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.
[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).
