troop: Word underlined by Celan in his copy of the German translation of Joyce's
Ulysses
(vol. 2, p. 101). I have not been able to verify original word.

Flughaut | flightskin: The term occurs in Brockhaus, and refers to the alar membranes of the pterosaurians, the first vertebrates to fly (technically, like bats today) during the Jurassic period. The word was already underlined by Celan in Jean Paul, though there it was associated with butterflies.

“Und Kraft und Schmerz” | “And strength and pain”

July 27, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort. In the last draft the poem is diagonally struck out, with a question mark in the top right-hand corner. In her collected volume, Wiedemann has restored the poem, using its penultimate, uncrossed-out version, though restoring a line Celan had crossed out in that one: “your typhus, Tanja.”

Hall-Schalt- / Jahre | jubilee-leap- / years: 1968 was a leap year;
Hall
also means “sound.” For
Halljahr
, see “Die fleißigen” | “The industrious” (p. 152), with the lines: “The not-to-be-deciphered / jubilee.”

Tanja: Tanja Adler (Sternberg, by marriage) was a friend of Celan's from university days in Czernowitz who emigrated to the Soviet Union, where she married, and then returned to Czernowitz. Celan had gotten back in touch with her in 1962. He had dedicated the 1941 poem “Gemurmel der Toten” (“Mutterings of the Dead”) to her.

“Miterhoben” | “Raised together”

July 28, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort.

seine Aura | his aura: Leads back to Celan's reading of Walter Benjamin during the summer of 1968. Compare “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” specifically: “If we think of the associations which, at home in the
mémoire involontaire
, seek to cluster around an object of perception, and if we call those associations the aura of that object, then the aura attaching to the object of a perception corresponds precisely to the experience [
Erfahrung
] which, in the case of an object of use, inscribes itself as long practice” (
WBSW
, vol. 4, p. 337). Lefebvre notes that “aura” is not without relationship to the “halo” (
Hof
) of Husserlian phenomenology of the consciousness of time or to the Baudelairian “correspondences.”

On the same day Celan wrote an uncollected poem that also uses the word “aura”:

Y
OU
M
ICHAELA,

and as you talk-

stammer, there:

You, aura,

and big-lipped like you,

Be-yidst, res-

ponded, Jewess,

you, knowing-unknowing,

at the point of indifference

of the reflexion

the bitter-planet spoke

overprecise.

Quentchen | quantum: Originally from Latin,
quintus
, “fifth,” has come to mean “a tiny part,” easily, nearly homophonically, rendered in English as “quantum,” though that loses the older connection of the German term to alchemical lore. (Also a measure, as in: “For the sake of experiment I took for several days four
quentschen
[that is, two drams] of good Cinchona twice a day.”)

“Steinschlag” | “Falling rocks”

August 10, 1968, Paris.

heimstehen in seine | home-standing into: Lefebvre notes regarding the grammatical form of the German that “the accusative, as often in Celan, signals the dynamic force and the historicity of what in all appearance stands immobile and fixed (you could call this a syntactic oxymoron)” (
PDN
, p. 149).

ausschreitende | striding: See also title/opening line of the next poem.

“Ich schreite” | “I stride across”

Written probably on August 16, 1968, though reworked in November of that year while Celan was hospitalized in Épinay-sur-Orge for psychiatric treatment. At that point he added the end line “Eric, live strong and large,” cut out of the final manuscript version.

kalben | calf: The verb covers two domains, (1) biological: a cow giving birth to a calf, and (2) geological: the sudden breaking away of a mass of ice from a glacier, giving birth to icebergs.

irgendein Toter | a, any, dead one: Possible reference to François, the dead son, as the whole poem seems to be a bitter attack on his estranged wife, Gisèle.

“Leuchtstäbe” | “Lightrods”

Composed on August 21, 1968, the night Warsaw Pact troops occupied Czechoslovakia, putting an end to the so-called Prague Spring.

Leuchtstäbe | lightrods: This term was for a while considered as a possible title for this (and for the next) volume of poems. The German
stab
(rod) has also the connotation of “letter,” as in
Buchstab
. It also suggests neon tubes and could possibly be connected to an article in the
FAZ
of that day on blindness (see next poem).

grätschen | straddle: To spread the legs wide laterally, as when hopping over an aggressive defense in soccer.

