Günter Grass entschied sich bereits 1956 unter dem Eindruck von Adornos Analyse der Kultur nach dem Zivilisationsbruch Auschwitz für eine asketische, »graue« Sprache als Maßstab der Dichtung – eine Maxime, die für Paul Celan zu grundlegenden Entscheidungen für die Skelettierung seiner lyrischen Sprache führte. Der Austausch zwischen dem Autodidakten Grass und seinem »Lehrer« Celan hatte andererseits fundamentale Bedeutung für die Konzeption von Hundejahre als episches Korrelat zum Sprachkosmos des Lyrikers. Als »kommunizierende Gefäße« sind sie durch einen gemeinsamen (...) Code miteinander verbunden, den dieses Essay zu entschlüsseln versucht. (shrink)

In his poems, Paul Celan does not use words such as territory, border, border crossing, and only very rarely the word space. I would like to reconstruct the traces of?Heimat? in Celan, and perhaps try to describe what Heimat might have meant for the young Paul Antschel. That is to say, I would like to understand whether?Heimat? is synonymous with what Celan speaks about, many years after his name change, in the address given on the (...) occasion of the Georg-Buechner-Preis:?Ich suche auch, denn ich bin ja wieder da, wo ich begonnen habe, den Ort meiner eigenen Herkunft.? In the poems written at the time when Antschel is learning Hebrew as well as reading Martin Buber for the first time, I look for some basic figures Celan ties to his life in Bukovina at the time, in the environment of Czernowitzer Judentums. Aside from the works by Israel Chalfen, Else Keren and Elke Guenzel, I would like to make use of a book published some ten years ago, a detailed listing of Celan?s Paris library. I would like to consult this archive in the coming period, since Celan punctuated the margins of many of those books with evocations of his early creative period. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adrian Del Caro PAUL CELAN'S UNCANNY SPEECH On October 22, 1960, Paul Celan was in Darmstadt, West Germany, to accept the prestigious Georg-Bûchner-Preis. Winners of this prize are required by custom to give a speech on some aspect of Georg Büchner's writings, and Celan followed suit with a speech entitled "Der Meridian." The speech itself, as an address given in German in Germany to (...) German listeners, was uncanny, but it was Celan's "uncanny" discourse that had earned him this prize in the first place. In his poetry die uncanny takes on a life of its own. In the Meridian speech, dimensions of the uncanny in Büchner's writings are explored for the purpose of shedding light on the artistic impulse, and on poetry in particular. The poetic of Paul Celan is difficult to define from the aggregate of his poems, and hardly transparent in the Meridian speech, either. But it is the concentration on the uncanny in "Meridian" that makes the effort worthwhile. I will use the Meridian speech, examples from German literature, and examples of Celan's poems to unpack this uncanny. "Meridian," like so many words chosen by Celan, is full. Among the things it can mean are highest point, prime of life, circle from pole to pole, and lines numbered according to degrees of longitude. We speak also of a prime meridian, namely Greenwich, having the property of a center, of a locus from which we determine our bearings. Celan the linguist and etymologist knew and considered all meanings. "Uncanny" as a translation of German das Unheimliche is not quite sufficient, but it is a good starting point. German heim is English home, and unheimlich, unheimisch would be unhomely or unhomey—at least in the etymological spirit. When things are not as they are at home, they are unheimlich. Grimm's dictionary tells us that it wasn't until die end of Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 211-224 212Philosophy and Literature the eighteenth century that an emotive quality was added to this formerly cognitive adjective; it began at diis time to be associated with feelings of terror, dread, and anxiety. The Romantic Ludwig Tieck was among the first German writers to treat supernatural, uncanny themes, and as unheimlich became associated with the supernatural, it began to lose its sense of homeliness. Later on, E. T. A. Hoffmann became a master of die uncanny in his numerous weird tales. English "uncanny," which is still the best translation we have for unheimlich, experienced a similar development away from its origins in Scottish, where canny meant quiet, snug, cozy, and pleasant. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that "supernatural, mysterious, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar" were properties ascribed to "uncanny" after 1850. Poe's writings are uncanny in this modern sense. Freud devoted an essay to the uncanny in 1919. He made die point diat das Unheimliche is merely das Heimliche that we have repressed. Ifwe romanticize this idea, dien in the beginning all things were heimlich or homey to us, and it is only after consciousness thatwe become alienated from our home in nature, a condition which makes us feel unheimlich. Celan certainly had strong reason to focus on the earliest meaning of unheimlich, since he experienced homelessness in virtually every conceivable sense of the word, but then, so did his people, dieJews; first in their experience of the Diaspora, then in their "final" eradication during the Holocaust. The people without Boden or land became, by 1945, a people no longer of die earth. Freud linked the concept of das Unheimliche to its origin in heimlich. After exhaustively quoting the lexicologists Sanders and Grimm, Freud concluded that only Schelling had added a new dimension to das Unheimliche: "Uncanny would be everything that is supposed to remain a secret, remain concealed, but has emerged."1 This is credible enough, and fits Freud's repression theory. Freud's statement at the conclusion of the first part of his long essay would have appealed to Celan: "Heimlich is a word according to whose meaning an ambivalence develops until finally it corresponds in any uncanny way with its opposite. Unheimlich is somehow a kind ofheimlich... (shrink)

