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a word heavenward? Isn’t this a rhetorical gesture?
Celan’s title for the collection in which the two quoted
poems appear is From Threshold To Threshold, and this
just about sums up the ‘failure’ of these two poems to
cross the threshold to heaven. As readers we tend to
grasp moments of manifesto-like clarity such as these;
but assertion is not enough. Despite its practical matterof-factness,
it betrays failure. This is not to criticise.
Failure is central to the history of modern poetry, although
such failure is now usually misunderstood.
To simplify, the concern of the Romantic-Enlightenment
poets of the 18th century – the beginning of the
modern age – was humanity’s relation to nature. We are
familiar with this in Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the
greater Europe, Hölderlin’s inspiration was also “To
be one with all that lives, and to return in blessed selfforgetfulness
into the All of Nature”. While he pursued
it in poetry, others, such as his friend Hegel, turned to
philosophy. But where philosophy feeds off distance,
allowing the goal of the Absolute – which would be
the end of philosophy, the end of history etc – to be
preserved indefinitely as a self-aggrandising rhetorical
device, poetry demands the end without delay: if poetry
remains, distance remains. Where today’s celebration
of nature uses language in an unironic slideshow of
clichés (see any New Age CD, website or poetry book
made of recycled paper) the Romantics recognised only
failure: words, corpses.
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Worse, Enlightenment promises actually inaugurated
the manifold growth of science and technology that
sought (and still seeks) to conquer nature rather than
to respect it. The consequence of Enlightenment was
at once to liberate us of the fetters of medieval society
and to destroy the traditions by which society kept its
body and soul together. The contradiction remains with
us, and the agitation of modern culture can be summed
up as the tension between accepting the wilderness and
our instinctive rejection of its freedom. A Celan poem
reflects the struggle:
Should
should a man
should a man come into the world, today, with
the shining beard of the
patriarchs: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
againagain
(Trans: Michael Hamburger)
He speaks but only just. It is poetry with aphasia.
How might a man speak of this time, this ‘destitute
time’, as Hölderlin called it, without using destitute
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