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Feature [published September 2000]
Paul Celan: After The Disaster
Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan
With a variable key
you unlock the house in which
drifts the snow of that left unspoken.
Always what key you choose
depends on the blood that spurts
from your eye or your mouth or your ear.
You vary the key, you vary the word
that is free to drift with the flakes.
What snowball will form round the word
depends on the wind that rebuffs you.
This is a poem by Paul Celan translated from the
German original by Michael Hamburger. The original
was written in the early 1950s. Its title is the first line.
We assume a translation is second-hand and only
the original can provide definitive clarification. But
clarification of what? Isn’t our sense of the opacity
of translation also the sense of the rebuffing wind in
Celan’s poem? Searching for the key to this poem, and
being resisted, we sense the climate the poem reports.
As we watch the snow gathering, pursuing an answer
BUY Paul Celan books online from and
to explain why Celan chose this particular key – and
there are grim details one can point to – prompts only a
return journey to the poem.
It is an uncomfortable fact that the bar to a poem’s
key – this poem’s key – is the key to the poem itself.
Some might dismiss this as tiresomely reflexive; a
poem about poetry. It is clear, I think, that this is an
insensitive reading. The metaphors are too close to
experience to dismiss it as abstract. Indeed, can they
get any closer?
Celan’s friend, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy,
wrote: “I believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did
so that once, at least, words and what is might join”. He
had drowned himself in the Seine in late April 1970,
six months before his 50th birthday. What is Bonnefoy
talking about? Surely death by drowning and words are
as far apart as one can get? Bonnefoy is alluding to his
friend’s peculiar linguistic heritage and how it affected
his life and poetry. Celan was grew up in the city of Czernowitz,
then part of Romania, now within Moldova.
Its political geography meant many languages were
spoken among its inhabitants. In the poet’s home, the
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