Commentaire philosophique de l'oeuvre de Celan, à partir d'un commentaire de Celan lui-même : Le poème va d'une traite au-devant de cet autre qu'il suppose à même d'être rejoint. Texte précédé par une réflexion d'Henri Michaux.

Paul Celan’s “Tenebrae” is a scandalous poem: it describes how “unity with the dying Jesus” is achieved by means of the Jewish experience of the concentration camps. In this paper, I provide a new interpretation of “Tenebrae” that breaks from the two traditional ways in which the poem has been viewed—on the one hand, as a Christian poem that suggests that Jesus, insofar as he suffers just like Jewish concentration camp victims do, can provide “hope and redemption for (...) the faithful”, and, on the other hand, as an ironic criticism of this Christian idea. Rather, I suggest that “Tenebrae” is a modification of Christianity: preserving Christian belief about Jesus’s death, it destroys that belief, and does so for the sake of the defense against Christian persecution. Finally, I suggest that this view reveals the peculiar poetic form of “Tenebrae”—what I call “political form.”. (shrink)

W artykule poruszono problem stosunku znanego współczesnego poety, autora Fugi śmierci do tradycji judaistycznej. Celan - Paul Ancel - wywodzi się z kręgów kultury żydowskiej Bukowiny. Jest to dla jego twórczości fakt o fundamentalnym znaczeniu. Poeta przejmuje od Chasydów centralną kategorię, jaką jest "samotność". Wokół tego pojęcia rozwija się jego poetyka.

The need for a comprehensive semiotic understanding of poetic translation is at the heart of the present paper. This task is framed in terms of a multidisciplinary theoretical framework termed semiosic translation that I apply in this article to the translation of Holocaust poetry. This type of poetry is characterized as a distinct sign system that poses a number of challenges to both translators and semioticians. One of the most conspicuous problems is the ineffability of nothingness, which is particularly evident (...) in the poetry of Paul Celan. Building on the notions of abductive inference (Charles S. Peirce) and rule-following (Ludwig Wittgenstein), I introduce a method for the translation of two key poems Schwarze Flocken (‘Black Snowflakes’), corresponding to Celan’s early period, and Weggebeizt (‘Worn down,’ a poem written in 1963). The semiotic method applied shows that the underlying Firstness of Holocaust art (an anti-semiotic sign system) is the driving force behind Celan’s poetry. It is also suggested that iconicity and indexicality are not peripheral semiotic processes but central elements to elucidating how the translation across sign systems takes place. (shrink)

Name is a powerful sign, and name-giving is also calling one intolanguage. Name identifies, summons and subjects. Paul Celan wasfamiliar with all these uses of name and addresses them in his poeticsand poetry. This article will discuss how poetry like Celan’s, which is heavily influenced by so many philosophical readings, could form a critique of naming,on a poetical basis towards philosophical concepts that underline problematics of name-giving in poetic text in particular.

