Breathturn into Timestead (49 page)

August 30, 1967. Reading traces (
BW
, p. 811) of an annotation in Rudolf Bilz,
Die unbewältigte Vergangen-heit des Menschengeschlechts
: “when a delirium tremens patient reads a letter from a completely white page” (my translation).

“Schneid die Gebetshand” | “Cut the prayerhand”

August 30, 1969. Reading traces in Bilz: “I do not address the prayerhand, especially the physiognomic change that has occurred.”

Barbara Klose, in “‘Souvenirs entomologiques': Celans Begegnung mit Jean-Henri Fabre,” has shown that this poem, as well as ten further poems in the next section of
Lichtzwang
, show traces of Celan's reading of French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre's selected writings in German, edited by Adolf Portmann.

“Was es an Sternen bedarf” | “What's required as stars”

September 2, 1967.

“Ich kann dich noch sehen” | “I can still see you”

September 2, 1967, Paris.

“Lauter” | “Nothing but”

September 3, 1967, Paris.

“Im Leeren” | “In the void”

September 5, 1967, Paris.

“Die lehmigen Opfergüsse” | “The loamy sacrifice downpours”

September 2, 1967, Paris.

“Das Wildherz” | “The wildheart”

September 8, 1967, Camedo, in the Domodossola–Locarno train.

vom halbblinden Stich | by the halfblind stab: A reference to Celan's recent suicide attempt, when he stabbed himself with a knife (or a letter opener, depending on the source), barely missing the heart but puncturing his left lung.

This and the next poem were written on a trip to Switzerland (September 7–22, 1967), where Celan would spend a few days with his friend Franz Wurm, after a long forced residence in the Paris hospital. These two, as well as the previous poem (“The loamy sacrifice downpours”), are connected with the poems that Celan gathered under the title
Eingedunkelt
|
Tenebrae'd
(p. 222). Compare, for example, “Einbruch” | “Irruption” for “unterwaschen” / “washed out” (p. 232) and, in
Zeitgehöft
|
Timestead
, “Kleines Wurzelgeträum” | “Little rootdreamings” for “blutunterwaschen” | “bloodwashedout” (pp. 232 and 428), as well as the poem “Unterhöhlt” | “Hollowed out” (from the poems around
Eingedunkelt
not collected here):

H
OLLOWED OUT

by flooding pain,

soulbitter,

amidst the wordbondaged

steepstood, free.

The oscillations that

once more

report

to us.

IV

“Die Ewigkeiten” | “The eternities”

September 20, 1967, Zurich. Compare the poem “Die Ewigkeiten tingeln” | “The eternities honkytonk” (p. 162).

“Herzschall-Fibeln” | “Heartsound-fibulas”

September 23, 1967, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris.

dem Fangbein der Mantis | the mantis's trapleg: reading traces of Fabre's “Souvenirs entomologiques.”

“Aneinander” | “Grown weary”

September 25, 1967, Paris.

“Ein Extra-Schlag Nacht” | “An extra dollop of night”

September 26, 1967, Hotel Raspail (where the next poem was written as well), just before Celan's meeting with the physicist and neurophysiologist Moshé Feldenkrais, a friend of Franz Wurm's, from whom Celan expected to receive an alternative treatment to the heavy antidepressant pharmacopeia of his Parisian doctors.

Reading traces (
BW
, p. 815) cite a note on an early draft that mentions
Extra-Schlag Suppe
(an extra ladle/scoop/dollop of soup) from a
Spiegel
magazine article on Stalin's eldest son as wounded prisoner of war of the Germans in 1941: “In the officer's prisoner of war camp Hammelburg, Dzhugashvili carved … cigarette holders and exchanged them with the guards for tobacco, bread and an extra scoop of soup.”

“Hinter frostgebänderten Käfern” | “Behind froststreaked beetles”

September 26, 1967, Hotel Raspail, Paris.

“Die Irin” | “The Irishwoman”

September 27, 1967.

“Die mir hinterlassne” | “The left-to-me”

September 28, 1967, Paris.

