Gras, auseinandergeschrieben
I've been reading poems by Paul Celan, relatively consistently, in various translations, for probably a year and a half now. Recently I was going through some of my files and found a note that I had written to myself back in early 2004 (towards the end of my Senior year of college) reminding myself that I should read more Celan. I cannot recall, however, the exact causal linkage between my initial interest in Celan (I assume sometime in '03-'04) and the continuation of that interest, a year or so later. My theory is that I liked his poems, forgot about him, and then started liking his poems again, later, completely seperately from the first cycle of poem liking. Anyway, if nothing else, the experience confirms for me that I like his poems. This site has some recordings of Celan reading several of his poems.
The readings of Todesfuge and Engfuhrung are particularly notable.
German texts of the poems can be seen here (it's weird that they're justified to the center like that, but that page is the only clearinghouse of Celan auf Deutsch that I've found thus far).
Although the Deathfugue is the more famous (easily Celan's most famous) of the two poems, I can't help but be more mesmerized by Engfuhrung - it seems to be more exact in its musicality. The musical notions of fugue and stretto are both translated into language with relative ease by Celan, but I would argue that the Stretto is more stretto than the Fugue a fugue. The way he reads Engfuhrung - the prayer-chant musicality of it, that maintains its course despite the fact that the words and images breakdown as the poem progresses, disintegrating into the poems end. Engfuhrung, upon a bit of cursory research, is something of a "sequel" to Todesfugue, apparently. That makes it even more profound, I suppose.
The readings of Todesfuge and Engfuhrung are particularly notable.
German texts of the poems can be seen here (it's weird that they're justified to the center like that, but that page is the only clearinghouse of Celan auf Deutsch that I've found thus far).
Although the Deathfugue is the more famous (easily Celan's most famous) of the two poems, I can't help but be more mesmerized by Engfuhrung - it seems to be more exact in its musicality. The musical notions of fugue and stretto are both translated into language with relative ease by Celan, but I would argue that the Stretto is more stretto than the Fugue a fugue. The way he reads Engfuhrung - the prayer-chant musicality of it, that maintains its course despite the fact that the words and images breakdown as the poem progresses, disintegrating into the poems end. Engfuhrung, upon a bit of cursory research, is something of a "sequel" to Todesfugue, apparently. That makes it even more profound, I suppose.
2 Comments:
Thanks for passing that along. Hearing a recitation while reading in English is probably as close as you can get to experiencing the original without speaking the language.
And unfortunately I don't have enough German to make out the poetry anymore.
Celan's repetition of phrases in those two poems shades them with a desperate sense of ritual, doesn't it, on top of keying his musical analogies.
Yeah, if anything the sense of repetition comes before the musical titling - Deathfugue, in its inital draft was in fact titled Deathwaltz, I believe. But its that notion of the inevitability of the machinations of the fugue that add power to its place at the top of the poem.
In Stretto, the ritual aspect runs itself into the ground, again this kind of inevitability in outcome - it extends well beyond the literal stretto that occurs between stanzas, but the chaining of disintegration in the imagery of the poem. For instance, how the image of a "wheel [slowly] rolling out of itself," in the first section, is paralelled in the "hurricanes" further down the page, amplified by the additional density of the hurricane as not only a destructive spiraling thing, but an image that completely embodies that destruction - is not only the devastation but also the force. And then just "circles," before the poem takes its more explicity religious turn, building to the last parenthetical section of poem where the core of the beginining in all its power is left bare.
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