The decisive moment of human development is continually at hand. This is why those movements of revolutionary thought that declare everything preceding to be an irrelevance are correct – because at yet nothing has happened.In his Meridian speech Paul Celan pays homage to a dissident tradition, speaking of himself as one “who grew up with Peter Kropotkin’s and Gustav Landauers’ writings” .1 In his biography John Felstiner briefly mentions Celan’s affiliation, noting that the poet soon relinquished his (...) communist sympathies but stood loyal to the ethoi of socialism and anarchism . This holds true as a point of departure, but a detailed analysis of Celan’s anarchistic impulse is lacking .. (shrink)

El escrito Lo imposible de presenciar ofrece una interpretación del nocturno de Paul Celan Du liegst por parte de un lector que no se presupone destinatario del poema. En consecuencia, el primer momento de la lectura sigue el consejo del propio poeta de alejar la pretensión de creer que el sentido de una palabra consiste en el significado que conocemos de ella. El segundo momento busca las coordenadas del sentido en la puntuación del poema, y su estratificación, en (...) la rima, para penetrar en lo desconocido de la palabra por medio de una música desconocida. El tercer momento habla del presente del poema y de su segunda persona como signos de una poesía que no se hace ilusiones ni tampoco las proporciona. (shrink)

Jacques Julien Pris entre ces manifestations de folie collective, en ces temps de détresse que furent le nazisme et le stalinisme, ébranlé par sa propre condition mentale, le poète Paul Celan veut faire entendre une voix qui s’élève « contre ». Afin de faire sentir cette opposition sans quartier, il la porte au coeur même de la langue allemande et de l’art poétique. Nous allons chercher à entendre la singularité de cette voix dans ses expressions qui nous sont (...) à la fois proches et lointaines, cheminant avec le poète dans les sentiers de ses poèmes, dans une sorte d’accompagnement fraternel et respectueux. (shrink)

Resumen: Siguiendo el hilo conductor de la pregunta sobre cómo se nos puede conceder un acceso a la poesía de Paul Celan, el artículo discute dos enfoques diferentes: por un lado, el de la experiencia hermenéutica de Hans-Georg Gadamer; por otro, el de la experiencia diseminal de Jacques Derrida. La intención de la confrontación de las posiciones opuestas respecto a la poesía de Celan no es ni examinar los supuestos y preposiciones de ambas posiciones ni impugnar la (...) legitimidad de una de ellas desde el punto de vista de la otra, sino establecer y evocar el sentido de la disensión, la significación del discernimiento entre ellas y, así, abrir un campo de posibilidad para ambas, para una hermenéutica y para una deconstrucción hoy; y a través de ello también, y sobre todo, un lugar y un tiempo para el poema de Celan, la posibilidad de escucharlo y oírlo, de convertirse en destinatario de su voz inter-(a)pelativa. Palabras clave “Du liegst”; Lenguaje hermético; Comprensión; H.G. Gadamer; J. Derrida // The Secret of the Encounter. Paul Celan’s Poetry between Hermeneutics and DeconstructionAbstract Following the guiding line of the question how an access to Paul Celan’s po-etry can be granted to us, the article discusses two different approaches: on the one hand, the hermeneutic experience of Hans-Georg Gadamer; on the other hand, the disseminating experience of Jacques Derrida. The intention of the confrontation of the opposing positions regarding Celan’s poetry is nei-ther to examine the suppositions and prepositions of both positions nor to contest the legitimacy of either of them from the viewpoint of the other, but rather to establish and evoke the sense of the dissention, the signification of the discernment between them and, thus, open up the field of possibility for both, for a hermeneutics and for a deconstruction today, and through it also, above all, a place and a time for Celan’s poem, the possibility to listen to it and to hear it, to become the addressee of its inter-(a)pellative voice. Keywords “Du liegst”; Hermetic language; Understanding; H.G. Gadamer; J. Derrida. -/- Este artículo fue traducido al español por Facundo Bey. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida wrote twice, in 1984 in "Shibboleth" and in 2002 for his Paris seminar lectures, about "The Meridian," Paul Celan's Georg Büchner prize speech that forms the most elaborate exposition of the poet's poetics. In both readings Derrida, in one way or the other, deals with the question of time. In "Shibboleth," at stake is the notion of date; in the seminar lectures, the "other's time." Through the Greek, Christian, and Jewish experiences involved, the present article takes (...) the notion of Augenblick as a fil conducteur. (shrink)

