Breathturn into Timestead (43 page)

Hohlzahn | hollow tooth: The German word
Hohlzahn
literally means “hollow tooth.” I have been unable to trace the word in a maritime context, as sail, mast, or anchor would suggest. The word is also a botanical term referring to the plant hemp nettle (
Galeopsis tetrahit
).

“Schief” | “Aslant”

April 5–6, 1967.

Hörklappe | hearing-flap: The first draft had
Hörkappe
, in the context of a reading trace and citation from Freud's
The Ego and the Id
: “Schief, wie uns allen, / sitzt dir die Hörkappe auf // Freud XIII, D. 252.” The reference pertains to the following quote: “One can add that the ego wears a ‘hearing-cap,' but on one side only, as attested by the anatomy of the brain. You could say that the cap sits crooked (awry, aslant).” The form “Hörklappe” | “hearing-flap” may have been a typo that Celan then sanctioned (
TA,
Fadensonnen
, p. 118).

Schläfenfirn | temple-firn: Compare a similar neological word formation in the term “Schläfenzange” | “templeclamps” in the poem of the same name (p. 10).

“Die herzschriftgekrümelte” | “The heartscriptcrumbled”

April 8, 1967. This is the first poem written after the conversation with his wife on April 6 in which Gisèle expressed her wish to live separately from then on. Celan also wrote the next poem on that day, and started the following one (
BW
, p. 771).

“Unverwahrt” | “Unkept”

April 8, 1967. The first draft was written on the torn-out title page of a paperback edition of Thomas Mann's
Der Zauberberg
|
The Magic Mountain
(
TA
,
Fadensonnen
, p. 122). Other notes for the poem can be found in Celan's copy of Thomas Bernhard's novel
Verstörung
(meaning something like “devastation,” “deterioration,” “blight,” though it was translated as
Gargoyles
).

“Das unbedingte Geläut” | “The unconditional chiming”

April 8–11, 1967.

“Die Ewigkeit” | “Eternity”

April 11, 1967. Draft provided with place of composition: C.P.D. (Clinique Professeur Delay). The same day he wrote the next poem and started the following one.

Die Ewigkeit | Eternity: Compare several poems with the same or similar titles throughout the oeuvre.

Cerveteri: An Italian city, at center of the Etruscan culture, that Celan had visited during a stay in Rome for a reading at the Goethe-Institut in April 1964. As this poem was written so shortly after his wife's announced intention to live separately, he may also have had in mind the letter she had sent him on January 19, 1965, from Rome, after a visit to the Etruscan museum in the Villa Giulia (
BW
, p. 772). In that letter she had written: “An hour … among the vases, the statuettes, the jewelry, the magnificent sarcophagi remarkably well presented. I remember before all a very beautiful
Sarcofagi degli sposi
, deeply moving in its serenity, charm, love, which made me pray to be with you for all eternity, and to know that it can be thus is a marvelous help. To have seen these two lovers, serene and united, calm and so tender in death has made me believe that we two also, with our difficult life, but beyond all full of love, will maybe eventually have the right to share the fate of these two Etruscan lovers, that I saw on January 19, 1965, in the Villa Giulia in Rome while thinking of you” (
PC
/
GCL
, #198).

Asphodelen | asphodels: A flower famously connected with the dead and the underworld. Homer, in chapters 11 and 24 of
The Odyssey
, describes it as covering the great meadow (ἀσφόδελος λειμών), the haunt of the dead. It was planted on graves, and is often connected with Persephone, who appears crowned with a garland of asphodels. See also, for example, the use made of this flower by William Carlos Williams's 1953 poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
, ed. Christopher MacGowan [New York: New Directions, 1991], p. 2:310).

“Spät” | “Late”

April 11, 1967.

“Die Sämlinge” | “The seedlings”

April 11–12, 1967.

causa secunda: In scholastic philosophy and theology, if God was given as the
causa prima
, the first cause of creation, then what was created, the world, beings, mankind included, were the
causa secunda
, or second cause.

“Die Hügelzeilen entlang” | “Along the hill lines”

April 13, 1967.

