[translated by me, as usual: if is too awful whicb it probably is in some places and you have improvements, tell me and i correct it]
by Klaus Reichert, NZZ 19.2.2005
Conversations and Encounters in discrete closeness
When the literary scholar and translator Klaus Reichert was a student in Berlin he got to know Peter Szondi and became his student. He was to become Szondi's assistant in Zürich where Szondi was appointed to teach shortly before his suicide. In the following, slightly abridged introductory speech for the Peter Szondi Exhibition in the German Literature Archive in Marbach he remembers his encounters with Szondi.
In winterterm 1960, when I came from London to Berlin in order to study at the free university I discovered in the course catalogue a for me unpronounceable name -- Schondi or Tschondi -- with whom i connected a book which I had read in London and which had been so very different than almost everything that i was forced to read as a student of literature: "Theory of modern drama". The tone was different, the style, the author wrote concise and clear, lean without clinkers, not to much, rather too little, thoughtfully rigorous, at the same time elegant, almost essayistic. In this book, in which the argument was based on original literature, not secondary literature, two names appeared like guiding stars, one i had never heard and the other one only by way of ridicule: Lukács and Adorno. I knew I had to read those two authors, not because they would help me in my studies -- i didn't care about that -- but because they would change my view of art and its social conditions. So in every respect I became curious about the man who had written such a book. He offered only one course, a seminar on the aesthetics of Hegel. Before I had toiled away with the analyses of Aristotle in a strict philological way, had been in England in the society of the pupils of Wittgenstein and critical rationalism and knew that i didn't have to do Hegel. And yet though Hegel, Hegel's Aesthetic. Fortunately not his Logic.
Darkly shadowed
The seminar was small, about 20 participants, later 8 - 20. A giant of a man entered the room, in dark clothes and darkly shadowed face beneath an already grey lion's mane, he appeared by almost bull like stature bent forward, had he not occasionally suddenly lifted his head towards heaven like towards saturnus. The voice from this colossus was quiet, not tender, almost without tone, at the same time determined and not to be contradicted, and he'd rather sit with his books and not to utter words in this non-conversational-situation of his seminar. 200 pages of Hegel were to be read from week to week and one participant had to present them whereupon Szondi's: What do you think was lasted out with minute long silence, his, ours. Who would have dared this then - or today? The taciturn, withdrawn contract teacher/adjunct - he hadn't a higher position due to not being habilitated - had an aura like an awe inspiring shelter around himself that let one sense his high sensitivity and at the same time his only just by few attested importance, also his unquestionable authority.
Immediately after the first seminar I went to him to introduce myself, you did that back then. He asked what I did before and what I was interested in and I told about London, about the to him unknown Canetti, about Erich Fried, Michael Hamburger. I mentioned Paul Celan and it appeared we both knew him personally and corresponded with him. The mention of this name in some sense was the entry card -- right from the beginning something came into existence that could be described as discrete closeness. Most of the time I accompanied him after the seminar, we both absorbed in a quite conversation. Szondi smoked without a break during walking. He screwed himself in a sense with each step higher in the air, the head thrown back, stretched high as if he wanted to remove himself from the one who walked next to him or as if the head ought to disappear towards the upward. (Once I saw him walking in the distance, in the Grunewald, walking slowly and heavy, leaning forwards as if absorbed in himself, the head directed to the ground -- after the saturnic upwardsscrewing the other extreme of the melancholiac: earthadherence, digging in the lowest element.) When Szondi spoke during our walks it was rather a murmur, pieces of sentences like avulsions from an inner dialogue, timid, incidental. Sometimes the walks ended abruptly and when saying goodbye he offered his fingertips.
Often I accompanied him to his home, sometimes I was allowed to visit him in his small, sparsely furnitured flat whose first room was called the Hofmannsthal room, apparently because of the bright Biedermeier furniture (with Empire Palmetten). There on a console was the portrait of Walter Benjamin by Gisèle Freund that was soon to become famous. Back then Benjamin was to me not much more than a name. "You got to read him" said Szondi with a strange emphasis, "I'll get you the edition with my discount at the publisher." In his study there was a recently bought Klee, Garten der Lüste which had cost him all his money and very few books -- also later apparently he only ever wanted to have those few books around that he just needed, travelling lightly --, in this rigorously tidy room we sat, smoked, talked, drunk sherry or whisky. Szondi discoursed not magistral and not allowing any objections like Paul Celan, Szondi spoke cautious, in hints with a certain sort of shame that he spoke ins Unreine [something that has not been proofread, talking like someone whose talk was not proofread]: he hated everything that was improvised which one could see later in his very detailed worded lectures.
