Fesltiner on Celan, via G M Hopkins?

APR Nov/Dec 2000 Vol. 29/No. 6 | John Felstiner: "In Memoriam Paul Eluard (1952)
By 1952, self-exiled in Paris, Celan had begun teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieure, seen his first collection appear in Germany, and married Gisele de Lestrange, a graphic artist. About the Paul Eluard elegy, it helps to know that in 1950 a Czech Stalinist tribunal had condemned Zavis Kalandra, a surrealist poet and survivor of Hitler's camps. Andre Breton urged Eluard to intercede, Eluard declined, Kalandra was hanged. Thus Celan, though no longer steeped in surrealism, responded vehemently to the death of a fellow poet who'd once defended liberty and 'the power of words.'

Penciled into an edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Celan's library I found an angry draft, using words such as 'gallows' and 'guilt' that he later removed from the more tempered final version. Tone, idiom, and the rhythms that carry them seem to me vital in translating his caustic yet understated sentences. Luckily the telling play on 'tongues' and 'tongs' is a set-up, English being cognate with Zungen and Zangen. And occasionally, 'Thou' can respond to the familiar second-person singular du. But where German word order differs markedly, English line breaks need extra care to deliver Celan's tentative, chastening lines: 'a second, / stranger blue will enter, / and the one who said Thou to him / will dream with him: We.'"

silence is freezing

wake up call came
came like a breeze a winter breeze
blown hard from north to south
a wake up call from militia-man
in michigan again he says, again
he says some words to hear it's hard to
hear it's hard to know
what should I know? what should I think?

came, came a word
a word from michigan, a word from
the cold.

really excited

Ideas just won't stop pouring in..from...somewhere...
I'm past the "facts", long past the Introduction (oh yeah, I posted it on here), and on to the Theoretical Influences section. I've already got more words than my entire Epic Poetry paper, so I'm afraid I might pass the mark Argyros assigned. Well, I really mean that I'm hopeful I'll pass it. It's almost midnight and my last day of class is tomorrow. I really wish the ower hadn't gone out, becuase I would have been at such a different spot in the writing of this essay...I've got a lot of energy left--mental energy--but I'm physically tired and worn out, and so I'll have to surrender soon and prepare for an EXTREMELY LONG MONDAY. I'll be on campus by 8:45 a.m., and won't be leaving the city of Richardson until after 10:00.
"Weekends, I prefer the Weekends!"

The small sliver of hopeful expectation that I might possibly receive my graded Epic paper back tomorrow afternoon is almost too exciting to entertain.......I'm anxious and eager and all other emotions in between the two.

I'm also thrilled that I've been writing nonstop about the JM Berlin. I never thought that I'd be at this point in my academic career already: where I'm so enraptured by certain texts--visual or verbal--that I'm composing my thoughts for my Master's Portfolio Papers and, in some respects, I'm even writing them this semester.


I can hear the Bailey Booler from the other room, sleeping in his house; the high-powered whizzing of Gina's new (new for her) laptop continues to break the silence during the few times I stop typing to drink the coffee she's made me or leave the room for another diet coke.

And that's the life of this grad student. Everything changes at the end of this week though; then it's just me and Soliday's paper for a whole month and a half.

Goodnight World
-BW

lecture online

I love and hate the internet. I find things that I'm not looking for, but what I really want--what I'm really frantically searching for (Derrida on Libeskind) can't be found. No--it can be found, but just not accessed. So here's what I did find:

Architecture has been kind of immune to that discourse

because we expect of books and of music deep reflections on memory,

but in architecture we don’t expect it.

Architecture is fundamentally a communicative art.

It’s not just the art of the building, it’s a communicative art

and I believe it’s an art that tells a story.

Daniel Libeskind[1]

---

[1] Libsekind delivered these remarks after cpmmenting on the enigmatic nature of time and the representation of memory during a panel discussion reflecting “Monument and Memory” at Columbia University on 31 October, 2002. See citation for Libeskind, “Architecture is a Communicative Art.”

