Paul Celan, The Dark Oar, translated by Jaclyn Piudik

 

Paul Celan made Paris his home from 1948 until his death in 1970, and while his day-to-day life was conducted in French, he composed only one poem in his adopted language: “Ô les hâbleurs,” written for his son Eric in 1968. For Celan, a polyglot and prolific translator of the work of other writers – from Shakespeare to Apollinaire, Mandelstam to Char, to name but a few – there was no question that German, the Muttersprache or mother tongue, would be the language of his poems. despite his complex stance vis-à-vis the German language, his native tongue itself was, according to his biographer, John Felstiner, “the only nation he could claim.” Yet Celan had a long connection to French, having initiated his study of the language in high school in Czernowitz, later undertaking medical training in Tours between 1938 and 1939, and maintaining epistolary exchanges with friends and colleagues well before taking up residence in Paris. By the time Celan settled in France, he had already mastered the language, and his rapport with it would deepen, even though it would always be the language of his “exile.” (“FOREWORD”)

Presented as a poem in three languages is The Dark Oar (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), offering an original poem by Romanian-French poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) composed in German, alongside his own translation of the poem into French, and subsequently, the translation from French into English by Toronto poet and translator Jaclyn Piudik. As Piudik offers in her preface to the collection, she purposefully chose to translate the poems from the French, as opposed to translating directly from the German: “The Dark Oar brings Celan’s French translations of his own German poems – 26 in total – into English for the first time. Celan’s translations span some 17 years, from 1952 to 1969, through many phases of his life and his writing career.” She continues, writing: “And while there are many fine translations of the original German poems into English, the translation of Celan’s French versions of those poems open a window into the poet’s relationship both to his mother tongue and to his adopted language.” There is something I find fascinating about anyone moving to write in a language beyond their mother tongue. Samuel Beckett (1906-1979) and Milan Kundera (1929-2023), for example, who also moved into France and composed works in French, each of them situated in their own unique and very different forms of exile.

It is interesting to see Beautiful Outlaw editor/publisher, the Toronto poet, translator and critic Mark Goldstein, expand his own explorations into Paul Celan through publishing such projects, following American poet Robert Kelly’s Earish (Beautiful Outlaw, 2022), a German-English “translation” of “Thirty Poems of Paul Celan” [see my review of such here], as well as through multiple of his own projects, including Thricelandium (Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) [see my review of such here], Part Thief, Part Carpenter (Beautiful Outlaw, 2021), a book subtitled “SELECTED POETRY, ESSAYS, AND INTERVIEWS ON APPROPRIATION AND TRANSLATION” [see my review of such here] and as curator of the folio “Paul Celan/100” for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, posted November 23, 2020 to mark the centenary of Celan’s birth.

Through Piudik’s offering, it allows for the possibility of seeing further into the process of Celan the translator alongside Celan the poet, catching the differences he might have himself seen in the shifts between language, and a further project might be seeing just how different these English translations might be to others taken directly from Celan’s German. A book of companions and comparisons, especially for those able to read German and French, as Piudik writes:

Thus I stand, stony,
facing you.
High.

Eroded
by drifting sand, the two
hollows at the forehead’s edge.
Inside,
darkness glimpsed.

Pierced by the beats
of hammers brandished mutely,
the place
where the winged eye brushed me.
Behind,
in the wall,
the step where the Remembered crouches.
Facing here
animated by nights, a voice
streams,
from which you ladle the drink.

 

Paul Celan, Thricelandium, trans. Mark Goldstein

 

On finishing my translation of Eingedunkelt, I was startled to discover the 11 poems comprising this work required a draft of over 100 pages. Rereading these materials, I came to understand that a response in English to Paul Celan’s poetry in German necessitates a material approach. The poem’s word-materiality in English first must parallel the word-materiality in Deutsch.

What do I mean by this? I propose considering this parallel materiality as a kind of alchemical Landschaft or Landscape. One wherein, amid its territory, we may inscribe Stein as Stone – and as a result of the difference between words, we may be granted a glimpse of their glyphic (and lithic) associations as anomalies: a chrysopoeia through which the under-poem may announce itself. (afterword, “ON TRANSLATING PAUL CELAN”)

