Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. Norton. 426pp, £23 in UK
Fathomsuns and Benighted. By Paul Celan, translated by Ian Fairley. Carcanet Press. 285pp, £12.95 in UK
Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel, in Czernowitz, former capital of Bukovina, in 1920. At the time of his birth, Bukovina was a province of Romania. In 1940, it was occupied by Soviet troops, then by German and Romanian forces, and in 1944 was seized by the Soviet Union and annexed to the Ukraine. And we in Ireland think we have a troubled history.
Celan - the name is an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian spelling of Antschel - at first studied medicine, and it was as a medical student that he went to Paris in 1938. The following, fateful, year he returned to Czernowitz, and when the war broke out he was studying Romance languages and literature. Somehow the Antschels, German-speaking Jews, remained free until 1942. Then, on the night of June 27th that year, when Paul was staying with friends in order not to be caught breaking the curfew, his parents were rounded up by the Gestapo and deported to a labour camp in Transnistria in the Ukraine. John Felstiner, who has written a fine biographical study of Celan, remarks that the poet "could never readily give an account of this event", an event which was to mark him for life, and probably contributed to his death. It seems that he had urged his parents to go into hiding, but they had refused, preferring to face their fate - not knowing, of course, how terrible it would be - and that after an argument with his father he had stormed out of the house. When he returned in the morning, the house was empty, the front door sealed.
After an earlier round-up of Jews, Felstiner tells us, an acquaintance of Celan's had gone to the station and succeeded in getting her parents off the deportation train. "Celan," says Felstiner, "remained conscious of not having done as much." His father was to die of typhus in the labour camp, and later his mother was shot when she could no longer work. A month after the deportation of his parents, Paul himself was sent to a Romanian-run labour camp in Wallachia, and may have served time in a number of other camps as well, returning to Soviet-occupied Czernowitz in March 1944. How he escaped from the camps is not clear; one published account by a fellow poet, which Felstiner says contains "implausible elements", claims that Celan survived an SS "selection" by slipping from the line headed for the gas chambers and into the line of those about to be released, so that another man died in his place. Celan himself never spoke directly of the details of that time. In a biographical note of 1949 he wrote, with remarkable terseness: "What the life of a Jew was during the war years, I need not mention," while in a letter sent in July 1944 to a boyhood friend he said: "I've experienced only humiliations and emptiness, endless emptiness." Whatever the fact of those terrible years may be, it is certain that the loss of his parents, his own sufferings, and the Holocaust in general - which he always referred to simply as "that which happened" - formed him not only as a man but as a poet. Indeed, it might be said that he had only one subject - "that which happened".
After the war he moved first to Bucharest, and in 1948 to Paris, where he lived until his death. He married the artist Gisele de Lestrange, taught German literature at the Ecole Normale Superieure, worked as a translator, and, despite increasingly severe bouts of depression, wrote in total some 800 poems collected in seven volumes, all the time resisting, like his fellow exile Samuel Beckett, the siren-song of silence "which was a notable-to-speak and thus believed itself an ought-not-to-speak".
CELAN'S WORK is a standing rejoinder to Theodor Adorno's declaration that after Auschwitz, to write poetry is a scandal. Yet it would be wise to keep in mind the fact that art cannot be validated by suffering. Pain may ennoble the soul, but it will not advance your poetry one whit. Celan's experience in the European catastrophe, the loss of his parents, even his suicide, should not lead us to imagine that his voice has more authority or authenticity than that of a poet - Philip Larkin, say - who experienced none of these horrors.
In 1958 Celan was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize, and in 1960 the Georg Buchner Prize, the highest German literary award. The speeches he made at the two prize-givings, which are translated in John Felstiner's superb Selected Poems and Prose, constitute Celan's most extended meditations on the art of poetry in general and on his own work in particular; however, anyone hoping to find in these speeches illumination and guidance for an encounter with some of the most difficult poetry written in the 20th century will likely be disappointed. "The Meridian", Celan's celebrated response to the Buchner Prize, is, in its rhythmical, ecstatic denseness, worthy of Heidegger at his most gnomic: "Homage here is to the Majesty of the Absurd, testifying to human presence. And that, ladies and gentlemen, has no fixed name once and for all time, yet it is, I believe . . . poetry." Well, quite.
