Breathturn into Timestead (52 page)

“Huriges Sonst” | “Whorish else”

January 7, 1968, Paris, place de la Contrescarpe.

“Was näht” | “What sews”

Written on January10, 1968, at 8:00 p.m. and sent the same day to
GCL
with the note: “I just wrote a poem composed with rather simple words—I'm sending it to you. I hope that it will speak to you.” As Lefevbre (
PDN
, p. 112) notes, this is (with “Ein Leseast “ | “One reading branch” [p. 386]) the longest poem in the volumes, and that length “accentuates the threadlike character of the text, linked to the paradigm of sewing. The deliberate absence of a final period contributes to the thread-effect, the thread that links speech to that of which it speaks.”

“Ich höre, die Axt hat geblüht” | “I hear the axe has blossomed”

The first line/title of the earliest versions gave as the date of composition “the twentieth January [
Jänner
] 1968,” an essential date in Celan's cosmos, referred to in the Meridian speech, where (quoting Büchner) Lenz, “on 20th January walked through the mountains” (
MFV
, p. 7). It was also the date in 1942 when, at the Wannsee Conference, the “final solution”—that is, the extermination of the Jews—was planned and set in motion by the Nazis. A little further along in the Meridian speech (
MFV
, p. 8), Celan writes: “Perhaps one can say that each poem has its own ‘20th of January' inscribed in it? Perhaps what's new in the poems written today is exactly this: theirs is the clearest attempt to remain mindful of such dates?”

In that early version he had located the place where “the axe has blossomed” as Hungary, but when he sent that version to Franz Wurm, the latter suggested that this place-name of a state would narrow the poem too much, and Celan changed it to an “unnameable” place (
PC
/
FW
, #93).

“Mit der Stimme der Feldmaus” | “With the voice of the fieldmouse”

January 20, 1968, Paris, rue d'Ulm.

Possibly Celan had in mind Franz Kafka's last short story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.”

“In Echsen-” | “In lizard-”

January 20, 1968, Paris, rue d'Ulm. See the poem “Haut Mal,” which also speaks of epilepsy (p. 212).

“Schneepart” | “Snowpart”

January 22, 1968, Paris, rue d'Ulm. The poem that gives its title to the volume. See notes on the title above (p. 576).

II

“Die nachzustotternde Welt” | “The to-be-restuttered world”

January 23, 1968, Paris. If the poem that gave its title to the whole volume closes the first cycle of the book, then the poem following it and opening the second cycle can be seen as programmatic—as Lefebvre argues cogently (
PDN
, p. 115). The work of the poem can be seen as a restuttering of the world, not mimetic reproduction, but a rearticulation, thus a re-creation. Lefebvre: “To re-say the world with re-made words, decomposed into syllables that bang against each other and have trouble gathering together, privileging hard onsets, to re-say a world that is a passage where one is only invited. Note the inscription of this program in a retrospective gaze anticipating on the totality of existence: the (unreadable) world in which I will have lived (written, and read).”

Also useful is this quote from
The Meridian
(
MFV
, pp. 124–25): “Büchner's last words on his deathbed, Lenz's words (Moscow) have not come down to us—it is the return into the just still voiced, as in Woyzeck—it is language as involution, the unfolding of meaning in the one, word-estranged syllable—: the it is the ‘rootsyllable,' recognizable in the [death-rattled] stuttering, the [language as] what has returned into the germ—the meaning-carrier is the {mou} mortal mouth, whose lips won't round themselves. Muta cum liquida,—and vowel-buttressed, the rhyme-sound as self-sound.”

See the related term “lallation-stage” in the poem “Das Flüsterhaus” | “The whisperhouse” from
Zeitgehöft
|
Timestead
(p. 418), but before all, see “Tübingen, Jänner” | “Tübingen, January” in
Die Niemandsrose
(
PCS
, pp. 79–80), which speaks to Hölderlin (
Pallaksch
is an invented word Hölderlin used during his madness):

Eyes con-

vinced to go blind.

Their—“a

riddle is pure

origin”—, their

remembrance of

swimming Hölderlin-towers, gull-

blown.