Traditionally, comparative literature has focused on the study of influences between texts and it is only recent work that has explored the analogies and affinitiesof historically independent cultures. In this spirit, this paper develops methods for a structured poetic analysis and applies them to a systematic comparison of thepoem “Niǎo Mǐng Jiàn” from the 8th-century Chinese poet Wáng Wéi and the program piece of Paul Celan’s Atemwende: “Du Darfst,” based upon a detailed analysis of their poetics. The analysis (...) and translation reveals how both poems employ words and images as signs without reference, and create dialogical gaps through ambiguity and impersonality. Thus, despite their cultural and historical separation, both poetic texts become “hermetic,” and both poets apply the “hermetic” as a method of inquiry into truth, a truth that cannot be simply pronounced, but needs to be cowitnessed, or heard in silence. It is through this meaningful “silence” that their poetry invites readers and translators all the more perceptively to engage in meaningful conversations. These results entail encouraging perspectives for the question of the limits of translation, especially with regard to east-western studies and for crosscultural comparative literature. Thus, the paper supports Prof. Li Qingben’s and Prof. Guo Jinghua’s claim for a multi-dimensional framework in the study of East-West cultural influences. (shrink)

L�usage, dans un contexte liturgique, du poème le plus connu de Paul Celan, Tenebrae, pose problème. Quel «projet de réalité» se déploie-t-il dans ce texte ? Une interprétation est ici proposée qui prend particulièrement en considération l�univers poétique de l�auteur jusqu�en 1957 ainsi que les nombreuses réminiscences littéraires et spécialement bibliques qui lui permettent d�élaborer un contre-langage. Les étapes préliminaires du poème que nous révèlent les éditions critiques récentes fournissent des pistes précieuses pour affiner le sens de ce (...) poème splendide et mystérieux. (shrink)

Artykuł jest próbą interpretacji dwóch znanych wierszy Paula Celana - Es war Erde in ihnen z tomu Niemandsrose oraz Du liegst z tomu Schneepart za pomocą metody fenomenologicznej.

ABSTRACT“Time-consciousness” constitutes the core of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Extending from a project of reviving the comparative method, we develop Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of time as a method of literary comparison. Three views of time set the stage: the quatrain “Luán’s Fall” by the eighth-century Chinese poet Wang Wei, a stanza from the poem “Etched off‌” by Paul Celan, the quintessential post-war poet in German language, and the haiku “Walking, on and on” by the Japanese itinerant monk and free-verse (...) haiku pioneer Santoka Taneda. What makes these poems relevant is not merely their superficially shared theme of time, but an intrinsic affinity, manifested in different poetic “time-objects”, to the very notion of time-consciousness. Through poetic analysis in the context of Husserl’s philosophy of time-consciousness, these poetic experiences, embodied in a phenomenological concept of “walking,” emphasize time as being. (shrink)