Hügelzeilen | hill lines: Reading trace in the final chapter of Thomas Mann's
Magic Mountain
, which Celan was reading then, as a note in a letter of April 10 to Gisèle makes clear: “After lunch, diverse readings, among them two chapters of the Zauberberg which I adored at eighteen: ‘Snow' and ‘Walpurgis Night' (the latter containing the dialogue between Hans Castorp and Clawdia Chauchat mainly in French). Well, I found it insipid, not at all ‘cool,' as Eric would say, not for him, but, alas, neither any longer for us. Alas? No, there's need for less regrets. But harshnesses (self-made), but rock faces emerging from the depths, but spirit that's rigorously anti-bourgeois” (
PC
/
GCL
, #489). Fernand Cambon, a student at the École Normale Supérieure in those years, remembers Celan's dislike for Mann. When he told Celan that he was reading
The Magic Mountain
, Celan pulled a face and said sarcastically: “Oh, Thomas Mann—he's a pasticheur!” (
PC
/
GCL
, 2:353–54).

“Komm” | “Come”

April 21, 1967.

Komm | Come: Compare the poem “Komm” | “Come” from the volume
Zeitgehöft
|
Timestead
(p. 436).

Nervenzellen | nerve cells … multipolar | multipolar … Rauten- / gruben | rhomboid / fossas: Reading traces in Celan's copy of Adolf Faller's book on human anatomy,
Der Körper des Menschen: Einführung in Bau und Funktion
(1966).

“Entschlackt” | “Deslagged”

April 21, 1967.

Wenn wir jetzt Messer wären, / blankgezogen wie damals | If we were knives now, / unsheathed like back then: Compare the poem “La Contrescarpe” from
Die Niemandsrose
, speaking to Celan's first arrival via Kraków and Berlin in Paris, specifically the lines:

… Under

paulownias

you saw the knives stand, again,

made sharp by distance.

(Compare pp. 513–515)

“Seelenblind” | “Soulblind”

April 22, 1967.

Seelenblind | Soulblind: reading traces in Reichel/Bleichert: “If this [temporal lobe] is also destroyed, the the capacity to learn is irremediably lost. After injuries to areas 18 and 19, man loses the ability to differentiate between and recognize visually perceived objects (‘soulblindness'; optical agnosia)” (p. 142).

hinter den Aschen, / im heilig-sinnlosen Wort | behind the ashes, / in the holy-meaningless word: Above a draft of the poem, Celan had written the third line of Osip Mandelstam's poem “In Petersburg” in Russian, which says literally “the blessed, senseless word,” though Celan here says “heilig-sinnlos” | “holy-meaningless,” whereas in his Mandelstam translation volume he will write: “jenes selige, deutunglose Wort” (that blessed meaningless / uninterpretable / word) (
TA
,
Fadensonnen
, p. 138).

Hirnmantel | cerebral mantle: Anatomically, the pallium (Latin for “cloak,” “mantle”)—the layers of gray and white matter that cover the upper surface of the cerebral cortex in vertebrates.

Sehpurpur | visual purple: Rhodopsin, a biological pigment in photoreceptor cells of the retina that is responsible for the first events in the perception of light. See also reading trace in Faller: “Vitamin A is responsible for the normal development of the visual purple in the cornea of the eye” (p. 243).

“Anrainerin” | “Borderess”

April 23, 1967. Eve of Passover.

“Möwenküken” | “Gullchicks”

April 24, 1967. Passover begins; it lasts until May 1. The first two stanzas of this poem are based on the following passage in Adolf Portman's
Das Problem der Urbilder in biologischer Sicht
(Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1950), p. 420:

As example we may use the trigger for the begging response of newly hatched herring gull chicks, as studied by von Tinbergen. They direct their begging to a red spot on the yellow lower beak of the parent bird … This is not, however, a special effect of the red stimulus color: a black spot works even better, as decoy heads show, and a blue-and-white spot is also quite effective. A beak without a spot, however, provides nearly no stimulus. Experiments show further that the red spot placed somewhere else, anywhere on the head, for example, is a very minor stimulant; only the typical disposition on the lower beak triggers optimal begging responses. The structure the chick needs for its behavior is thus not a randomly located stimulus color, but a “stimulus gestalt,” a configuration. This has to be hereditarily predetermined in an ordered fashion in the chick's nervous system.

