Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan Read Free Book Online Page A

near complete translation of all of late Celan, starting with Breathturn . Between 1988 and 1991, I reworked all of these translations yet again for a Ph.D. dissertation at SUNY Binghamton—an occasion that gave me the leisure and ability to catch up on the vast amount of secondary Celan literature that had accrued over the years. Three volumes— Breathturn , Threadsuns , and Lightduress —were published between 1995 and 2005, work I followed up with my translation of the scholarly edition of The Meridian —a book it took me nearly seven years to complete and that was published in 2011. I then set to work on preparing this volume, gathering and reworking all the poems from Breathturn on, adding the cycle Eingedunkelt | Tenebrae’d , as well as the commentaries the reader will find at the end of this book.
    The detailed narrative of the various stages of this project is not meant to propose the count of years and the accumulation of versions as proof of quality—to the contrary: it is meant to relativize the very notion of a definitive, final translation. Any given stage was as definite a translation as I could make at that time, and next year’s version would no doubt be—even if only ever so slightly—different from this one. (On the ontogenetic level, this tale of successive versions of translations repeats the phylogenetic need for all great poems—and maybe the less great need this even more so—to be retranslated, generation after generation, to be of use. The accumulation of these readings, for that is what translations are, constitutes the [after]life of a poem.) The presentation of the Celan translations (and of most other such work of meta-phorein I’ve done) that I would prefer has always been linked to the time I studied medicine: namely, to those wonderful textbook inserts consisting of a series of transparent plastic sheets, each of which had a part or layer of the anatomy printed on it, making for a palimpsest one could leaf through backward and forward. All books of translations should be such palimpsests, for if there can be a definite original text—which we know is not true, though it may be a necessary fiction from the translator’s perspective—there can be only layers upon layers of unstable, shifting, tentative, other-languaged versions, even if a given one may be the most fitting and thus the “best” one for its moment and place. But this synchronic or symphonic presentation of the versions is not a practical possibility; we will have to make do with the tale of the diachrony of the work and hope that the narrative of the process will permit these versions to be seen as just that: versions, momentary stopping points, and configurations in an unending process of transmutation.
    7. SOME FURTHER NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION
    There are specific problems that make translating Celan a difficult undertaking. Among them is the extremely complex, not to say complicated, relationship Celan had to the language in which he wrote. His German strongly distances itself from any use that language was put to, both in literature and as vehicle for spoken communication, either before or during the poet’s lifetime. It is truly an invented German. A translator thus first has to locate the language, or rather the languages, from which Celan has “translated” or “transcribed” his poetry into German. The sources are manifold, and the commentators have laid some of these bare: to “cleanse” his language “of historical political dirt” (Steiner), Celan has often gone to earlier forms of German, so that medieval or late medieval words and etymologies enter the poems and need to be tracked down. Similarly, rare or dialectical (such as north and south German, as well as Austrian) words no longer in current use, or known only to dialect speakers, make frequent appearances, baffling even native German speakers. Celan was an