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The volume Lichtzwang, which came out a few month after Paul
Celan's
death in the spring of 1970, contains a poem called "Todtnauberg." It is
certainly one of the most commented Celan poems in recent times,
especially
in France, though not exclusively there, and the number of translations
it has
given rise to, as well as the very matter of the poem itself make it an
ideal
topos for a few comments concerning poetic thought and translation. Here
is
the poem, in its original German and in my still provisional translation:
TODTNAUBERG
TODTNAUBERG
in the
Htte,
im Herzen,
in the heart,
Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,
Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,
Feuchtes,
viel.
humidity,
much.
Given the scrutiny this specific poem has been subjected to,
and the different - and often contradictory - contexts in which it has
been used, we know much about its origins, or better, the occasion
that gave rise to it, the history of its appearance in print and the
subsequent history of its translations. The best and most compelling
hermeneutical approach to the poem can be be found in the
"Todtnauberg" section of Otto Pggeler's book Spur des Wortes1
and in the following I will lean heavily on Pggeler's insights.
Having established the poem's main thrust, I will then turn to an
English translation by Robert R. Sullivan as it appears in the
latter's translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer's book Philosophical
Apprentice-ships,2 in order to show how the context in which the poem
appears there has twisted - dtourn, the French would
say - the translator's grasp of the poem itself and forced him to make
choices in his translation that are, to say the least, objectionable.
Celan, like many other poets, is concerned with thought, with
philosophy, and in his work we find, as Pggeler puts it,
Auseinander-setzungen with a variety of philosophers and thinkers:
with Democritus in the poem "Engfhrung"; with Spinoza in the
poems "Pau, nachts," and "Pau, spter" ; or with Adorno in his
single prose work, Gesprch im Gebirg. It is therefore not
surprising to find Celan concerned with the figure of Martin
Heidegger. This concern is ambivalent, to say the least, involving
both attraction and repulsion. Pggeler reminds us that as far
back as 1957, Celan had wanted to send his poem "Schliere" to
Heidegger, but also, that, when somewhat later Heidegger had his
famous meeting with Martin Buber in Mnich, Celan felt very
uneasy and was not ready to give Heidegger a "Persilschein", a
"Persil- passport" i.e. did not want to whitewash the politically
compromised philosopher. Celan, at that time, was reading Heidegger's
Nietzsche as well as Nietzsche himself, and seems to have thought
highly of Heidegger's interpretations. Nietzsche's thought is also,
albeit liminally, present in Celan's poetry, for example in
"Engfhrung," where the line "Ein Rad, langsam, rollt aus sich
selbst", is a formula used by Nietzsche in the chapter "Von den 3
Verwandlungen" in Zarathustra. Heidegger himself was intermittently
interested in Celan's work and came, whenever possible, to the rare
den Augentrost" ("But lash and lid miss the eyebright"). Notice also
the two bright A's that begin the words: the English translation, as
well as the various French ones, lose the second A, though, by a happy
coincidence, the English plant- name, "Eye-bright", rather accurately
translates the German one.
The next two lines indicate that the traveler, upon arriving,
takes a draft of water from a well. The hope of the opening flora is
maintained in the sense of quickening one gets from a draft of fresh
well-water. The well itself is described as having a
"Sternwrfel", literally a star-dice, on top. This was indeed the
case: old photos of Heidegger's Htte show this wooden cube with
a painted or carved star-motto on it, which seems to have been a piece
of local folk-art. The English translation by Sullivan botches this
line giving it as "the well/ with the cube of asters on it" - possibly
an un-called for attempt to get more flora with an initial a-sound
into the poem? And cube forWrfel completely undertranslates the
motherlode of meanings present for Celan. Wrfel, though indeed a
cube, is primarily a dice - here the whole complex of Celan's relation
to Mallarm and his "Coup de d" comes into play -, and
either the noun or the verb can be found throughout Celan's work. The
topos is of course even more complexified by the star on it: think of
the six sides of the dice, which no matter how often you throw it,
cannot come up with the number seven, Mallarm's famous
"constella-tion," Celan's "Siebenstern," i.e. the Pleiades (the seven
sisters of Atlas transformed into stars, of which only six are visible
to the nakes eye) and much more. The star on the dice rimes with the
yellow arnica, giving the five-pointed jewish star: the jewish poet at
the door of the politically suspect philosopher, etc. Stern, or star,
is also important to Heidegger who, interestingly, or strangely
enough, had an eight-pointed star engraved on his tombstone.
Then, the briefest stanza, three words distributed over two
lines: in der/Htte . "In the cabin, or hut." I have preferred to
retain the German word "Htte" here, because in a Heideggerian
context - and that is where a poem titled Todtnauberg has to be
located - the word is heavily and symbolically loaded: Heidegger
refers to his 1947 book "Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens" as the
"Httenbchlein" (a book which, as Pggeler points out,
contains the line "Auf einen Stern zugehen"). The Htte itself,
which Heidegger had built in 1922, was not only his holiday house in
the mountains, but also his essential work and thinking place and,
maybe more importantly, the refuge he went to in times of trouble. It
was from there that, abandoning his work on the pre- socratics, he
went down to Freiburg to take up the job as rector in 1933 and
militate for what can be at best described as his own idiosyncratic
version of a Hitlerian Germany. It is there that he took refuge during
the denazification years. But, maybe essential in this context, and
Celan almost certainly knew this, either via Schneeberger's book7, or
via friends, it was also there that in 1933 Heidegger ran nazi
indoctrination sessions.
