Today, when it comes to Paul Celan, people with a little literary and historical knowledge probably have two feelings: first, Celan, as a German-speaking Jewish poet, proved that it is "possible" to write poetry after Auschwitz; second, Celan's poetry is confusing and unreadable. He has been hailed as "the great German poet after Rilke" and is also regarded as "the most important exponent of contemporary German closed writing" (Adorno).
Paul Celan (1920-1970), the most influential German-speaking poet since World War II. In 1960, he was awarded the Bichner Prize, Germany's highest literary award. He is the author of "Poppy and Memory", "Language Fence", "No Man's Rose", "Cotton Thread Sun" and other poetry collections.
The incomprehensibility of Celan's poetry has been controversial since his lifetime, and to this day, reading Paul Celan's poetry seems to be a century of problems. This article is a review of the biography of Zeeland by wolfgang Emerich, a scholar of German literature and cultural history.
Written by lou Yanjing |
The Biography of Celan, by Wolfgang Emerich, translated by Liang Jingjing, Yazhong Culture 丨 Nanjing University Press, January 2022.
Connect Celan's poems with his life
In one conversation, Celan said: "I am at a different level of time and space than my readers; they can only interpret me from a distance, they cannot grasp me, they just hold the fence between us." Who does "my reader" point to? For ordinary readers, or for non-Jewish-German readers, or even for Jewish readers? Does the "different temporal and spatial dimension" refer to different eras, or is it the entire twentieth century as a contemporary? What about the "fence" between the two? Does it mean poetics, the strangeness of form, or the historical and thematic estrangement? How to understand Celan's statement that "I can only be interpreted from a distance", and in what sense is it to "meet" with Celan "far away" ("This is the keyword celerant uses to describe the relationship between poetry and readers")?
It is only when we return to Celan's poetry and life, in the mutual proof of the two, that we will meet Celan at a special moment, and the book "The Biography of Celan" by Wolfgang Emmerich, an expert in Celan's research, undoubtedly provides an opportunity for us to meet Celan.
However, writing a biography of Celan is not a matter of course for Wolfgang Emerich, and to understand Celan, it is necessary to reconstruct the "ethics of reading" about Celan. On the one hand, Celan's poems are obscure and incomprehensible, and on the other hand, Celan's life deeds are very secretive, and it is difficult to directly index between the two to form an empirical complementarity.
Print by Celan's wife, Giselle Celan.
But, as we already know, Celan's life and poetry are again full of major personal and historical traumas, or in the words of Celan's letter to a friend: "I have never written a single line of words that have nothing to do with my existence, and I am a — and you see — a realist, a realist in my own way." Celan's poems are full of Bützelan's "I Am," but Celan somehow alienates these life events to a considerable degree, forming a "language fence." If you want to meet Celan, you can't reduce this to "pure art", treat Celan's poetry differently from his life, and you can't ignore Celan's poetic way. In the book "Celan Biography", the new ethics of reading Celan lies in reopening Celan's poetry and life, and in understanding the "information code" in Celan's poetry.
Interpretation of the Death Fugue
"Information code" is an important concept that Celan repeatedly mentioned in his acceptance speech for the Bichner Literary Prize, "Meridian". According to Wolfgang Emerich, "information code" has multiple meanings: literally means "something that already exists," "a time statement on a calendar," "all possible facts and information," and "derived from history, politics, literature, language, or personal experience." These information codes appeared in certain important moments of Celan's life and thought, and were deeply imprinted in Celan's poetic texts in a unique way, and they were the premise for understanding Celan and the basis for celan's biography. Or, conversely, in Emerich, because of these information codes, "it is possible to pass on the message for Celan", then it is also possible to understand Celan, although it is "encountered" with Celan across the "fence".
One of the key points of "Celan's Biography" is to decipher the various information codes in Celan's poetry, connect Celan's poetic texts, life deeds, and states of mind with each other, not only describe the details of Celan's life, but also combine Celan's poetry to make ideological judgments, presenting a real and objective Paul Celan from a comprehensive, networked perspective.
Take Wolfgang Emerich's interpretation of the poem "Death Fugue", for example. As a "poem of the century", "Death Fugue" is related to both Celan's life and Celan's poetics. Emerich began to examine the relevant details of the Death Fugue from a realistic point of view, and interpreted the Death Fugue as "a description of the horrific situation in the death camp" by quoting many testimonies. Next, Emerich focused on the information code from "literature" in Death Fugue, arguing that the poem is "a poem obsessed with literature, and the quotation can be seen throughout." ”
First, the contradictory rhetorical method at the beginning of Death Fugue, the "Black Milk of the Early Years," appears frequently in the works of previous and contemporary poets, and in this context, Emmerich links this to the great distress caused by the "Gore Incident" of the 1960s. At the same time, Emerich also believes that "Death Fugue" and Celan's teenage classmate Emanuel Weisgras's poem "Him" have "striking similarities" on many levels, thus extending the early friendship between the two poets.
