DM Black Whispers of Heavenly Death

DM Black salutes two exemplary writers on the outer edge of language


PAUL CELAN translated by Ian Fairley
Snow Part/ Schneepart
Carcanet £14.95

GALWAY KINNELL
Strong is your Hold
Bloodaxe £8.95

If you wish to utter a sentence that will spark universal harmony and concord, try murmuring: ‘Poetry, of course, is untranslatable’. Suddenly, look where you will, all heads are nodding.

But is it true, really? This allegedly impossible task seems to have a remarkable number of extremely competent practitioners, and much of what they are producing is at least the equal of most of today’s original poetry. Garioch’s Belli, Wilbur’s Molière, Logue’s Homer, Hughes’s Ovid, Heaney’s Dante, Greene’s Mandelstam, Chandler’s Sappho, Paterson’s Rilke – to name a mere handful – are all extremely impressive, both in their own right (as work in English), and in conveying a persuasive impression of another sort of experience we might have if we could read the original. Of course, that impression will not be entirely accurate – more so in the case of meticulous practitioners like Garioch and Wilbur, less so with freer operators like Logue and Greene – but, nevertheless, a great deal has been achieved.

If we differentiate further, things become more interesting. Some poems are vastly more translatable than others, particularly those that are strong on ordinary dimensions of meaning: narrative, descriptive, witty, informative. The specifically untranslatable thing is ‘music’, and even that can be imitated or paralleled up to a point. (Try Wilbur’s translation of La Fontaine’s Ode to Pleasure, or Garioch’s astonishing translation of Hesiod into alliterative Scots.) But where music reaches a certain pitch of perfection, the translator can only despair (or, better, can only write a crib, which is useful too, even if not very gratifying). Not even Wilbur can manage ‘L’Invitation au Voyage’, though he makes a gallant stab at it. Goethe’s ‘Über allen Gipfeln’, or ‘Kennst du das Land’, Mallarmé’s ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, Apollinaire’s ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ – these reach such a pinnacle of united perfections (rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, vowel-music, emotion) that the wretched translator can only fall on his sword in the foothills.

If we say that there is a wide spectrum of translatability, where does Celan come on it? The answer is that in the course of his life he moved steadily towards the untranslatable end.

Celan was born in 1920 in a Romanian Jewish family in Czernowitz; when he was twenty-two his parents were seized by the Nazis. He never saw them again; later he learned that his father had died of typhus and his mother had been shot. He himself was sent to a succession of labour camps but managed to survive Romania’s nightmarish sequence of occupation, first by the Nazis, then by the almost equally anti-semitic Soviets. In 1947 he escaped. For most of the rest of his life he lived in Paris, where he established himself as a Germanlanguage scholar and translator, married and had two children (one of whom died in infancy). Despite this apparent construction of a viable life, he never ceased to be haunted by the events of the war; as he grew older he was several times admitted to psychiatric hospitals; he made a number of suicide attempts, and finally, when he was forty-nine, one of these was successful: he drowned himself in the Seine. His poems, written in German and often exceedingly beautiful, convey moods of unrelenting sadness.

In his earlier work, Celan’s emotion and the reasons for it are sometimes quite explicit. No one conveys better how it is to be persecuted by terrible imaginings:

Espenbaum, dein Laub blickt weiss ins Dunkel.
Meiner Mutter Haar ward nimmer weiss.

Aspen tree, your leaves glance white into the dark.
My mother’s hair was never white.
                                    (Michael Hamburger’s translation)

and so on for five of these heart-breaking couplets. The last one reads:

Eichne Tür, wer hob dich aus den Angeln?
Meine sanfter Mutter kann nicht kommen.

Oaken door, who lifted you off your hinges?
My gentle mother cannot return.

This poem is unusually accessible. More typical of Celan’s early work is an image like: ‘The blackish cuckoo/ with diamond spurs draws his image on to the gates of the sky’ (Hamburger’s translation). Surreal imagery is one of the languages of trauma: it may not be easy to understand, but it isn’t necessarily a great problem for the translator.