Not any hut or cabin or mountain refuge, then. Heidegger's
Htte. Elsewhere in Celan the word Htte is used twice,
once in the quote "Friede den Htten", a foreshortening of the
revolutionary slogan "Krieg den Palsten, Friede den
Htten," and once in a poem talking of a bamboo hut. The tight
The orchis is indeed a very different flower from the two in the
opening line. It is an orchid, of the genus Orchis, having magenta,
white or magenta-spotted flowers (magenta, a vivid purple red, was
discovered the year of the battle of Magenta and named for that
occasion's bloodiness). Whereas in the first line arnica and
eyebright, two different flowers, are simply juxtaposed, both part of
the same scene as seen, here the same flower, the orchids, standing
for the two men, are separated by the word "und" and, as if that was
not enough to show their seperateness, the last word of the line
insists on it: "einzeln", singly/single. In German the plant is also
known as "Knabenkraut", "boy's weed", for its testicle-shaped roots
(which, as Pggeler notes, links it to a number of other Celan
concepts and words such as the "Mandelhode", the almond-testicle, and
the other Orchis poem which talks of the Fnfgebirg Kindheit, the
five- mountain childhood. Pggeler further mentions the orchis as
symbol of the poet or thinker in buddhist and zen lore.)
At any rate, the intention here is clear: two men, insisting
on their singularity, on their seperateness, are walking along. The
bright, hopeful A's of the first line have been replaced by the darker
O's - have we come from alpha to omega? (the O of orchis is in fact an
omikron, but then the omikron has usurped the functions of the greek
omega in our, roman, alphabet). And where do they walk? They walk on
"halb- / beschrittenen Knppel-/Pfaden.." - "half- trod
log-trails", literally on "paths made of wood" - the German Holzwege,
which refers to a path in a forest, but also, in common parlance, to a
dead-end, to a mistaken route, and is, of course, the title of a
well-known book by Heidegger. Celan is too subtle to use Heidegger's
word, and his "log-paths" complexify the image further as Knppel
- the German word means both "logs" and "rods" - are also used as
weapons to beat people, prisoners, etc.
"Half-trodden" only: the walk is cut short. Pggeler
suggests rain, which the final stanza, "Feuchtes, viel", would,
according to him, substan-tiate. But the poem, or Celan, does not
say. The walk is interrupted, the walkers return to the car, Celan is
driven back. In the car there is talk, "Krudes", not a common word in
German, "something crude" passes between Celan and another passenger,
and the poet calls upon the third person present, "he who drives us,
the man", as a witness to this exchange ("he who also hears
it"). Clearly the "Krudes" cannot be the "word in the heart" Celan
expected from the visit. Clearly, Heidegger did not come through in
the way Celan had hoped.
I say clearly, but it would seem that it is not at all that
obvious. Heidegger himself, for example, cannot have read the poem the poetic thought embedded in it - that way, or else how could he
have been so pleased that, according to many accounts, he loved to
show off his copy of the limited bibliophile edition of the poem to
his visitors?
That could still be understandable as the"angle mort", the
blind spot, of Heidegger's vision. Less understandable is the
remarkably wrong-headed reading given by Gadamer in the Heidegger
chapter of his Apprenticeship book, which I'll quote here in the
Sullivan translation:
"One day the poet Paul Celan appeared among the pilgrims who
made their way to Todtnauberg, and from his meeting with the thinker a
poem came to be. Just think about it: A persecuted Jew, a poet who did
not live in Germany, but in Paris, yet still a German poet, uneasily
ventures this visit. He must have been received by the "consolation of
the eye" of the small rustic property with the running spring "with
the cube of asters on it" as well as by the small rustic man with the
beaming eyes. He inscribes himself in the cottage book, with a line of
hope that he kept in his heart. He walked with the thinker across the
soft meadows, both alone, like the individually standing flowers - the
orchis and the orchis. Only on the way home did it become clear to
Celan what Heidegger had murmured and what still seemed crude. He
understood the daring of a thinking that another - "the man" - could
also hear but without understanding it, the daring of a stepping out
onto the shifting foundation, as onto beaten paths that one cannot
follow to their ends..."
This is followed by the poem which Gadamer in his original
German text of course quotes in Celan's original German. Now, I think
that after the close, if all too hasty and incomplete, reading of this
poem I proposed above, Gadamer's "interpretation", or rather the use
he puts the poem to for his own purposes, appears clearly as the
"hagiography" Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe called it. Gadamer does not,
or cannot, or worse, does not want to, read the thought proposed by
Celan's poem and clearly inscribed in the poem. But what interests me
here is not so much Gadamer's intention - understandable as a gesture
of friendship or loyalty to his old teacher whom he is honoring in his
Festschrift - than the effect this has on the translation of the Celan
poem by Gadamer's English translator, Sullivan. Here is that version:
Arnica, eye bright, the draft from the well with the cube of asters on
it,
in the
cottage,
a line written in the book
- whose name did it receive
before mine? a line written in this book
a line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker's
coming word,
a hope in my heart
forest glade, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, seperated,
crude, but later, in traveling,
clear,
the one who is driving us, the man,
the one who is listening, too,
the halffollowed, trodden
An early version of this essay was first presented at the "Poetic Thought
&
Translation" Conference at Wake Forest University, October 1988.
REFERENCES
1Otto Pggeler, Spur des Wortes, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber,
1986, pp. 259-271.
2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, translated by
Robert
R. Sullivan, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1985, pp. 45-55.
San
Bern 1962.