Celan is one of those poets I have an ongoing engagement with, based on a faith that there is an extraordinary depth of meaning there to be discovered. Not, of course, that once discovered you could ever paraphrase such meaning in terms other than as it manifests itself in the poems themselves. Almost unlike any other poet, you cannot even begin to describe a Celan poem. You must simply go there, and read, re-read, listen, and wait. However, that's not prevented me jotting this: Celan- not 'meaning', but object, as a crafted piece of crystal has viability, refracting images. This would account for the metaphors involving crystals in his poems. The poem not as a conveyance of meaning, but a refraction, a reorganisation, of the word and world.: a word-world, a third space equidistant between the two, where word and world are intimately enmeshed as light and image in a crystal. Keeping this space open was his best option for continuing to use German, on terms more his own.
.
.
All those sleep shapes, crystalline,
that you assumed
in the language shadow,
.
to those
I lead my blood
.
.
The translation is Michael Hamburger's, which suddenly reveals to me the debt I owe to his work: my faith that Paul Celan repays continued reading is mediated by the faith I have in Hamburger's translations, most of which I have thoroughly internalised. In fact, I clearly associate his translations with a particular time and place: Belfast, Walnut street, off Donegall pass, 1989, Winter into Spring.
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