Breathturn into Timestead (5 page)

Perhaps the poem is itself because of this … and can now, in this art-less, art-free manner, walk its other routes, thus also the routes of art—time and again?

Perhaps.
17

I have quoted this passage at length not only because it may be the one that most closely defines Celan's thinking about poetry, but also to give a sense of its rhetorical texture, its tentative, meditative, one could say groping, progress. The temptation—and many critics have not resisted it—would be to extract from the passage the definitive, affirmative statement “Poetry is a breathturn,” but in the process one would have discarded the series of rhetorical pointers, the ninefold repetition of the word
vielleicht
, “perhaps,” which turns all the sentences into questions. The passage is, however, not an isolated rhetorical formula in the speech; indeed, one could argue that the whole of the Meridian speech is a putting into question of the possibilities of art, in Celan's own words, “eine radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst,” which all of poetry (and art in general) has to submit to today if it wants to be of essential use. Gerhard Buhr, in an essay analyzing the Meridian speech from exactly this angle, comments on Celan's expression “eine radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst” as follows:

The phrase “radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst” (radical putting-into-question of art) has a double meaning given the two ways the genitive can read: Art, with “everything that belongs and comes to it” … has to be radically questioned; and it [art] puts other things, such as man or poetry, radically into question. That is exactly why the question of poetry, the putting-into-question of poetry is not exterior to art —: The nature of art is rather to be discussed and clarified in connection with the nature of the question itself.
18

Celan, a careful poet not given to rhetorical statements or linguistic flourishes, who in his late poems will castigate himself and his own early work for an overuse of such “flowers,” needs to be taken quite literally here: he is groping, experimenting, questioning, trying to find his way to a new possibility in poetry. It is a slow process: the term
Atemwende
, coined in this speech of 1960, will reemerge as the title of a volume only seven years later.

*   *   *

The last book published before the Meridian speech had been
Sprachgitter
, which had come out the previous year and already points to some of the directions the late work will take. For the first time Celan uses a single compound word as a title, something he will do for all subsequent volumes; for the first time it contains poems, albeit only five, devoid of individual titles—something that will become the norm in the late work; the language has now given up nearly completely the long dactylic lines and the rhymes of the first three books, while the brief, foreshortened, often one-word lines have become more frequent. Most important, some of the poems are clearly what has been called
Widerrufe
: attempts at retracting, countermanding, disavowing previous poetics—those of other poets, but also his own earlier stance. The poem “Tenebrae,” for example, is a carefully constructed refutation of Hölderlin's “Patmos” hymn, which, as Götz Wienold has shown,
19
negates the (Christian/pagan) hope for salvation expressed in Hölderlin's lines “Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch” (Close / and difficult to grasp is God. / But where danger lurks, that which saves / also grows); simultaneously the poem inverts and negates the (Judaic) hopes regarding God's promises as expressed in the psalms, specifically Psalm 34, and in other places in the Bible that are alluded to, mainly Isaiah 43:20 and Leviticus 17. In a similar vein, the title poem, “Sprachgitter,” takes issue both with Gottfried Benn's famous essay
Probleme der Lyrik
and with the optimism of Psalm 126.

However, Celan's
Widerrufe
are not only addressed to German poetry and the scriptures. He also calls into question his own earlier poetics. One can thus read “Engführung,” the great poem that concludes
Sprachgitter
, as a rewriting with different poetics of the “Todesfuge,” as Hans Mayer
20
and others have done. This critical stance toward his early poetics remains perceptible in several poems of the late work and is thematized in the opening stanza of a poem in
Breathturn
:

W
EGGEBEIZT
vom

Strahlenwind deiner Sprache

das bunte Gerede des An-

erlebten – das hundert-

züngige Mein-

gedicht, das Genicht.

E
RODED
by

the beamwind of your speech

the gaudy chatter of the pseudo-

experienced—the hundred-

tongued perjury-

poem, the noem.

The neologism “Meingedicht” is based on the German word
Meineid
, “perjury,” but because Celan breaks the word the way he does, one cannot but also hear in the prefix the possessive
mein
, “my.” As Jerry Glenn has suggested,
21
this “allude[s] to Celan's own early attempts to come to terms with the past in elaborate, colorful metaphors.” The new language of the addressed “you,” which here seems to be the poet himself, his new “beamwind”-language, aims to erode the “gaudy chatter” of the early work, and lead into a bare northern landscape of snow and ice:
nordwahr
, “northtrue,” as another poem puts it, where the true “unalterable testimony” which it is the poet's job to create can be found, located deep in the ice, as an
Atemkristall
, a “breath-crystal.”

What all of Celan's
Widerrufe
seem to have in common is a deep dissatisfaction with traditional (and that includes modernist) poetics, and a need to push toward a new vision of writing and the world, and of the relationship between those two. For Celan, art no longer harbors the possibility of redemption, in that it can neither lead back to or bring back the gods, as Hölderlin suggested, nor can it constitute itself as an independent, autonomous aesthetic sphere of
Artistik
, “artistry,” as Gottfried Benn sees it, and behind Benn, the tradition that starts with Mallarmé. It is this new poetics tentatively proposed in the Meridian speech that is implemented throughout the late work.

3. “LINE THE WORD-CAVES”

The Meridian speech thus points the way, with many “perhaps”es to the late work, but how to read these obviously difficult poems remains a problem. Happily, besides the
Widerrufe
poems, Celan has written a number of programmatic metapoems, showing how the poet envisaged the act of writing, thus how he would have liked his work to be read and understood. Let me give a somewhat detailed reading of one such poem from
Fadensonnen | Threadsuns
.