Klöten | ballocks: Reading trace in Celan's German translation of Joyce's
Ulysses
, where he circled: “
ZOE
: (Turns) Ask my ballocks that I haven't got” (p. 667), and an earlier mark for: “
ZOE
: How's the nuts?
BLOOM
: Offside. Curiously they are on the right” (p. 599 of the 1966 Bodley Head edition). The German translation uses the word
Klöten
on both occasion.

ZK:
Zentralkomitee
, literally, “Central Committee.” I prefer to leave the German
ZK
, especially as it ghosts its infamous reverse,
KZ
(
Konzentrationslager
, “concentration camp”).

Evidenz | evidence: In May 1968, Celan had noted: “There is no evidence anymore |
Margarete Susman, über Kafka, | p. 360
.” (Bertrand Badiou pointed this out.) Celan is referring to a 1929 essay by Susman, “Das Hiob-Problem by Franz Kafka,” reprinted in 1954 under the title “Früheste Deutung Franz Kafkas,” in her
Gestalten und Kreise
(Stuttgart/Konstanz/Zurich: Diana Verlag, 1954), p. 355. The longer sentence, quoted by Wiedemann, is: “The last link to a world that is shared, ordered according to ideas: memory, is torn—there is no evidence anymore; that is, the illumination of things is no longer proof of their Being in truth; there is only presence: irrefutable, overpowering presence” (
BW
, p. 858).

“Ein Leseast” | “One reading branch”

A range of the vocabulary and information of this poem of August 21–22, 1968, comes from several articles from the Nature and Science section of the
FAZ
of August 21, 1968, such as N. Wyss's “Noch keine brauchbaren Seehilfen für Blinde” (No useful visual aids yet for blind people), Beatrice Flad-Schnorrenberg's “Wo sitzt die Intelligenz der Vögel?” (Where is the seat of birds' intelligence?), and the article “Basaltisches Mondgestein” (Basalt moon rocks) signed R. (
BW
, pp. 858–59;
PDN
, pp. 151–53). At some point
Leseast
was considered as possible title for the volume as a whole.

Leseast | reading branch … Stirnhaut | forehead skin: N. Wyss mentions inconclusive experiments toward a transistorized device that would send photoelectric impulses to the brain through electrodes implanted above the eyes, in the skin of the forehead, via the ophtalmic branch (
Ast
) of the trigeminal nerve.

Lichtquelle | light source: N. Wyss: “The device was tried out on a largish number of blind people; of light sources it transmits a blurred, uncolored image.”

Wirtsgewebe | host-tissue: Another
FAZ
article, “Immunological Mimicry,” signed “R.F.,” says: “In a sort of immunological mimicry the worms protect themselves against their hosts' immunological defense reactions through the incorporation of host tissue.”

Rückstreu-Sonden | backscatter-probes:
Surveyor 5
(launched September 8, 1967; landed on the moon September 11, 1967) carried a miniature chemical analysis lab with an alpha particle backscatter device used to determine that the lunar surface soil consisted of basaltic rock.

Hornhautüber- / zogner | Cornea-covered: Reading traces in another
FAZ
article of that day: “Hornhautprothesen” (Cornea prostheses), stating that such prostheses so much improved the vision of seven blind adults that they could care for themselves again.

The sixth stanza contains allusions to Celan's suicide attempt of the previous year, when he tried to stab himself, missing the heart but seriously wounding his lung. The postcard seems to refer (
BW
, p. 859) to a New Year's postcard he had received from František Fabian from Radio Pilsen, and further to a newspaper article Celan read that mentioned the silencing of the radio station that had backed Alexander Dubček even as the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring.

“Zerr dir” | “Tear your”

August 23, 1968

pack deinen Schuh rein | pack your shoe into: Possible reference to Ingeborg Bachmann's poem “Die gestundete Zeit”: “Sie dich nicht um. / Schnür deinen Schuh.” (Don't look back. / Lace up your shoe.) (In
Werke
, edited by Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, and Clemens Münster [Munich/ Zurich: Piper Verlag, 1978], 1:37.)

Rauschelbeeräugige | mezery-eyed:
Rauschelbeere
does not exist, though
Rauschbeere
does and corresponds to
Vaccinium uliginosum
(our bog bilberry or northern bilberry) and/or to
Daphne mezereum
, which produces a red, very toxic berry, at home in the subalpine vegetation zone of Germany and Austria.