This article intervenes in the project of theorizing the politics of reconciliation and transitional justice with the suggestion that (a) more attention be paid to subjective experiences and discursive sensitivities affected/shaped by the trauma of historical violence and injustice, and that (b) the constitutive as well as potentially subversive working of these experiences and sensitivities be recognized. It focuses specifically on Paul Celan (1920?1970), a Jewish-Romanian-German poet and Holocaust survivor, proposing a reading of his work that connects aspects (...) of the poetic, the traumatic and the peripheral that are relevant to political theories of reconciliation and justice. Celan's work is shown to problematize the dominant understandings of communal temporality that are encoded in the reconciliatory transitional project. This temporality approximates a linear and progressive motion: the transitional community (a) leaves behind the legacies of the ?violent past? and (b) imagines (and moves towards) its future as an emancipative movement positioned beyond the constraints of the historical violence and injustice. In Celan's work, however, the traumatized subject's experience of temporality is understood metaphorically as an impossible passage. In contrast to the linear and progressive unfolding of the collective imaginary, the movement within a passage is repetitive, elliptical and, quite literally, aporetic (impassible). There is no guarantee of a successful passing through; instead, within the passage, Celan's traumatic and poetic subject encounters the abysmal. This basic contrast suggests that a critical theory of reconciliation should not only account for the fragility of human life in relation to historical violence, but respond to the constant proximity of violence within the reconciliatory project itself. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. In this short and accessible book, he turns to a topic at the heart of much of his work: What is translation and why is it so important? Reminding us that The Bible, the Koran, the Torah and the works of the great philosophers are often only ever read in translation, Ricoeur reminds us that translation not only spreads knowledge but can change its very meaning. In (...) spite of these risk, he argues that in a climate of ethnic and religious conflict, the art and ethics of translation are invaluable. Drawing on interesting examples such as the translation of early Greek philosophy during the Renaissance, the poetry of Paul Celan and the work of Hannah Arendt, he reflects not only on the challenges of translating one language into another but how one community speaks to another. Throughout, Ricoeur shows how to move through life is to navigate a world that requires translation itself. Paul Ricoeur died in 2005. He was one of the great contemporary French philosophers and a leading figure in hermeneutics, psychoanalytic thought, literary theory and religion. His many books include Freud and Philosophy and Time and Narrative. (shrink)

I argue from a hermeneutic point of view that formal elements of poetry can only be identified because poetry is based on both the phenomenon and the conception of poetry, both of which precede the attempt to identify formal elements as the defining moment of poetry. Furthermore, I argue with Gadamer that poetry is based on a rupture with and an epoche of our non-poetic use of language in such a way that it liberates “fixed” universal aspects of everyday language, (...) and that through establishing itself in a new, self-referential and monologue unity, it individualizes speech . From the hermeneutic position, poetry is a form of speaking rather than a “fixed” object. As such, I will try to make sense of what Paul Celan said in his famous “Meridian” speech: namely, that the poem is “actualized language, set free under the sign of a radical individuation, which at the same time stays mindful of the limits drawn by language, the possibilities opened by language.”. (shrink)