Sometimes he suddenly started a sentence with "You know that..." and one didn't of course know. Years later, after Celan's Breathturn had appeared, poems I didn't understand and that overwhelmed me as Celan's editor, but about which i couldn't talk to anyone, because i felt I ought to understand them, about which I wrote a blurb that almost lead to a break with Celan, after the publishing of Breathturn Szondi said to me suddenly: you know that for me the Nomansrose is Celan's last volume of poetry. Szondi, the most precise Celan exeget of the 60ies hadn't understand those new poems, this Breathturn either.
Charge of plagiarism
What he was occupied with, in the winter of 60/61 was the finishing of his habilitation and the preparation of his habilitationlecture. What he was plagued with was the charge of plagiarism against celan by claire goll. He tried to mobilise the colleagues from Berlin, but they declined: Celan takes this story exaggeratedly serious, it will evaporate. Günter Grass, again in Berlin, until recently a friend of Celan in Paris said that Celan was hysterical. In all the debates to which i listened in it was about the oversensitive Celan, never about the monstrosities of the -- for whatever reasons -- revengeful and perfidious widow of Ivan Goll. Szondi was the last to hold the fort and he saw, like Celan -- but didn't say what the colleagues didn't see due to his own reticence -- that it was underlying about something else than about the charge of plagiarism, carefully expressed: about the tactlessness towards the feelings of someone who had been persecuted. In looking back it becomes clear how alone Szondi must have felt. But he didn't indict, didn't judge, he was silent.
Back then I didn't know about Szondi's own fate, I only knew vaguely that somehow as an adolescent he got away from Hungary, but didn't know the circumstances and also didn't want to ask due to our unspoken agreement of discretion. Only once - I can't recall the circumstances, the context - something blurted out of him -- just like sometimes something funny or something horrid or both at the same time blurted out of him only to be obliterated after a short, toneless laughter only expressed in the folds of the face. He said: "When we were stopped at Bergen Belsen, my grandmother said to her lady-in-waiting because there was no butter: And this too, my dear, is a sign that we got to go away at a rush." That was everything. Nothing about the years in Budapest, nothing about the Kastner-transport, nothing about fears. But the narrated grandmotheranecdote has the edge of a Beckettian intervention ("Nothing is funnier than misery"), the as a moment experienced denial more cruelly horrid than the remembered horridness. In retelling one could see Szondi's view, trained at Benjamin, for the significance of the insignificant, the irrelevant, the incidental, a speaking-for-itself that says more than a speaking-about. This is the method that Szondi developed for the lecture of poetic speech.
In summer term 61, that was before the wall was built, but Szondi never anyway (ought one to say: out of caution) did go to the other part of Berlin, also to my knowledge never met his aunt Anna Seghers -- in the summerterm of 61 Szondi did a seminar of lyric, Brecht, Benn (Satzbau poem), the by then almost forgotten Alexander Xaver Gwerder to whom Szondi was attached with strange love, Celan's Engführung. In this seminar I learnt reading. Szondi was precise, he let us urn the words over and over, not about what a poem spoke was discussed, but how it spoke, what was written, not what it might mean in some transferred sense. The poem itself supplied the premise towards its recognition.
In the one year later written Traktat über philologische Erkenntnis he writes: "Literary science... ought to get its method out of an analysis of the poetic process; it can get real knowledge only from an immersion in the works, in the logic of how they (the poems) have been produced." Such immersion demands highest attention, an always new sharpened view, a sensitivity for nuances and valeurs that could be indicated by the way the line ends. It was an infinite task, the way Schlegel called translating, that is, one could never come to an end regarding a poetic entity and Szondi sometimes used for this procedure of immersion the english expression "an approach". Szondi always and always insisted on the own laws of every individual poem. When a poet used a word in a poem in a certain way, it didn't mean that this word in a different poem had the same meaning.
The by Szondi demanded and always again at poems demonstrated method not to allow anything outside a text to determine that text was unfortunately almost without consequence in the following years that were shaken by heavy debates on methods. Marxistic, ideolog critical, psychoanalytical (first Freud, then soon Lacan), social historical, structuralist, poststructuralist, receptionaesthetical methods took turns or were in rivalry with each other, they were superimposed on the texts that were given to the fury of disappearance. Hans Robert Jauss said then: "Your Szondi is the most conservative, he still believes in philology." After most methods of alienated reading have finished themselves in the recent years one can observe a back-to-the-text and hopefully Szondi's work will get with its unprecedented precision and unexcited clinical urge get the attention that they are being owed. My own theory and praxis of translation is unthinkable without Szondi's hermeneutics.
