Monday, November 23, 2020

Mark Goldstein :

folio : Paul Celan/100

 

 

Extracts from Schwarzmaut by Paul Celan. Vaduz: Brunidor, 1969. Copyright Surhkamp Verlag, 1990; four poems from Cycle 5 & Cycle 6 of Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (BookThug, 2010)

 

Schwarzmaut was inscribed by Paul Celan sometime after January 30, 1967, the date on which he first tried to kill himself “with a knife (or a letter-opener) that missed his heart by an inch.” The suspected cause, among many forces, was a “chance encounter at a literary event at the Paris Goethe Institute on January 25 with Claire Goll, the widow of the poet Yvan Goll, who some years earlier had wrongly accused him of plagiarizing her husband’s poetry, causing Celan’s first psychic collapse.”[1] At the time of his suicide attempt Celan was “saved by his wife in extremis, and transported to Hôpital Boucicaut where he was operated on immediately”2 as his left lung was severely damaged. From mid-February until mid-October he was interned at the Saint-Anne psychiatric hospital, where Schwarzmaut was written. Subsequently, it was first published by Brunidor, along with engravings by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, in a limited edition of 85 copies under the title “Schwarzmaut” in March 1969. In 1970, published by Suhrkamp Verlag, it became the opening cycle of Lichtzwang just three months after Celan’s death.

 

 

 

Seven poems from Blacktoll

 

Earscraps, Eyescraps in
ward onethousandandone,

daynightly
the Dancing Bear:

they retrain you,

you again become
he.

+

The night rode him, he was coming to himself,
the orphan’s smock for flag,

no more running astray,
it rode him straight —

It is, it is,
         
as though the oranges stood in the privet,
as though the thus ridden wore nothing

but his
first,

morthermarked, se-
cret-speckled

skin.

+

Musselheap: among
the stone maceheads I drove in between,
following the rivers into the

melting ice-
land,

toward it, to that
sign to be engraved

in firestone in the
dwarf-birch breeze.
 

Lemmings burrowed.

No Later.

No
shell-urn, no
penanular brooch,

no starfoot-
fibula.
 

Unappeased,
unattached, artless,
ascended the all-transforming slowly   

scraping
up behind me.

+

With the ashtrowel scooped
from the Beingtrough,
saponaceous, at

the second
start, to-

ward each other,

incomprehensibly fed now,       
far
outside us and already — wherefore? —

heavedasunder,                

then (at the third
start?) blown
behind the horn, before the

standing
tearthrum,

once, twice, thrice,

from unpaired,
fledglingly-cleft,
flaggy                    

lung.

+

With microliths besplit
giving-given away
hands.
 

The conversation, spinning itself
from tip to tip,
scorched by

spraying fire-air.

A sign
combs it together
as answer to a

brooding rockart.

+

Gone into the night, helpfully,
a star-
permeable leaf

instead of the mouth:

there remains
still something for wild wasting,
treeward.
 

+

We lay already deep in the macchia, when you
finally encroached.

But we could not
darken-over to you:
there reigned

lightduress.

 

NOTE: The above poems from Blacktoll represent a continuation of my transtranslational potentialities first begun in After Rilke (BookThug, 2008) and continued in Tracelanguage (BookThug, 2010). Where Tracelanguage exemplifies a “shared breath” that seeks to break with tired translational orthodoxies, Blacktoll attempts to embrace both old and new methodologies as singular. Whether one approach is wider or deeper than the other, I’ll leave to the reader to decide in full knowledge that there’s no “poem” there. By this I mean that words are encampments around absence — that field of energy beyond description.

 

 

Four poems from Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath

 

with eyes closed, in sight
counter-inscribed — you walk the road, riverside:

a return to the body
its unknowing stand, carried through
a thousand whitenesses
“the sky below
                     an abyss.”

You, here … you,
your breath-turning, quickened
by multitudes, their
lungbranches
outwardly immobile.

To translate
oneself

to bridge
unutterable paths — outlines perhaps
projecting themselves — language
become voice
shot through with hearttones, what else
can we claim as
                        our origin?

+

at bottom, your
silence blankets the shore —

hands made clean
in innocency — gold ore
from sand and silt — what
washes over me

through that sluice
it has to go
for there gasps
the words,
              alight.
 

+

rest in your wounds,
untraceable —

though the observer seek you, rest —
there’ll be no skin for their ceremony.

How the vowel-stone escapes those
caught between parallel streams
as it lies beneath the waterline —
lost to all carrying.

Devoid of sight, you’ll swim
devoid of color, you’ll
pierce white rings
of light, sounding on air —
where die Muttersprache failed you
its arc can be rewritten
that its undertow amassed you
proximities realign — arise
return through that golden flood,
a halo.

+

once
there, I heard you
purify the word
darkly, wholly
unseen –

for one and all
obliterate
its i-

lluminated past.

 

Awakening.

 

Note on the above poems from Tracelanguage: This “Shared Breath” of Paul Celan’s seminal work, Atemwende, is a transtranslation because, to quote Maurice Blanchot, “translating is madness.” One would like to feign accuracy where there is none and yet Lagerbrot can never be Challah, no matter how hungry we are. In exhausting this hope, we need no longer circle the poem seeking rest having accepted its boundlessness.

 

 

 

 

Mark Goldstein is a writer, translator, and musician. He has taught at the Toronto New School of Writing, SUNY Albany, and lectured on translation at George Brown College, York University, and in Paris at the École des hautes études en sciences socials. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Jacket2, The Capilano Review, and Open Letter. Among others, he has translated Celan’s Atemwende as Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (BookThug, 2010), published the cycle Blacktoll (Beautiful Outlaw, 2013), and has a forthcoming book-length work entitled Paul Celan: Thricelandium. He divides his time between Toronto and Los Angeles. (www.markgoldstein.ca)

 


[1] & 2  Pierre Joris, from a prefatory note to Lightduress (Los Angeles: Green Integer 113, 2005), and from “Chronologie” in volume 2 of Paul Celan/ Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, Correspondance, edited and with commentaries by Bertrand Badiou assisted by Eric Celan (Paris: Le Seuil, 2001).

 

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