Visits of drowned carpenters by

these

diving words:

If,

if a man,

if a man was born, today, with

the lightbeard of

the patriarchs: he could,

speaking of these

days, he

could

but babble and babble.

always, always

agagain.

(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)

“Du mit der Finsterzwille” | “You with the darkness slingshot”

January 23, 1968, Paris. The “Zwille” | “slingshot and stone” image could easily be associated with the biblical David. Lefebvre suggests (
PDN
, p. 116) that it functions as an image for poetry (as do other projectile instruments such as boomerangs and bows). Celan's astrological sign was Sagittarius, the archer.

“Eingejännert” | “Enjanuaried”

January 26, 1968, Paris. See the poem “Tübingen, Jänner” | “Tübingen, January” (p. 583), as well as the commentary for the poem “Ich höre, die Axt hat geblüht” | “I hear the axe has blossomed” (p. 581).

“Schludere” | “Be sloppy”

Night of January 29–30, 1968, Paris, rue Tournefort. Celan very carefully dated this poem to this specific night—that is, the anniversary of his suicide attempt the previous year.

“Stückgut” | “Parceled goods”

February 2, 1968, Paris.

Stückgut | Parceled goods: Celan found and underlined in a German translation of Marguerite Duras's novel
Le Vice-Consul
: “Stückgut mit Büchern kommt aus Frankreich an ihre Adresse” (Parceled goods containing books arrives from France at your address). A note in Celan's hand reads: “Stückgut: Man [
sic
] und Holz, Stückgut und Vieh” (Parceled goods: man and wood, parceled goods and livestock).

“Von querab” | “From abeam”

February 2, 1968, Paris.

“Holzgesichtiger” | “Woodfaced”

February 6, 1968, Paris, rue d'Ulm. Wiedemann points out that the feuilleton page of the
FAZ
for that day reproduced a Swiss Shrovetide's mask made of wood with a large hanging mouth, illustrating an article on folk art by Gisela Brackert, and another one, “Collapse of the Ego,” by Hans-Jürgen Heise, that compares the art of schizophrenics and the positions of contemporary poets (
BW
, p. 838).

“Largo” | “Largo”

February 9, 1968, Paris.

Largo: A musical term for a very slow tempo or a musical piece or movement in such tempo.

über- / sterbens- / groß | sur- / dying- / large: At the root of this Celan neologism one can hear the verb
überleben
, “to survive.” He had first used the term two days earlier in a poem he didn't include in
Shneepart
|
Snowpart
:

In my shot-up knee

stood my father,

sur-

dying large he stood

there,

Michailowska and

the cherry orchard stood around him,

I knew it would

come to this, he said.

Michailowska is the the labor camp in Transnistria where Frederike and Leo Antschel, Celan's parents, died in 1942. “The cherry orchard” is, of course, Chekhov's.

die Zeit- / lose | fall / crocus: the colchicum flower, or crocus; for Celan, a complex association, as colchicum (in French the flower is called
colchique
) links to Colchis and the Black Sea, which links to both Celan's lost home country and to Mandelstam. Also, the literal translation of
Zeitlose
is “timeless”—obviously lost in translation here. This flower (and the “timeless” echo of its name) also links to Celan's mother, as is made clear in the poem “The syllable pain,” which says: “fall / crocus in his sight, the mother- / flower” (
PCS
, p. 92).

Lidern | lids: In a first draft of the poem was the homophonic
Lieder
, or songs (
TA-SP
, p. 47). Cutting out the
e
changed the semantic meaning but not the sound.

Amselpaar | pair of blackbirds: The German bird name immediately calls up Celan's original family name, Antschel, which could, in fact, be a deformation of
Amsel
. In the first draft of the poem, the pair of birds were cranes; changing it to
Amsel
points to a deliberate decision to cite this name, referencing his parents.

“Zur Nachtordnung” | “To nightorder”

Written on February 19, 1968, and, the manuscript tells us, on the place de la Contrescarpe, site of several of Celan's poems, such “La Contrescarpe” (p. 513) and “Huriges Sonst” | “Whorish else” (p. 326).

Weißkies- / stotterer | whitepebble- / stutterer: See note above for “The to-be-restuttered world,” as well as in the poem “Siberian” the lines: “with your / white pebble in the mouth” (
PCS
, p. 89).