As Celan got older, his language became more and more stark: very deliberate, very precise. Words are used more and more sparsely, often carrying the weight of many associations, few of which are visible even to the German reader. (One is reminded of Hölderlin, whom Celan admired; but, unlike Hölderlin, Celan gives the impression of saying exactly what he intends. He doesn’t sound ‘mad’). But the psychological stakes were impossibly high, for both men. By the time we get to Schneepart (the volume under review, written two years before his death and published posthumously), Celan’s language has reached a preternatural precision, in which not only words but even individual syllables are used to convey different elements of meaning. The reader flounders; the translator is in despair. Let me give an example from Ian Fairley’s introduction to the present (bi-lingual) volume.

He quotes a poem in its entirety:

There will be something, later
that fills with you
and lifts itself
to a mouth

I stand
up from the shatter of
madness
and watch my hand
trace the one
single
circle

Fairley comments:

The poet stands in mindful relation to a circle – which can be conceived, I suggest, as the circle of circumstance – and in internally distanced relation to himself, as if returned to a circuit of selfestrangement and self-recognition. His hand seems to have a mind of its own, and to know what it draws by heart. In the imperfect symmetry, created by the fact of standing, between the poem’s last and first four lines, a gesture is delineated but is not – not even in the tracing of a unique circle – completed. The figure of this circle is made to stand, empty, and so to correspond, in a way yet to be described, to the prediction of the first lines: it may stand for ‘something’, for ‘you’, and for ‘mouth’; and it can also stand for Celan’s madness. The poem’s gesture, its speech act, returns, through this ‘one’ circle, from ‘I’ to ‘you’, or perhaps to an ‘I’ now thinkable as both ‘you’ and ‘I’. It turns towards the thought of being filled by, or of filling, another.

Celan should be grateful to find such patience in his commentators. Confronted with the English version of his poem, it may be hard to feel it is of sufficient weight to merit so much hard work. But let’s take another example, short enough to discuss. Here is the final poem of the present collection. It reads in Fairley’s translation:

Daybreak soon
with the words:
I too
have denied
and robbed you

Now listen to the beautifully paced, immaculate German:

Bald ist morgen
und sagt:
auch ich
habe dich
verleugnet und bestohlen

Morgen with lower-case m has the sense of tomorrow’s daybreak; to my ear, the absence of indicative particles goes further – it implies not just tomorrow’s daybreak but every tomorrow’s daybreak: dawn after dawn will arrive with the same message. It is clear too from the German that it is dawn itself which speaks this bleak message to the poet. Dawn, tomorrow, time – which should bring hope – bring instead the repeated message of his betrayal. And all this is worded with such restraint, such inevitability, that one can’t accuse him of sentimentality or self-pity. This is the fact. This is how time is for him.

Different as the mood is (and Goethe would have detested Celan’s misery!), we are in a poetic territory comparable to ‘Über allen Gipfeln’: an exact, untranslatable music, which creates a tone and an atmosphere that can’t be made explicit without cack-handedness. The translator, do what he will, can only provide a crib. These are poems that demand – and reward – slow and very careful attention.


Strong is your hold, O mortal flesh!/ Strong is your hold, O love.’ Walt Whitman’s tremendous words (from ‘Whispers of Heavenly Death’) would have resounded bitterly for Celan; they resound more positively (though still profoundly ambiguously) for Galway Kinnell, who quotes them as the title of his latest collection. (Bloodaxe has included with this book a CD of the poet reading all the poems in it. This is an excellent idea, and should become standard practice.)

Kinnell is eighty this year, far along in a prolific and very distinguished career. He is an extraordinary and exemplary poet, who faces the reality of our present world – its beauty, its poignancy and its terror – with about as few defences as is compatible with sanity. His writing is in that great generous tradition of American poetry that descends from Whitman, characterised by an intense but calm focus on the physicality of the world, never overlooking the feelings that arise from a true perception of it. Like Whitman in the Civil War, Kinnell has seen at first hand some of the great issues of his time, worked with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Louisiana in the 1960s, protested against the Vietnam war in a book-length poem in the early 1970s, and remarkably had an office in New York overlooking the Twin Towers in 2001 – he includes a long sequence about the bombings in the present collection. He writes, mostly, with great simplicity, but he is saturated in literature and has published translations of Villon, Rilke and Bonnefoy, among others. He comes before us loaded with praise and honours, but remains thoughtfully, ruefully, humorously, honestly himself.