It is necessary to specify in which sense the concept "Silence" is to be used in Celan's poetry. If on one hand it can be said that his Lyric is an answer to Adorno's impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, and that it arose in the frame of the annihilation of war and Nazism that also devastated language , on the other hand, it is in a dialectical way that this allusion to Silence, neither positively nor factically determinable, could be (...) explored, according to the opposing tension lines that go across Celan's Lyric.Es necesario precisar en qué sentido se habla de silencio en la obra de Celan. Si por un lado puede decirse que su lírica es una réplica a la imposibilidad de la poesía después de Auschwitz y que se alza en el marco de la aniquilación de la guerra y el nazismo que arrasó también al lenguaje , es de modo dialéctico como esta alusión al silencio, nunca positiva y fácticamente determinable, puede ser explorada, según las líneas de tensión contrapuestas que atraviesan la lírica de Celan. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Holocaust Visions: Surrealism and Existentialism in the Poetry of Paul CelanVéronique M. FótiHolocaust Visions: Surrealism and Existentialism in the Poetry of Paul Celan, by Clarise Samuels; x & 134 pp. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1993, $53.50.Samuels’s thesis is that Celan’s poetic work in its entirety can and should be understood as a comprehensive and unified philosophical system, in which each poem is assigned (...) its place. This system is not outlined in terms of its organizing principles, but rather in its topography of three superimposed layers. The top layer (which an empiricist would consider foundational) mirrors an “objective” reality and is informed by finehoned observation, whereas the middle layer constitutes an “ideological program” that “attempts to establish a socio-political value system” (p. 2), while the supporting bottom layer offers an “existentialist epistemology.”Despite her stress on systematicity (obsolete since Hegel), Samuels identifies surrealism (particularly the strand deriving from Breton) and existentialism as the formative influences on Celan’s poetics; and she carefully explores the interrelations of these movements of thought with the heritage of French symbolism, and with Dadaism and Marxism. She does not, however, use guiding concepts, such as “epistemology” or “ideology,” in any precise philosophical sense. By “epistemology” she seems to mean a fundamental concern for reality and truth, coupled with the belief that truth is accessible beyond [End Page 382] social constructions of meaning, whereas “ideology” is used in the various senses of revolutionary program, utopian vision, structure of ideas, or even just ideation (as in “On the ideological level, the Holocaust fulfills the surrealist intention of entering the individual’s subconscious,” p. 108).On the basis of her analyses of surrealist and existentialist thought, Samuels examines Celan’s poetry and poetics with a view to his search for an “alter reality” that would transcend, but not negate, the “Holocaust universe.” She first researches Celan’s syntactic structures, such as the “genitive phrase,” the elliptical sentence, or the fragmentation (and recombination) of words, to move on to a discussion of his tropes, which she arranges broadly into “representations of space, time, persons, and actions” (p. 39). Her discussion of Celan’s spatial tropes, particularly of his devastated imaginary landscapes and places of loss (unfortunately “space” and “place” are not distinguished), is especially compelling. It is further enriched, in the final chapter, which seeks to elucidate Celan’s notion of utopia and to locate utopia in art, by reference to the visual work of Tanguy, Ernst, and Magritte.The book as a whole is meticulously researched and includes extensive discussions of the secondary literature, with a slant toward Germanistik rather than philosophy, and with perhaps a particular debt to Marlies Janz. Its weakness is, in a way, tied to its strength: in her discussions of philosophical concepts and movements, Samuels seems to rely largely on (somewhat dated) secondary literature, so that her philosophical understanding is frequently a confused amalgam. For instance, she links Sartre’s in-itself to the Kantian noumenon (p. 20) and goes on to locate it, not only in the “universe,” but also “at the core of the human self,” so that the for-itself contrasts with it as a “superficial” construction, a sort of artifact that needs to be “controlled.” She assimilates the nihilating character of Sartrean consciousness to a “principle of nihilism” that supposedly characterizes existentialism, while nevertheless interpreting Sartre’s humanism as a turn toward “the eternal aspect” of mankind. Heidegger is cast as an existentialist in search of a literalized authenticity, while his critique of Sartrean humanism is simply ignored.In treating Celan’s poetry as systematically coherent and as, in some sense, ideological, Samuels not only disregards the striking stylistic changes that characterize its various phases, but she also does not try to unravel its intricate textual fabric of allusions (notably to Hölderlin and Trakl), to analyze textual structures such as the displaced re-inscription of the date (notably Büchner’s Jänner), or to respond to its unleashing of the semantic energies that lie latent beneath the surface of ordinary language. Sometimes she overlooks her own inchoate interpretive insights, as in her two discussions of parts of... (shrink)

Hans-George Gadamer,in Who am I and who are you? Commentary to Cristal de aliento of PaulCelan, extracts a fundamental hermeneutical principle: an interpretation iscorrect just when it is capable to dissapear at the end because it haspenetrated the whole in the new experience of the poem. This make ..