“Verworfene” | “Repudiated”

September 30, 1967, Paris.

kunkelbeinige | distaff-legged: Reading traces (
BW
, p. 815) in Fabre, who uses the image of the spindle when describing the “murderous machinery” of the praying mantis's forelegs. (The only available English translation—
Fabre's Book of Insects, Retold from Alexander Teixeira de Mattos' Translation of Fabre's “Souvenirs entomologiques” by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell
[New York: Dodd, Mead, 1921]—has omitted this image.)

Gegenblut- / Sinn | counterblood- / sense: Reading traces in Rudolf Bilz (Celan's underlines): “Bei primitiven Völkerschaften gibt es
ein Winken im Gegenzeiger- und ein Winken im Uhrzeigersinne
. Im Uhrzeigersinne winken bedeutet: ‘Komm!' ‘Her zu mir!'” (Among the primitive peoples there exists a counterclockwise and a clockwise. To nod clockwise means: “Come!” “To me!”) (
BW
, p. 815).

“Fertigungshalle” | “Productionhangar”

October 1, 1967, Paris–June 23, 1969. In a July 4, 1970, letter to his publisher, Siegfried Unseld, cited by Wiedemann, Celan expands on his sense that he is not writing abstract or hermetic poetry, saying, “My poems have not become more hermetic or more geometric; they are not cyphers, they are language; they do not move further away from the everyday, they stand, in their very wording—take for example ‘Productionhangar'—in the today” (
BW
, p. 816).

Indeed, as Barbara Wiedemann shows, a range of this poem's technical vocabulary comes directly from an article in the previous weekend edition of the
FAZ
, “Stress am Fließband” (Stress on the assembly line) by K. L. Ulrich, relating a walk through a car assembly plant with the company physician.

“In der Blasenkammer” | “In the vesicle chamber”

October 3 1967, Paris.

Blasenkammer | vesicle chamber: A terminus technicus from nuclear physics; its literal referent is the “bubble chamber,” where atoms are ionized. But the association with breath via “das Entatmete”—and Celan's constant linking of breath and speech—suggest strongly the image of the lung's alveoli. According to James K. Lyon, it is, however, a Celanian construct based on the geological term
Blasenräume
, “the geological term for the spaces formed in basalt and other igneous rock through intense heat” (Lyon, “Paul Celan's Language of Stone,” p. 306). Given the volcanological vocabulary of the second stanza (“crater,” “porphyry”) I tend to agree with that reading and rather than translating the word as “bubble chamber,” I have used the neologism “vesicle chamber.”

“Magnetische Bläue” | “Magnetic blue”

October 3, 1967, Paris.

“Vorflut” | “Outfall”

October 4, 1967, Paris.

“Die Mantis” | “The mantis”

October 7, 1967, Paris.

im Nacken | in the nape: In the English edition of Fabre's book, we find this: “The Mantis attacks the Locust first at the back of the neck, to destroy its power of movement. This enables her to kill and eat an insect as big as herself, or even bigger.” And later on the following: “She even makes a habit of devouring her mate, whom she seizes by the neck and then swallows by little mouthfuls, leaving only the wings.” Wiedemann points to further such killing/devouring references in the edition Celan read.

“Kein Halbholz” | “No halfwood”

October 7, 1967, Paris.

Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 818) points to Fabre's description of climbing Mont Ventoux in Provence (not in the English version), for the provenance of the terms “halfwood,” “peakslopes,” “thyme,” and “bordersnow.”

“Schwimmhäute” | “Webbing”

October 3, 1967, Paris.