Further to Toronto poet, editor, publisher, translator and critic Mark Goldstein’s explorations through the work of Romanian-French poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) is Thricelandium (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), translated by and with a hefty introduction and even heftier afterword, “ON TRANSLATING PAUL CELAN,” by Goldstein. Thricelandium is but one step in a much larger trajectory through Goldstein’s thinking around Celan’s work, with other elements including: his poetry collection, Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) [see my review of such here]; his collection Part Thief, Part Carpenter (Beautiful Outlaw, 2021), a book subtitled “SELECTED POETRY, ESSAYS, AND INTERVIEWS ON APPROPRIATION AND TRANSLATION” [see my review of such here]; as publisher of American poet Robert Kelly’s Earish (Beautiful Outlaw, 2022), a German-English “translation” of “Thirty Poems of Paul Celan” [see my review of such here]; and as curator of the folio “Paul Celan/100” for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, posted November 23, 2020 to mark the centenary of Celan’s birth. It has been through the process of moving across such a sequence that I’ve begun to appreciate the strength of Goldstein as a critic, offering a thoroughness and detail-oriented precision to his thinking, working to articulate his approach to the material and his translations of such, that seems unique, especially one focused so heavily on the work of a single, particular author. Honestly, I’m having an enormously difficult time not reprinting whole swaths of his stunningly-thorough introduction, which deals with, among other considerations, Goldstein’s approach to the translation and how Celan’s work helped him develop his own writing. As Goldstein wrote as part of his “A Prefatory Note:” for the “Paul Celan/100” folio:

I came to the work of Paul Celan in my 20s through the common entryway of his poem Todesfuge [Death Fugue]. I suspect that I first encountered it in anthology — likely either in Jerome Rothenberg’s translation found in Poems for the Millennium or in John Felstiner’s translation as it appears in Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

In each case I was startled by Celan’s power of expression, and as a Jew, I obsessed over his early use of the imagery of the Shoah. In time, as I read through his books, I began to develop an ever-expanding sense of their territory. Moreover, as the writing neared its terminus, I came to recognize my estrangement with it too — one born from its profound and compelling angularity.

I’ve long been intrigued by Goldstein’s long engagement with the work of Celan, as deep and rich as his engagement with the work of Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall, from Beautiful Outlaw having produced multiple chapbooks and books by Phil Hall, to the recent ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL, eds. Mark Goldstein and Jaclyn Piudik (Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]. On the surface, at least, there seems far more affinity between the work of Celan and Hall than the two life-long focuses of Ottawa poet, publisher and bibliographer jwcurry’s writing life, bpNichol and Frank Zappa, although either of these parings (or trios, really) would make absolutely fascinating theses by some brave academic at some point.

Across three poem-sequences—“ATEMKRISTALL · BREATHCRYSTAL,” “EINGEDUNKELT · ENDARKENED” and “SCHWARZMAUT · BLACKTOLL”—there is a lovely contrary and delicate quality to these poems, offered both in the original German alongside Goldstein’s translation. The language swirls, moving in and out, and through, blended and perpetual meanings that become clear as one moves through, holding a firm foundation of clarity by the very means of those swirlings, those gestural sweeps. As Goldstein’s translation offers, early on in the first sequence:

Etched in the undreamt,
a sleeplessly wandered-through breadland
casts up the life-mount.

From its crumb
you knead our names anew,
which I, an eye
in kind
on each finger,
feel for
a place, through which I
can awaken to you,
a bright
hungercandle in mouth.

Chris Turnbull, cipher

 

the lake,
remnant, scar, is shallow

swings
toward edge-not.

kinetics of form
– ebb-terrain –

includes
the sodden

the parched
the reminiscent (“candid”)

The latest by Kemptville, Ontario poet and curator Chris Turnbull is cipher (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), a book of listening and attention; of being present, and outdoors. Set as a triptych of suites—“candid,” “contrite” and “ciper”—Turnbull extends her note-taking across a slowness, writing moments and local through a book of ecological space. “in now, when, then –,” she writes, as part of the first section, “compression – generated – / for this / instant-on-instant, [.]” Compression is a perfect word to describe Turnbull’s poem-structures, a kind of book-length accumulation of note-taking that exists amid the tensions of compression and expansion. Across the length and breadth of the book as compositional space, Turnbull composes short bursts of lyric that stretch out across a wide canvas, compelling and attending an ecopoetic of minutae and magnitude. “littoral zone – hundreds / list,” she writes, as part of the first section, “founder – dark reshaping clusters – /// easy / does it /// these domains / are fluid [.]” She writes of unsafe roads, ice on the river and bees messaging, a poem composed from and within a landscape, elements of which echo her ongoing rout/e, her project of placing poems along rural walking trails, and watching across time as the words fade and pages decompose’; a project, by itself, which echoes Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s collaborative Decomp (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013) [see my review via Arc Poetry Magazine here]. Across cipher, Turnbull’s words hold, erode, corrode, and slip into soil. There is an element, also, that echoes Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” although, unlike Niedecker’s infamous poem that emerged as an extension of work-related research, Turnbull’s lyric exists as both research and reportage: these poems are simultaneous study and result, and of something ongoing, deeply intuitive and regularly attended. As Turnbull speaks to the project in a recent interview conducted by Conyer Clayton for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics:

I’ve been working slowly on this manuscript for several years — and over this period considering seeming societal withdrawals ‘from’ the outdoors. I wonder how other generations might mediate their experiences of, or limit fears of, various elements of our physical worlds. I think this conundrum is important — there is no conclusion, but cipher presents possibilities. How do these generations relate to or make world(s)? Land does not take precedence, screens, networks, are central and unbound: the marsh is ripped at corner.