Second, due to their deviations in their poetic conception, Emmerich argues that Death Fugue is also a "polemical poem" for Him. Celan's challenge was not only for his teenage classmates, but also for "a kind of harsh reckoning of the German tradition in literature." In Emerich's analysis, Death Fugue's "invisible references" to numerous German traditions, such as metaphors and rhythms, give the poem "the only theme," "the germans' dual master temperament—artistic and murderous." ”
Again, along with the German tradition in The Death Fugue, there is the Jewish tradition, which means that Celan, who had once believed in the German-Jewish coexistence, "began to re-approach his Jewish people" and "at the moment when the Jews of Europe were destroyed."
Paul Zelan in reading.
"Death Fugue" implies a lot of biography and literary information codes, and Emmerich has declassified it through meticulous decryption to outline Celan's past.
However, the interpretation of the Death Fugue does not end there, because it "retains a charming beauty, a musical charm, an almost mysterious magic", which directly led to the misinterpretation of Death Fugue in the 1950s and 1960s.
Critics at the time saw the musical harmony of the poem as a "overcoming" of Auschwitz, a reading pleasure and thematic purification, and Celan was even derided as "reading the poem like Goebbels" when he recited Death Fugue passionately at the gathering of the German "Four-Seven Society". Celan naturally became more and more horrified to realize these dangers, and simply confessed: "The Death Fugue, which has been talked about too much, has become a slur song, and I will never play that ensemble again." Thus, in celan's biography, the death fugue itself becomes an information code, representing a certain "turning point" in Celan's life and creation, after which the poet "seems to have completely intolerable his original way of writing", that "from the silent witness", the impossibility of poetry, the distrust of language, gradually grabbed the poet's expressive mind, and finally in the later stages of Celan's life, the poetic language continued to collapse, disintegrate, and metamorphosed into "no man's rose" (celan's poetry collection title).
Only respect for the strangeness of poetry,
to have the right to read them
Emerich's tracking and interpretation of "Death Fugue" reflects the basic point of the writing of "Celan's biography": respecting Celan's original meaning, treating Celan's poetry as a completely realistic and standing in the era in reading, "respecting his life experience, the mentally crazy and indignant life history", through the interspersed interpretation and skillful weaving of many information codes, so that Celan's poetry is twisted with people, and sincerely shows Celan's life.
The biography of Celan is informative and accurate, and some well-known events in Celan's life history, such as Claire Gore's plagiarism allegations, meeting with Heidegger, and final drowning, etc., are described in detail and concisely, and some of the "information codes" implied in them are also revealed.
Not only that, "Celan Biography" also presents a more multi-faceted Celan. For example, Celan did not always have a bitter and vengeful face, in Bucharest after the end of World War II, Celan "can laugh, can have fun", "enjoy love", has a large number of girlfriends, likes to play word games with friends in correspondence, and enjoy it.
For example, Celan also has a surging side, and has a complicated relationship with the communist revolution. "Celan regarded 'socialism with the imprint of morality and religion' as his own belief" and firmly believed that "revolution is 'a different beginning, an uprising of the lower classes, the rise of creation—a radical change of a universe'", and was called "the sad man of Marxism" by his friends. During the 1968 Paris Student Movement, Celan was also in high spirits, holding hands with people on the street and "singing the international anthem with everyone.". Many revolutionary moments of the twentieth century always aroused Celan's "old communist feelings."
However, although many of the hidden contents of Celan's life and texts are "cracked" and revealed, will Celan's poems be truly understood by readers? What does the deciphering of the various "information codes" have to do with Celan's statement that "I can only be interpreted from a distance"? For his part, with his own readers, especially non-Jewish German-speaking readers, "deeply separated", traumatic history cannot be shared heart-to-heart in the form of language, so that language can only be "presented as an obstacle", because once the work is understood, it will have the illusion of reconciliation with the victim. Thus, Emerich also set a bottom line for the writing of Celan's biography— "As a reader of Celan's poems, you only have the right to read them if you respect the strangeness of the poems." ”
No matter how much Celan's "information code" is interpreted in "Celan's biography", it is only "far away", Emmerich always realizes that the "fence" between the reader and Celan, this "fence" exists fatally, can not be removed, can not be crossed, it is the way to "meet" Celan itself. Or rather, only by crossing the fence can we "meet" Celan.