K
LEIDE DIE
W
ORTHÖHLEN AUS

mit Pantherhäuten,

erweitere sie, fellhin und fellher,

sinnhin und sinnher,

gib ihnen Vorhöfe, Kammern, Klappen

und Wildnisse, parietal,

und lausch ihrem zweiten

und jeweils zweiten und zweiten

Ton.

In my translation:

L
INE THE WORDCAVES

with panther skins,

widen them, hide-to and hide-fro,

sense-hither and sense-thither,

give them courtyards, chambers, drop doors

and wildnesses, parietal,

and listen for their second

and each time second and second

tone.

Following Celan's own suggestions, I have already insisted on the importance of the
word
in the late poetry. This poem thematically foregrounds the point, yielding insights not only into Celan's writing process, but also into the reading process. The work of poetry is to be done on the word itself, the word that is presented here as hollow, as a cave—an image that suggests immediately a range of connections with similar topoi throughout the oeuvre, from prehistoric caves to Etruscan tombs. The word is nothing solid, diorite, or opaque, but a formation with its own internal complexities and crevasses—closer to a geode, to extend the petrological imagery so predominant in the work from
Breathturn
on. In the context of this first stanza, however, the “panther skins” seem to point more toward the image of a prehistoric cave, at least temporarily, for the later stanzas retroactively change this reading, giving it the multiperspectivity so pervasive throughout the late work.

These words need to be worked, transformed, enriched, in order to become meaningful. In this case the poem commands the poet to “line” them with animal skins, suggesting that something usually considered as an external covering is brought inside and turned inside out. The geometry of this inversion makes for an ambiguous space, like that of a Klein bottle, where inside and outside become indeterminable or interchangeable. These skins, pelts, hides, or furs also seem to be situated
between
something, to constitute a border of some sort, for the next stanza asks for the caves to be enlarged in at least two, if not four, directions: “hide-to and hide-fro, / sense-hither and sense-thither.” This condition of being between is indeed inscribed in the animal chosen by Celan, via a multilingual pun (though he wrote in German, Celan lived in a French-speaking environment, while translating from half a dozen languages he mastered perfectly): “between” is
entre
in French, while the homophonic rhyme-word
antre
refers to a cave; this
antre
, or cave, is inscribed and can be heard in the animal name “Panther.” (One could of course pursue the panther image in other directions, for example, into Rilke's poem—and Celan's close involvement with Rilke's work is well documented.) Unhappily, the English verb “line” is not able to render the further play on words rooted in the ambiguity of the German
auskleiden
, which means to line, to drape, to dress with, and to undress.

These “Worthöhlen,” in a further echo of inversion, call to mind the expression
hohle Worte
—“empty words.” (The general plural for
Wort
is
Wörter
, but in reference to specific words you use the plural
Worte
.) Words, and language as such, have been debased, emptied of meaning—a topos that can be found throughout Celan's work—and in order to be made useful again the poet has to transform and rebuild them, creating in the process those multiperspectival layers that constitute the gradual, hesitating, yet unrelenting mapping of Celan's universe. The third stanza thus adds a further stratum to the concept of “Worthöhlen” by introducing physiological terminology, linking the wordcaves to the hollow organ that is the heart. These physiological topoi appear with great frequency in the late books and have been analyzed in some detail by James Lyon,
22
who points out the transfer of anatomical concepts and terminology, and, specifically in this poem, how the heart's atria become the poem's courtyards, the ventricles, chambers, and the valves, drop doors. The poem's “you,” as behooves a programmatic text, is the poet exhorting himself to widen the possibilities of writing by adding attributes, by enriching the original wordcaves. The poem's command now widens the field by including a further space, namely “wildnesses,” a term that recalls and links back up with the wild animal skins of the first stanza. Celan does not want a linear transformation of the word from one singular meaning to the next, but the constant presence of multiple layers of meaning accreting in the process of the poem's composition. The appearance in the third stanza of these wildnesses also helps to keep alive the tension between a known, ordered, constructed world and the unknown and unexplored, which is indeed the Celanian
Grenzgelände
, that marginal borderland into which, through which, and from which language has to move for the poem to occur.

But it is not just a question of simply adding and enlarging, of a mere constructivist activism: the poet also has to listen. The last stanza gives this command, specifying that it is the second tone that he will hear that is important. The poem itself foregrounds this: “tone” is the last word of the poem, constituting a whole line by itself, while simultaneously breaking the formal symmetry of the text which had so far been built on stanzas of two lines each. Given the earlier heart imagery, this listening to a double tone immediately evokes the systole/diastole movement. The systole corresponds to the contraction of the heart muscle when the blood is pumped through the heart and into the arteries, while the diastole represents the period between two contractions of the heart when the chambers widen and fill with blood. The triple repetition on the need to listen to the second tone thus insists that the sound produced by the diastole is what interests the poet.

The imagery of the heart and of the circulation of the blood is, of course, a near-classical topos in poetry; Celan, however, transforms it in such a way that it becomes vital poetic imagery at the end of his century. In no way is it readable as a kind of postmodernist (in the aesthetical-architectural sense) citation or pastiche of classical poetic/decorative topoi. Numerous other poems take up, develop, and transform this and related imagery. Here, as one example, is a poem that appears a few pages after “Line the wordcaves” and that speaks of this second movement, though this time from an anatomical position slightly above, though still near, the heart:

N
AH, IM
A
ORTENBOGEN,

im Hellblut:

das Hellwort.

Mutter Rahel

weint nicht mehr.

Rübergetragen

alles Geweinte.

Still, in den Kranzarterien,