Zeithof | timehalo: Celan encountered the term
Zeithof
in his readings of Edmund Husserl, where he underlined and marginally marked it with a double stroke in section 14 of
Leçons pour une phénoménologie de la conscience intime du temps
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964) (
LPC
); compare Husserl,
Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins
; and pp. 35–36 in the English translation (
The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964]), which is cited here:

Let us consider a case of secondary memory: We recall, say, a memory we recently heard at a concert. It is obvious in this case that the whole memory-phenomenon has exactly the same constitution, mutatis mutandis, as the perception of the memory. Like the perception it has a privileged point: to the now-point of the perception corresponds a now point of the memory. We run through the memory in phantasy; we hear, “as it were” [“gleichsam”], first the initial tone, then the second tone, and so on. At any particular time there is always a tone (or tone-phrase) in the now-point. The preceding tones, however, are not erased from consciousness. Primary memory of the tones that, as it were, I have just heard and expectation (protention) of the tones that are yet to come fuse with the apprehension of the tone that is now appearing and that, as it were, I am now hearing. The now-point once again has for consciousness a temporal fringe which is produced in a continuity of memorial apprehension; [Der Jetzpunkt hat für das Bewußtsein wieder einen Zeithof, der sich in einer Kontinuität von Erinnerungsauffassungen vollzieht,] and the total memory of the melody consists in a continuum of such continua of temporal fringes and, correlatively, in a continuum of apprehension-continua of the kind described. [und die gesamte Erinnerung der Melodie besteht in einem Kontinuum von solchen Zeithofkontinuen, bzw. von Auffassungskontinuen der beschriebenen Art.]

Jean Greisch reads this poem as “something like a variation on the Husserlian image of the comet's tail of protensions and retentions, marking the temporal slipstream of the living present and allowing it to shift toward the past. With this difference, however, that the incessant surge of the living present sustains a rather disquieting deformation: the ‘source-point' of the present becomes a pool of stagnant waters, the luminous head of the present has an obverse, maybe the grayness of the impossible to forget non-sense.” He suggests that “to orient oneself in as ‘floating' a temporality maybe one does indeed need words that are webbed” (in
C-J
, pp. 167–83).

Celan uses the term twice more, next in the poem “Mapesbury Road” in
Snowpart
(p. 348), and a variant (
Zeitgehöft
) becomes the title of his last posthumous volume (p. 400). In
Breathturn
we find the composite term
Lebensgehöft
in the poem titled “Hohles Lebensgehöft” | “Hollow lifehomestead” (p. 28). I have chosen to translate
Zeithof
as “timehalo”—though other possibilities, such as “timeyard,” “timecourt,” even “timepatio,” came to mind at one time or another—and
Zeitgehöft
as “timestead” (with
Lebensgehöft
logically becoming “lifestead”).

“Anredsam” | “Addressable”

October 8, 1967, Paris.

Amsel | blackbird: In the German word for the blackbird,
Amsel
, which occurs a number of times in Celan's work, it is difficult not to hear a rhyme on Celan's original name, Antschel. See also the poem “Frankfurt, September” (p. 110), which in German points out the sound-rhyme between Celan's original name and Kafka's Hebrew name, Amschel, while the name Kafka also refers to a black bird, the jackdaw.

V

“Oranienstraße 1” | “Oranienstraße 1”

October 11, 1967, Frankfurt am Main, where Celan gave a reading from the just published
Breathturn
in the context of the annual book fair.

Title: the address of a bed-and-breakfast and restaurant, then called Römerkrug, in Frankfurt.

Ossietzkys | Ossietzky's: Carl von Ossietzky (October 3, 1889–May 4, 1938) was a German pacifist and the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize (which Hitler prohibited him from accepting) for his work in exposing clandestine German rearmament. He was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 after publishing details of Germany's alleged violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force, the predecessor of the Luftwaffe, and training pilots in the Soviet Union. Ossietzky was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, being released at the end of 1932 in the Christmas amnesty. On February 28, 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was arrested and held in Spandau prison. In May 1936 he was sent to the Westend hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg because of his tuberculosis, but under Gestapo surveillance. He died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody, on May 4, 1938, of tuberculosis and from the aftereffects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps. He was supposedly so weak that he couldn't raise up a teacup without help.

durchstünde | endure: Wiedemann (
BW
, p. 819) points to the motto of the Oranien-Nassau family (Nassaustraße runs parallel to Oranienstraße), which is “Je maintiendrai” (I will hold steadfast), and its importance for Celan in the post–Goll affair days. See
PC
/
GCL
correspondence, letters 154, 198, 272, and 445. See also cover illustration of this book.