Celan's depressions grew steadily deeper and more frequent during the 1960s, and one night in April 1970 he drowned himself in the Seine, taking with him into those midnight waters what Felstiner calls his "incurable wounds". Celan might have said of himself what another great writer in German, Heinrich von Kleist, wrote in a letter shortly before he, too, committed suicide: "There is no help for me on this earth."
It would be misleading, and a disservice to Celan, to pretend that his poetry is anything other than difficult. Many critics have questioned Celan's "tortuosities" - the word Seamus Heaney in his Nobel acceptance speech applied to Celan's work - criticising his "insistent minimalism" and his "unwillingness to commit himself to accessibility", charges which are hard to rebut. Here is Felstiner's attempt:
Celan's writing may baffle the reader unready to give it that "attentiveness" he considered "the natural prayer of the soul". To grow attentive . . . is to activate these poems. Their truth, after all, may consist in obscurity or ambiguity, as also in occasional radiance.
This is well put, but not of much comfort to the baffled reader, no matter how patient or sympathetic. Ian Fairley's new translation of the late collection, Fadensonnen (1968), is a brave and frequently inspired attempt to make over into English some of Celan's most oblique and intricate poetry. Fairley's introduction, though in places almost as obscure as the poems themselves, is full of insights, particularly in the comparisons he makes with the work of other poets, especially Rilke. But Fadensonnen is hard going, as are the 11 "abandoned" pieces in Eingedunkelt, translated by Fairley as Be- nighted. Celan's poems, even the very early ones, are furled tight as rosebuds; we may admire their appalling beauty, but it will take the light of only the strongest attentiveness to make them burst into full blossom. It is worth the effort. There is radiance here, even in the midst of obscurities. John Felstiner's translations communicate a real sense of Celan's peculiar musicality and tragic resonance. They are an advance on the work of the late Michael Hamburger, who did so much to bring Celan to the attention of the Englishspeaking world, as Felstiner generously acknowledges.
NEVERTHELESS, like many poets, Celan wrote too much, and at times he is, despite that "insistent minimalism", positively garrulous. His most famous, or infamous, poem, "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue"), which some, mainly Jewish, critics have condemned for making a beautiful object out of the horrors of the Holocaust ("Death is a master from Germany"), is wonderfully translated by Felstiner, who in a stroke of translator's genius lets the German original gradually seep back into the English version, like the "black milk" the doomed dancers of the poem must drink; thus the "master from Germany" reverts to "ein Meister aus Deutschland", and the two women, Gentile and Jew, who are repeatedly invoked throughout the poem, at the close are addressed in their Muttersprache: "dein goldenes Haar Margarete/dein aschenes Haar Sulamith". "Todesfuge", though certainly impressive, is not among Celan's greatest poems. For that sombre, transcendent beauty which is the mark of his profoundest work,go to quieter pieces such as "Tenebrae", or "Psalm", or that exquisite, heartbreaking early lament, "Black Flakes", in which the poet imagines his dead mother begging him from her place of captivity for a shawl "to wrap myself when it's flashing with helmets":
Autumn bled all away, Mother, snow burned me through:
I sought out my heart so it might weep,
I found - oh the summer's breath, it was like you.
Then came my tears. I wove the shawl.
Paul Celan is the poet who most directly, most valiantly, and, for all his negativeness - his is the anti-poem, the "Genicht", the "noem" - most triumphantly faces, perhaps even at times faces down, the horrors into which the world allowed itself to blunder in the middle of the 20th century. He was, in the religious no less than the artistic sense, a true witness. He insisted that his poems could and should be understood, declaring that his work is "ganz und gar nicht hermetisch" ("absolutely not hermetic"), yet for him, as for Beckett, the darkness could never be denied. As one of Celan's early poems declares: "Speaks true who speaks shadow."
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times