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.'"
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.'"
posted by bwremington at
8:52 PM
