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language was High German, while the wider community
generally used the more latinate Romanian. There
were many others in circulation, including Yiddish.
The last is significant as Celan was part of a large
Jewish community. There was anti-Semitism, for sure,
but German culture was the pinnacle of Western civilisation.
It promised something better than feudal sniping.
Inspired by his mother’s deep love for it’s poetry,
he wrote lyric poems in the tradition of Hölderlin and
Rilke. It is said that as a youth he had a remarkable
affinity for it too. His taste moved him toward the
contemporary symbolist and surrealist movements,
and despite his polylingual abilities, he always wrote
his poetry in German; his müttersprache.
Then war came. Celan was, by chance, separated
from his parents on the day the Nazis arrived and deported
the city’s Jews. He never saw his parents again.
They were taken to a Ukrainian labour camp. His
father died of disease; his mother was shot. After this,
as Hugo Gryn said, Celan was in the position of being a
writer in the language of his mother and of his mother’s
murderers. He could not renounce the latter’s language
without renouncing the former’s. Celan was robbed
of his parents’ death as well as their lives. Bonnefoy
implies the same goes for his müttersprache.
“We can say of Celan as of no other poet: his words
did not recover his experience. The loss was felt,” he
says, “like a discharge without origin or end.” And as
BUY Paul Celan books online from and
a result: “nothing real could authentically respond to
this flux or be its equal, in the absolute, as referent:
only the river itself … seems to fold in on itself (losing
itself) like the only thing signified on the scale of
so much absence.”
So for Bonnefoy, an avowed Christian, another death
becomes another metaphor of hope. If his explanation
is exemplary, we remain in what Maurice Blanchot
calls “the civilisation of the book”, where literature
takes possession of everything – that is, submitting it
to a pre-established unity symbolised by the enclosing
covers of a book. Even Bonnefoy’s sensitive appraisal
leaves too strong a trace of the dubious correlation
of life and art. Its presence allow us to keep the discomposing
reality at a distance, within the inexorable
logic of a narrative with a beginning, middle and, most
importantly, an end.
This article on Celan will tend toward that logic too.
Perhaps it must. But whereas the industry surrounding
Sylvia Plath, for example, regards the poetry as
an expert witness to judging the case of her tormented
life and suicide, with Celan, this would be to miss
everything.
Seamus Heaney begins his essay on Sylvia Plath by
stating the potential of poetry:
“the poet’s need [is] to get beyond ego in order to
become the voice of more than autobiography. At
the level of poetic speech, when this happens, sound
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