‘Whispers of heavenly death’ might in some ways be the title of this collection too, which is haunted by the awareness of approaching death, not necessarily frightening – at one point he calls it ‘exhilarating’ – but certainly calling on one to be serious:

We look for a bridge to cross
to the other shore where our other
could be looking for us
but all the river crossings

all the way to the sea
have been bombed. We look for a tree –
touch it – touch
right through it – sometimes nowhere

is there anything to hitch oneself to,
and we must make our way by pure balance.
This is so and can’t be helped
without doing damage to oneself.

To write a poem is often to make one’s way by pure balance, and one of the best poems in this collection is ‘Pulling a Nail’, in which he describes with brilliant unhurried descriptive detail the process of extracting a nail which, in the year of Kinnell’s birth, his father had hammered hard into place. The fight to haul out the nail becomes a subtle metaphor for the poet’s struggle with his father, in no way spelt out but most movingly conveyed. It seems that father and son – depressed father, brilliant son – had little in common, little to say to each other – and yet, in their devoted attention to wood, hammer and nail, a far deeper, unutterable bond is hinted at. This is psychological truth-telling, and poetic writing of a very high order, comparable to the best work of Robert Frost – that other master of ‘pure balance’.

The poem about the bombing of the Twin Towers is probably as good as such things can be. To write about a public tragedy is a challenge, and many people feel it’s in some way wrong, a prostitution or trivialisation of the essential privacy both of poetry and of the suffering of strangers. Kinnell has commented on this in relation to his work with CORE in Louisiana. Speaking in an interview with Daniela Gioseffi, he said: ‘When I went down there to work in the South, I thought it would be unseemly to “use” the situation down there as material for art, and I decided not to write a word while I was there. I put aside everything having to do directly with poetry. A couple of years later I realised I had made a serious mistake. It was ignorant idealism... I now think I should have taken a surrealistic approach and simply treated the whole world as hell. It was hell.’

To be in the Twin Towers was also a fair approximation of hell, but Kinnell doesn’t adopt a surrealistic style; true to his clear-sighted maturity, he describes what he knows and what he can imagine of the event; his metaphors arise out of the material and are comprehensible. He makes no reproaches, either to the bombers or to the authorities:

air too foul to take in,
but we take it in, too gruesome for seekers of lost beloveds
to breathe, but they breathe it and you breathe it.

This long poem was published in the New Yorker. As I read it, it fulfils a genuinely bardic function, an ‘occasional poem’, speaking for America on one of the few occasions when America could seem like a single community, united in grief and horror at the appallingness of the event. (Of course, there were other reactions among the politicians.) It takes a great poet to find such a voice, speaking for humanity yet almost impersonal.

The danger is of editorialising, and (bringing this review full circle) Kinnell cites Celan in an attempt to provide a context for the bombing – a ‘small instance in the immense lineage’ of the world’s atrocities. He quotes (in German) the beginning of Celan’s most famous poem, ‘Death Fugue’, echoing the reference to dawn we spoke of a moment ago: Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends (Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall). To me, this quotation strikes a slightly wrong note. Celan’s pain is to do with personal loss. It may be inseparably bound up with outrage at a public atrocity, but he is not a public spokesman; he speaks out of a private, appalling state of mind that he would never stop suffering. Kinnell’s relation to the Twin Towers is different; he is a public spokesman, putting into words the grief of collective ‘America’. He is not, like Celan, personally afflicted.

Where Kinnell is at his best is, as always, in the closely observed detail of daily life. A charming poem called ‘Insomniac’ conveys some of the rarely described intimacies of sleeping, or rather lying awake, beside a familiar partner. Half-asleep, she tugs him towards her, giving the message that she welcomes his closeness. The poem ends with his imagining her instructing him, step by step, how to come closer and embrace her; she says finally:

Entangled with each other so, unsleeping one,
together we will outsleep the night.

One guesses that Kinnell’s daybreaks are very different from Celan’s.