Poetry: The role of snow
Saturday September 22, 2007
The Guardian
by Paul Celan, translated by Ian Fairley
195pp, Carcanet, £14.95
Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice. If you do not understand what Sereni meant when he wrote "è la mia / sola musica e mi basta" or Propertius "sunt aliquid manes" or, come to that, Yeats "I must lie down where all the ladders start", nothing so very dreadful will happen to you.
This question poses itself in a different form with the verse of Paul Celan (1920-1970), which has some claim to being the most difficult ever written in any language. Of what use is a parallel-text translation? Does it help the non-Germanist that Ian Fairley translates "Schimmelbrothelle / eckt an" as "Breadmould light / elbows in"? And "stahlschüssiger Sehstein" as "Steelshot lens-stone"? Are you any nearer what Celan had in mind? Or Fairley?
Celan was born Paul Antschel on November 23 1920 to Jewish parents in the predominantly Jewish town of Czernowitz, capital of an outlying Habsburg province absorbed into Romania at the end of the first world war. In 1942, his parents were deported by the SS to Ukraine where they perished in the Michailovka labour camp. Celan survived the camps in Moldova, moved to Bucharest and in 1947 to Vienna. The following year he published his first collection of verse (Das Sand aus den Urnen - The Sand from the Urns) and settled in Paris. In September 1969 he presented to his wife a fair copy of some 70 poems in their order of composition under the title Schneepart and the instruction Nicht veröffentlichen (Not for publication). Having set his poetical timebomb, he threw himself into the Seine.
Celan could have written his verse in Romanian or French or Russian or Latin or Yiddish or even, for all I know, English. In choosing to write in High German, Celan adopts the language not only of the high culture of Czernowitz but of its destroyers. However his parents were done to death, the ultimate authority was delivered in German. In Schneepart, Celan takes on modern German with its portmanteau neologisms and logical structure, and proceeds to demolish it.
The language of Schneepart is not merely purged of inherited content or meaning. It has shed all logic. The very title is an error of logical category. Schneepart, Fairley reminds us in his introduction, does not mean "the part that is snow" but rather "the part or role that is given to snow" as if a phenomenon of nature had gained the power of speech or music. Fairley is not at all troubled by these Kategorienfehler, which are now commonplace. Lichtdung is, brilliantly, "light soil".
I do not think that Celan was a sort of verse Heinrich Böll, who set himself to rid written German of National Socialist patterns of speech and writing. Rather, Celan's German is like a modern fighter aircraft that must be made absolutely unairworthy before it can perform its allotted task. (An F-15 without power will not glide but plummet.)
Only when language is utterly disabled, it seems, can it articulate, in some abandoned region at the end of space and history, a fugitive echo of reality. In this desolate terrain, marked (as Fairley writes) "by composite glaciofluvial and karstic erosion", the reader comes on the relics of dwarfish industrial or mineral processes, abandoned military works, a depleted flora, no fauna whatever. Dispersed through the poems are the phantoms or vestiges of facts arising in the politics of 1968 (the Paris événements, the wounding of Rudi Dutschke, the Soviet occupation of Prague) or Celan's attempts at suicide. You wouldn't know if Fairley (or the sumptuous annotated German editions) hadn't told you.
If you liked The Whitsun Weddings, you won't like this book.
In his English translations, Fairley makes one or two choices that seem to me odd. He has "pine" for Fichte and "ringed with stars" for Umstirnter. Some words (Haem, Lagg) go untranslated. Heaven knows what "leucojums" are.
Some of Fairley's versions are extremely beautiful, which may from a certain point of view be a fault, but not from mine. Here, in full, is Fairley's version of Ich höre, die Axt hat geblüht
I hear the axe has flowered,
I hear the place can't be named,
I hear the bread that looks on him
heals the hanged man,
the bread his wife baked him,
I hear they call life
the only refuge.
· James Buchan's latest book is Adam Smith and the Pursuit of Perfect Liberty (Profile Books)
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/poetry/0,,2174327,00.html
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