Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan Read Free Book Online

half-dozen languages, certainly intimates nothing of the kind. A good translation presupposes a certain complicity between original poem and translator—something Celan expressed in a letter to Vittorio Sereni, editor and translator at the Italian publishing house Mondadori, in relation to a projected translation of his work into Italian: “Among the problems that remain to be resolved there is before all—and it is a major one—that of the translator. Personally, in matters of poetry, I have only ever tried to translate something that did, as one says in my language, speak to me (was mich anspricht), and I imagine that your own experiences must be similar to mine.” 31
    Celan’s poetry does exactly that—it speaks to me, has, in fact, spoken to me since I first heard it read aloud when I was fifteen (I have written of this in more detail elsewhere), and has accompanied me for some fifty years now. I too—obviously—believe in the possibility of translating poetry, would even call it a necessity, even if such faith is at times sorely questioned. Or maybe exactly because of this very dynamic: to question the possibility of translation means to question the very possibility of literature, of writing, of language, which is always already a translation, that is, is both an act of translation and the result of such an act. In the half century I have by now spent in the practice of poetry, both writing it and translating it, a sense has emerged suggesting that a poem is not only the one version printed in a book, but also all its other (possible) printed versions—context changing or adding to or subtracting from meaning(s)—plus all the possible oral and/or visual performances, as well as the totality of translations it gives rise to. The printed poem is, in fact, only a score for all subsequent readings (private or public) and performative transformations, be they through music, dance, painting, or foreign-language translation. Such a view is bound to destabilize any concept of the poem as some fixed and absolute artifact, readable (understandable, interpretable) once and for all. This is also how I hear Celan’s line in the Meridian speech: “The absolute poem—no, it certainly does not, cannot exist.”
    I started translating Atemwende , the volume that opens this compilation, in 1967, the year of its publication. I did so not with the immediate intention of having it published (though I certainly did not want to exclude that possibility, even then), but rather as the only way I saw of entering into an apprenticeship with the poet to whose work I owed my own turn to poetry, what I can only describe as the epiphanic experience that, six years earlier, had opened the realm of poetry as possible place of a life’s quest and fulfillment. In the spring of 1969 I completed the first translation of Breathturn in the context of an undergraduate thesis at Bard College, where I had the subtle and immensely enriching advice of the poet and scholar Robert Kelly to help me along the way. Four or five years later—by then I was living in London—Asa Benveniste, the poet and publisher of Trigram Press, proposed to print Breathturn . I revised the book carefully, but despite all his efforts Trigram was unable to secure the rights from the German publishers and the project came to nothing. Between 1976 and 1979, living in Constantine, Algeria—and with much free time on my hands—I yet again went over the early translations while starting work on Threadsuns and Lightduress . Upon my return to London—and even more so after moving to Paris in the early eighties—I became friends with Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, the poet’s widow, a friendship that proved a further spur and kept me working on Celan, reading, rereading, thinking about, and writing on the oeuvre—when I was not translating. When I moved back to the United States in 1987, I brought along a