-BW

electrical storm

text, from tex-ere, "to weave"

Time is rushing by and I have the power outage to thank for being considerably behind my own proposed schedule for Dr. Argyros' paper...
I think it's coming along really well, though. I've found it impossible to approach the museum as a text without the help of Paul Celan. At first I thought invoking Celan would make things more difficult, but I'm beginning to believe that his words allow for a fundamentally more navigable museum. Perhaps I'll post my introduction to the paper here:

How does a city “house” the memory of a people no longer at “home” there?
James Young[1]

Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening.
Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.
Paul Celan[2]

The construction of Daniel Libeskind’s architectural masterpiece at 14 Lindenstraße in Berlin’s Kreuzberg section triggered controversial criticism ranging from fierce opposition to devoted admiration. The building’s layout and design naturally engendered debate simply due to the purpose the structure was created to fulfill: a Jewish extension to the Berlin Museum. James Young’s question reveals the inherent difficulty in designing such a building; in order to present Jewish history as a function of the history of Berlin, a large portion of the exhibit must, by necessity, deal directly with death. While considering how to architecturally express the ambivalent history of a people who, like Celan’s language, passed through the depths of darkness, but, conversely, did not emerge, Libeskind attempts to render the vivacity of a community that did exist alongside the facts of its vicious destruction and subsequent nonexistence. In this building, architectural language takes its own journey through the darkness, encountering faceless voids, labyrinthine halls, compressed spaces and narrow passageways. Libeskind’s language passes through all this and emerges, undoubtedly changed by its descent into the depths of death and its ascent through the history of a Jewish-German symbiosis. In recreating spatially the journey which Celan speaks of in his Bremen speech quoted above, Libeskind’s Jewish Museum functions like a text, in which the visitor, as viewer/spectator, becomes the reader. The journey through the museum unveils multiple levels of narrative while serving as a commentary on the subject-position in relation to the traditional museum and its exhibitionary spaces. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum of Berlin subverts this relationship, and the individual, or spectator, becomes the subject of the museum’s narrative. At the same time, this controversial theme exists as a counterpoint to the history of Jews in Germany that the spectator encounters in the museum. Thus Libeskind, as a direct result of his innovative design, weaves two stories throughout his architectural narrative; a critical analysis, then, relies on an investigation of the relationships that then develop between Libeskind's building and the exhibit, and the exhibit and the spectator.


That'll give an idea as to where I'm going with this.
So for now, back to the paper.

Nacht.
Nacht-und-Nacht.

-BW

libeskind on the brain

time is running short; my paper is much shorter.
at least i've come up with an outline:
I. Intro to the JM Berlin
II. A Walk-through
III. Interpretations
IV. Conclusions: considering relationships

my thoughts center around the notion of the subject and the subject-position in relation to the traditional museum and its exhibitionary spaces; in the JM Berlin this position is subverted and the individual, or spectator, becomes the subject of the museum. This theme exists as a sort of counterpoint to the history of Jews in Germany simultaneously being presented in the museum. An investigation of the relationships that then develop between Libeskind's voids and the exhibit, the exhibit and the spectator, and the story of the spectator's experience and that of the dead experienced vicariously through the presentation of their history is what will ultimately be the main undertaking of my paper.

Read no more--look!
Look no more--go!
-BW

Schreiben und Libeskind

Haven't made much progress on the paper, but at least now I'm stting at the laptop in the dining room and working on it...my papers, essays, and books spread out across the table...

BW

a long time

so it's after 3.30 and i'm home in grapevine, #727.
i loaded up blogger 'cuz i figured i'd had some stuff to say, despite not knowing who i'm talking to...so maybe i don't have anything to say.

so much is happening. alwyas, though, right?
Matt has a new friend, eddie a new son-to-be-born-next-spring, walt'll have a wife soon... and i'm going to the tree trimming party! I've told Gina that I can't wait to walk around my house with a glass of wine in my hand and a name-tag on my back.

Just finished (couple days ago) a paper I'm calling "The End of Epic? Examining the Epic Tradition in the Shadow of the Holocaust". I was pretty intimidated to undertake the topic; my professor, Dr. Fred Turner, studied at Oxford (knew J. R. R. Tolkien), quotes Milton and Shakespeare like it's the Princess Bride or So I Married an Axe Murderer, and has written two epic poems, one about the ofunding of America, and another, over 300 pages, about humans building a new civilization on Mars. So, yeah, what do I know in light of this guy? So I'm anxious and eager to get this paper back as early as next week, maybe. We'll see what happens.

Now I'm on to another project for my Literary Theory class, treating the Jewish Museum of Berlin as a text. I'm thrilled about it, but it's going to be pretty difficult since there's so much to say about the JM Berlin. And then I find out that the Mueseum is considered an exercise in "Deconstructionist architecture"........ and my professor studied under Derrida in Paris....so, once again, What do I have to say?

We'll see.

"I'm wide awake....I'm not sleeping"
BW