I had wanted to translate a poem by Celan for P-Fray as a sort of holiday greeting. But I'm having a terrible time with the translation, and Celan makes for an odd holiday. At the same time, the problem itself is kind of interesting, so I thought I'd post to see what y'all make of it.
Paul Celan represents two mutually-contradictory and nearly-extent cultures. He was a Central European Jew, most of whom perished in the Shoah, and Central European German, most of whom were forced to emigrate to one of the post-war Germanies. He wrote in German, and so his words are comprehensible, but his German is a language nearly no longer spoken. The problem for Celan is writing words that continue to make sense, but whose idiom is long gone.
That is my reading of the poem, "Allerseelen," ("All Souls" -- this may or may not help with the title) which I've been having a terrible time translating. I'll post my most recent draft (in prose to suggest how rough it is) knowing that the New Year is unlikely to give me more time to work on it. It's adapted from Michael Hamburger's translation in Poems of Paul Celan.
All Souls
What have I done? Pollinated the night, as if there could be others more nocturnal than this one.
Birdflight, stoneflight, a thousand delineated tracks. Glances stolen and plucked. The ocean tasted, mis-drunk, mis-dreamed. An hour soulblackened. The next, an autumn light offered up to a blind feeling that came of the path. Others, many, place-less and heavy of themselves, glimpsed and avoided. Foundlings, stars, black and full of speech, named after a silenced vow.
And once (When? This too is forgotten): felt the barb where my pulse dared the counter beat.
I don't really know what this means, but I think there is a three-way metaphor of time, language, and souls. Each in some way survives erasure.
Souls: People are killed, but souls seem to remain. They are not quite redeemed, not saved, but they persist. I read the barb at the end of the poem as a kind of cry of distinction: "I" (the speaker of the poem) "am not part of that march of souls." That sense of distinction happens in an instant, and persists even though the time it happened is indistinct.
Language: the stars have silent names (how is that possible), and if a vow is rendered totally silent (verschiegenem Schwur) it isn't really a vow. Hamburger had it translated as "an oath which silence annulled." In writing about night one makes nights repeat; one fertilizes, inseminates it. Words are always wrong, not quite naming what they are meant to name or doing what they are meant to do (even the ocean is "mis-dreamt -- verträumt") Yet here, mystery of mysteries, we have a poem, itself a kind of barb and counter-beat.
Time: the work of the speaker is to multiple hours, to create more nights. Doing so gives the passage of time a sameness, so that any action is hard to separate from any other action. But again, there is something that happens that is different from other happenings.
And so the poem shows how destroyed and erased things can persist or remain distinct.
That's what I make of Celan, even as I have the sense that each individual word is only barely intelligible, something happens in his poetry that is meaningful, the whole (forgive the cliche) far greater than the sum of the parts.
I have no idea if any of this is right; indeed, I suspect it must be wrong. But it's the meditation that the poem inspired in me, rather like a small, secular religious experience. A quiet revelation that seems appropriate for the holiday. I hope it makes sense.
