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Green Integer
1931243751
£6.79
Paul Celan's language is about as far from cliche as it is possible to get. Almost every one of his poems contains portmanteau words, neologisms. Yet there are cliches of criticism it is almost impossible to avoid, when first approaching his work.
Chief among these is Theodor Adorno's widely quoted and misquoted statement: 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.' [See Footnote at end.]
This is the twentieth century equivalent of the words Dante placed above the gateway to hell: 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here.'
Yet Celan's poetry is in no way hellish, and it could (as well as anything else) be defined as anti-barbaric.
To quote a poem in full, an apparently approachable one:
'WHERE I forgot myself in you,
you became thought,
something
rushes through us both:
the first of the
world's last
wings,
the hide
overgrows
my storm-riddled
mouth,
you
come not
to
you.'
This, taken separately, could be seen as almost conventionally romantic. Here is a second step towards Celan:
'CUT THE PRAYERHAND
from
the air
with the eye-
scissors,
lop off its fingers
with your kiss:
What's folded now happens
breathtakingly.'
And now we arrive:
'HEARTSOUND-FIBULAS, fenced in,
the pair of cranes
thinks itself before you,
aspectral
the light of your flower bestows itself,
the mantis's trapleg
meets your over-
starry
Always.'
We arrive and are lost.
Celan makes one feel ashamed of prosaic statement but also slightly glad for it. This is language at a rack-like stretch. In-between each line, each word, is a gap - how do we get from here back to there?
Of course, each word is a hundred times necessary. None could be moved, changed, even nudged.
For understanding, there are almost enough clues. When there are enough, as in a very few poems, we are disappointed.
Here is my first reading of 'HEARTSOUND-FIBULAS, fenced in.' It is a nature poem in which the specific instances of the natural world (cranes, flower, mantis) don't matter. At least, not as they would in a poem by Ted Hughes, where the organism would symbolise, the symbol would become an organism: fox and thought, 'Thought-fox.'
Celan is anatomizing the human perception of the natural world, contrasting an objective existence ('the pair of cranes / thinks itself before you') with a subjective ('aspectral / the light of your flower bestows itself'). These are synthesized in the final swaying image, 'the mantis's trapleg / meets your over- / starry / Always.' A perilously tiny specific exists only in relation to a metaphysical absolute ('leg' / 'Always'). Yet in being expressed, this relation is being critiqued. 'Always' is always 'over- / starry.' The universe overemphasises its metaphysic; it becomes vulgar, despite having no outside, no non-universal society of universes within such judgements can be asserted. It is vulgar and, at the same time, it cannot be vulgar, since it is all there is. The stars criticise themselves for being too much like themselves. Equally, the things you perceive tell you that you are mis-perceiving them but give no hint as to how you can truly look at them. This is Natural-Philosophy.
(I have pushed this reading as far as I can; if I'm wrong, I want to be wrong by a vast distance.)
Celan returns repeatedly to minutiae, both of the body ('HEARTSOUND-FIBULAS') and of the natural world ('trapleg').
He is scrupulous in not wanting to oversay, but ghastly in the intellectual leaps he is prepared to take.
Read. Re-read. Please.
Footnote: This comes from an essay of 1949, 'Cultural Criticism and Society.' "Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely." [Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, tr. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), p. 34.] |