“Mit den Sackgassen” | “To speak with”

Febraury 21, 1968, Paris.

“Etwas wie Nacht” | “Something like night”

March 8, 1968, Paris, place de la Contrescarpe.

III

“Warum dieses jähe Zuhause” | “Why this sudden at-homeness”

Written on March 26, 1968, less than a week after Celan had met with Gisèle for the first time in a year, Gisèle having taken the decision to live apart in April 1967 as Celan's psychic troubles posed a danger for her and their son Eric.

einer, der sich in dich stach | someone who stabbed himself into / you: In a letter to me, the poet and translator Peter Cockelbergh wrote: “It's strange, but I can feel why the ‘you' is just right on the next line, but wonder what motivated you—is it because you changed that non-defining relative clause into a defining one? or the sound play (ich, dich, stach, stich > who, into, you + stabbed, bebreathes … which is more emphasized thus.” I responded:

The Celan line: well, I don't think I thought it totally through, that is, to start with the enjambment felt right as I was putting the words on paper, then, on second thought, it felt better even, because of the ambiguity the slight pause creates: he stabbed himself (as PC did with a
Brieföffner
, letter opener, missing his heart by a couple inches, in front of his wife) but he also tried to kill her at some point. And obviously unable to reproduce the tight/rhyming grammatical sequence of the German “einer, der sich in dich stach,” very trochaic but ending with a spondee, which is differently—but with similar expectations, maybe, reproduced, I think, by the enjambment. Of course my main focus was on how to translate
beatmet
and I am happy you like the “bebreathes”—a bit wild, but then given the importance of the word
Atem
in PC's world, and the various neologisms he creates with it, why not create one in English even if it isn't present in the original at that specific locus.

Geschlecht | sex: The German word has the double meaning of sexual organ and progeny, family, lineage. Though the first meaning prevails here, the second, wider concept needs to be heard. For a complex philosophical investigation of this term, see Jacques Derrida's essay “
Geschlecht
: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” in
A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds
, edited by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 381.

“Warum aus dem Ungeschöpften” | “Why, from the uncreated”

March 31, 1968, Paris, rue d'Ulm. One of the sources of this poem is no doubt
Das Prinzip Hoffnung
|
The Principle of Hope
by Ernst Bloch (1885–1997), published in three volumes (1954 to 1959) and exploring the utopian impulses present in art, literature, religion, and other forms of cultural expression. Celan marked and underlined several sentences in the first volume: “
Mercury, the essence of quicksilver, counted as the most essential metal constituent
; made of water and earth it permits
elasticity and fusibility
. Because of these passive qualities,
mercury was considered a female power
, as such it stands closest to the ‘
materia prima
'” (vol. 1, p. 749). “Like the ‘materia prima' … Mercurius can be compared to the Virgin Mary, as the stone can be with the son” (vol. 1, p. 750f), and “
The Virgin is Mercury
, from here the Son is born, that is the stone” (Marsilio Ficinus quote, vol. 1, p. 151f).

ein Weisensteinchen | a philosopher's pebble: In the alchemical context of the poem, the German word suggests
Stein der Weisen
(see Bloch, p. 749), or the philosopher's stone, which is supposed to be able to turn metals into gold and was the central symbol of the mystical terminology of alchemy, symbolizing perfection at its finest, enlightenment, and heavenly bliss. Celan underlined Bloch's tracing of the word
Aufklärung
, “enlightenment,” back to the vocabulary of alchemy (
BPPC
, p. 318). Efforts to discover the philosopher's stone were known as the Magnum Opus (Great Work).

Magnalia: Ernst Bloch, on p. 765, writes: “Das Haus Salomonis birgt weiter Flugzeuge, Dampmaschinen, Wasserturbinen und noch andere ‘magnalia naturae, Großtaten der Natur,' mit ihr und über sie hinaus” (The house of Solomon further holds airplanes, steam engines, water turbines and other “magnalia naturae, major deeds of nature”). The word usually refers to the greater works of God (
magnalia dei
); in the United States the word is familiar mainly from the title of Cotton Mather's
Magnalia Christi Americana
.