Poetry:In March 1984 I asked Samuel Beckett would he consider writing an introduction to Paul Celan: 65 Poems, a volume of translations done in collaboration with Peter Jankowsky (Raven Books, 1985).
Beckett replied inter alia: "I never met him and could not write about his work." That "could not" bears thinking about. No one was better qualified for the task than Beckett, because, of all writers, only he came close to Celan in being a master of the art of silence. It's also possible to imagine a causal linkage between "could not" and "never met" - as the following story suggests.
Celan gave the manuscript of Snow Part to his wife in September 1969. Estranged from her and their son, he spent the next six months sinking beneath the weight of loneliness and paranoia. He was obsessed in particular with a false allegation that he had plagiarised the work of Yvan Goll (who had, incidentally, translated Ulysses into German). A friend then invited him to meet Beckett, but the notice was short and Celan didn't feel it right to go unannounced. When the friend returned bearing greetings from Beckett, Celan said: "That's probably the only man here I could have had an understanding with." Some three weeks later, most likely on the night of April 20th, 1970, he drowned himself in the Seine. Beckett's "could not" has a history, one that can be read with a hint in it of "if only".
Snow Part was published in 1971. It marks therefore, if only chronologically, the high point of Celan's achievement. He was, in the words of JM Coetzee, "the towering European poet of the middle decades of the 20th century". That being the case, it is remarkable that Ian Fairley's is the first English translation of the book. But the explanation for the delay is simple: the difficulty of the original German is exceeded only by its untranslatability.
Born in 1920 in Czernowitz, which was then part of Romania, Celan lost both parents to the Holocaust and was himself worked almost to death as a slave labourer in various camps in Moldavia between 1942 and 1944. As a result, he felt that the German language was fundamentally complicit in the Nazi crime, a complicity he dealt with by compression: to get out of the concentration camp, he concentrated. As the years passed, the pressures, voluntary and involuntary, became nuclear: the dwarf-star entirety of Snow Part is hardly three times the length of this review.
THE RESULTS HERE and throughout Celan's work are paradoxical. Making allowances for translation problems - see below - the attentive reader in either language finds himself or herself in the immediate and unmediated presence of the poet and his history. We feel that we are, as he puts it in an earlier poem, "with the persecuted in late, unconcealed, radiant union". And we are struck by the freedom of his simplicity: "Water: what a word. We understand you life."
Although Celan was utterly devoted to being understood, it is often next to impossible to make sense of his work without expert knowledge of arcane subjects, such as numerology; of scientific disciplines, such as geology; and of local history. In the poem called You Lie, for instance, when he refers to "an Eden" he means not paradise but the hotel in Berlin where Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were imprisoned before being shot. As most of us know nothing of the history of the Spartacist uprising in 1919, not to mention the hotel, it is not unreasonable to regard the need to be told as a hindrance. But, as with the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, who composed on the same principles as Celan but in reverse, being hindered comes with the territory. Those countries exist because of their borders.
Peter Jankowsky and I translated two of the poems in Snow Part. In relation to one of them, which in the German runs to 132 words, I note the following variations between Fairley's version and ours. We begin: "What sews/ on this voice?" He starts: "What knits/ at this voice?" We say: "a fin-beat,/ steady,/ lights the bays". He says: "a steady/ fin-beat/ clears the bays". We say: "a beetle recognises you". He says: "a beetle knows you". We say: "you are ready for each other,/ caterpillars/ spin a cocoon around you both". He says: "you verge on/ yourselves,/ worms/ inweb you". Whatever about shades of meaning, translators should agree that caterpillars can't be worms.
CELAN'S CONDENSATIONS TEMPT the translator in two ways: to replicate or to open them out. In this same poem Fairley replicates thus: "soon/ the leaf knots its vein to yours,/ sparks,/ must through,/ in a stopping of breath". The oddity of "must through" renders the original accurately, but we chose to unpack it thus: "soon/ the leaf will knot its artery with yours,/ sparks/ must go through it,/ for as long as a shortness of breath".
Another temptation is to mimic Celan's neologisms. In this area Fairley is adventurous. Take for instance the word Wahnbrot. Michael Hamburger - that great servant of Celan, who died recently - translated it as "delusion bread". Fairley comes up with "lunebread", presumably as an echo of "lunatic". His audacity occasionally runs away with itself: what can "leucojums" be, and how can they be "catfledged"? Other words unknown to my complete Oxford Dictionary are "levade", "haem" and "lagg". Sometimes one can't help having "the unbridled conviction/ this should be said/ other than it is".
However, the Celan who said that - he had the paranoiac's sarcasm - is the originator of the problem. Fairley confronts it with a passionate energy and a headlong commitment that are never less than admirable. He is capable of catching the quickness of Celan's speeds: "To monger with you/ doll, the ragcart comes/ jazz-drawn, we will/ be gone". He can be elegantly memorable, as in the last line here: "Oldest red: where birds are toothed./ It is sung:/ where to your where from?" And he can move the heart as Celan does: "Live the lives, live them all,/ tell the one dream from the other,/ look, I rise, look, I fall,/ am an other, am no other".
Michael Hamburger concluded his introduction to the Poems of Paul Celan (Anvil, 1988) with the observation that the "process of reception" of this poetry "cannot be other than gradual and slow" and that its translation will have to be done "in stages, patiently, for a long time to come". Fairley has advanced that process significantly.
Brian Lynch is currently writer-in-residence at Farmleigh in the Phoenix Park
Snow Part/Schneepart By Paul Celan, translated by Ian Fairley Carcanet, 195pp. £14.95