At the end of summerterm 61 I left Berlin. Szondi had said: "You got to go to Frankfurt and continue studying with Adorno." In the following years we saw little of each other, but phoned often. Once Adorno wished him to come to Frankfurt in order to a apply for a professorship in German Studies. He talked about Hölderlin's Friedensfeier, "Er selbst, der Fürst des Fests" (He himself, the prince of the feast). Afterwards apparently a colleague of Adorno at the faculty meeting had said: "Mr Adorno, of people of your breed one is enough in our faculty." When not much later it was offered to him the new founded institute of general and comparative literary science in Berlin he invited me to built it up together with him. I agreed immediately and made a huge list for the basic equipment of a library, but then i had to cancel for various reasons. Nevertheless I remained his editor at the Insel publisher. We did Satz und Gegensatz and prepared Hölderlin Studies whose fabrication he accompanied with the same meticulousness with which he read texts. Mostly we talked about Celan whose poems i looked after for Suhrkamp and his translation I looked after for Insel. When Celan announced one of his visits to Frankfurt I phoned Szondi to find out how Celan's state was about Szondi was informed by Jean Bollack. Could he cope with people? Is my wife not allowed to wear something colorful?
With Celan I discussed the one or other passage of his translation of the sonetts of Shakespeare. He didn't reject the objections of a philologist. According to my memory he indeed did change the one or other -- not a lot -- indeed. Regarding one passage he wrote in a letter. I had hinted regarding one verse at the bizarre imagecreation thast would have been taken back in his translation: And peace proclaims olives of endless age, also etwa: der Frieden (der schon da ist, oder die Allegorie des Friedens) verheisst Ölzweige (das Wort ist rhythmisch hervorgehoben) von zeitloser Dauer. Celan writes: "CVII: I have a few attempts regarding what you suggested... verheisst der Frieden, but i end up with a fifteen syllable verse and therefore impossibility. It therefore has to remain - the Gods want this: Und mit dem alterslosen Ölzweig kommt der Frieden."
Readingprecision
I mention those questions of editing in order to say that Celan by all means -- sometimes and within reason -- could be talked to. When you read Szondi's big stude about Celan's translation of sonett 105, Poetry of Constancy -- Poetik der Beständigkeit, zou get the impression that every line of verse is the result of a preconceived and thereby applied poetological programme. As a translator I only cvan say that there are strong limites to the preconceived, especially in a poems that rhymes. However, Szondi shows with his microscopic reading abilities how what Shakespeare wrote poems about falls together in Celan's translations with the act of writing poetry and in the act, the translating becomes real. The new poem doesn't deal anymore about itself, but is itself. Celan contrasted Renaissance with modernity or performed the transition into the modern peom, via translation.
One could say with Benjamin -- Szondi does not do this -- speak about the aftermaturity of works. But Szondi speaks, with Benjamin about Celan's intention onto language regarding the translation just as well as in poems. But different than Benjamin he doesn't understand intention as willing or meaning, a way of meaning. Intention onto the language means here, with Fritz Mauthner, the direction of the consiousness onto language. Szondi in his Traktat über philologische Erkenntnis wrote about how the knowledge that one gained out of a poem cannot be generalized. This theorem I want to apply to his analyses of the Celan translation: It convinces for this poem. Who occupies oneself with translating Shakespeare, who works in this most compromiseless form of hermeneutics realizes that this intention onto language the way Szondi understands it was a guiding principle of the sonettwriter Shakespeare. He goes through where the words lead him, not the incentive, the object outside the poem. And this is why Shakespeare is modern.
With a view directed towards the earth
In april 1970 Celan drowned himself in the Seine. Szondi phoned: "It is good. Now he has peace. Finally." And Szondi started to write and publish his Celan essays which he didn't dare before, because he was afraid of Celan, that (fear) existed and not just for him. A few weeks later he phoned again and said, almost suddenly, without a name: "I miss him actually quite a lot, the longer (the time is) he isn't there anymore"
1971 Szondi accepted a joboffer at Zürich University. He planned to de-engage himself from the political in the same way he engaged himself with it in Berlin. I ought to come to Zürich with my stipend and give seminars and start my habilitation under his supervision. We moved to Switzerland, my wife and our child. After three weeks, in october, one and a hald years after Celan, Peter Szondi drowned himself in the Halensee, a few hundred meters away from his flat in the Taubertstrasse (-road) that once had been called Rathenau-Allee, a few hundred meters away from Benjamin's Delbrückenstrasse, in the area of Berliner Kindheit. He had parked his car properly in the Trabener Strasse. I was in Switzerland, at the Lake Constance, again at another literary encumbered body of water: "Woe me, where do i take from, when it is winter -- the flowers (...) and shadow on earth." [Weh mir, wo nehm ich, wenn es Winter ist, die Blumen (...) und Schatten der Erde.] I saw him infront of me, how he back then, dragging, hesitating, slowly with view towards the earth walked through the Grunewald as if even for the walk in the next village the life of a single person is too short.