IV

“Irisch” | “Irish”

April 26, 1967. This and the following poem are the first poems Celan wrote after he was granted permission to temporarily leave the hospital.

“Die Stricke” | “The ropes”

April 26, 1967.

“Tau” | “Dew”

April 27, 1967.

der Herr brach das Brot | the Lord broke the bread: Compare 1 Cor. 11:23–24: “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: / And when he had given thanks, he broke it…”

“Üppige Durchsage” | “Lavish message”

April 29, 1967. Compare reading traces in Albert Vigoleis Thelen,
Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts
: “The second Pilar, a Stußhure [brain-dead whore?] in an odor of ‘lenigster' [?] sanctity” and “Theodosius regarded the priest who stood in such an odor of sanctity, so highly” (my translation). This is a seven-hundred-plus-page novel published in 1953, which Celan much admired and called a “genuine work of art.” It was recently translated by Donald O. White and published as
The Island of Second Sight
by Overlook Press in 2013.

“Ausgerollt” | “This day”

April 30, 1967.

“Ölig” | “Oily”

April 30, 1967.

lidlos | lidless: Celan wrote this adjective in the margins of Gershom Scholem's
On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead
next to the sentence: “His (that is, God's) eyes have no lids, as the guardian of Israel neither sleeps nor slumbers” (p. 42 in German edition; read by Celan on April 25, 1967) (
BW
, p. 778).

“Ihr mit dem” | “You with the”

May 1, 1967. On the same day he wrote the next poem and started the following one. The first two show reading traces from Scholem's
On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead
: “All of the prophets gazed into a dark mirror, but Moses our teacher gazed into a clear glass” (p. 258). Compare St. Paul, 1 Cor. 13:12: “For now we see through a glass darkly…”

Joachim Schulze analyzes the whole of this poem as an example of Celan's Jewish mysticism and, in relation to the compound
Leuchtspiegelfläche
, he cites the following extract from Scholem's
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
(p. 155):

When, however, [in the process of meditation] you pass beyond the control of your thinking, another exercise becomes necessary which consists in drawing thought gradually forth—during contemplation—from its source until through sheer force that stage is reached where you do not speak nor can you speak. And if sufficient strength remains to force oneself even further and draw it out still farther, then that which is within will manifest itself without, and through the power of sheer imagination will take on the form of a polished mirror. And this is “the flame of the circling sword,” the rear revolving and becoming the fore. Whereupon one sees that his inmost being is something outside himself.

In “Mystische Motive in Paul Celans Gedichten,” Schulze comments on this citation as follows: “The ‘polished mirror,' ‘the flame of the circling sword,' seems to me to be most exactly equivalent to Celan's ‘Leuchtspiegelfläche zuinnerst' | ‘light-mirror-surface innermost.'” He then associates the expression “Boten-Selbst” | “messenger-self” in the next stanza of the poem with another extract from Scholem's book dealing with the medieval kabbalist Abraham Abulafia's directions for meditating on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The extract he quotes is the following: “Then turn all thy true thought to imagine the Name and His exalted angels in thy heart as if they were human beings sitting or standing about thee. And feel thyself like an envoy whom the king and his ministers are to send on a mission, and he is waiting to hear something about his mission from their lips, be it from the king himself, be it from his servants.”

Dreivokal | trivowel: Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac are characterized by morphemic verb and noun structures based on the roots of three consonants (triconsonantal root) to which various affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes), which can be vowels or other non-root consonants, are attached to create a word or inflect its meanings. Celan here turns this into a “triple vowel” root; it is interesting to note that in his late work he makes great use of all such affixes to transform basic single or composite German words, treating the syllables of his language as if they were linguistic structures like the Semitic triliterals.