Tan Bing'er: Paul Celan 'Death Fugue'

Poetry and music have always been inseparable. "Fugue" was originally a contrasted musical form (composed of several independent voice parts); In the musical process, the principle of fugue is that the theme itself is static, unchanging, without development, and without dramatic conflict; The other parts are all played on a theme, in different voices and in different tones, occasionally at different speeds or upside down or from back to front; If it is repeated, until the end of the song.

The various voices in the "fugue" rise and fall one after another, like asking and answering, in a kind of looping rhythm, the audience can strongly feel the oscillation and impact of the music.

Paul Celan's highly musical and visual effect, expressed in a cold metaphorical way, uses this method of structural text, which plays an important role in strengthening the rhythmic sense of the poem and deepening the thematic meaning of the poem. As Susan Lange said, "When a poet creates, he does not simply want to tell people what happened, but to talk about it in a special way."

The poems show a strong indictment of the violent and evil nature of the Nazis, and also describe the situations of blackness and repression, violence and despair, death and nothingness to the extreme.

Adorno had said that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric and impossible. However, Paul Celand's poems could shock the German poetry scene at that time and become a symbol of "ruin culture". So Adorno retracted the old saying and corrected it to "The long-suffering are more entitled to express themselves, just as the tortured are to cry." The claim that Auschwitz could not write poetry after Auschwitz may be false. ”

Yes, totalitarian rule has carved so many shattered, torn, and surreal images into Paul Celan's life that he has had to fight the boundless darkness with doubt, anger, and so on. His language, coming from the kingdom of death, points to the core of tragedy; his poems are metaphors, despair, drops of blood, dialogue with God.