Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

“Almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945,” asserts George Steiner.

     Of course everyone seriously interested in poetry has to know something of Celan’s tortured, gnomic struggles with his grief and his deconstruction of the German language. But this is late work, when Celan - feeling guilty for his survival of his parents’ death in the camps, mourning his post-war dead child, with his wife no longer able to live with him - was understandably paranoid, his suicide at fifty imminent, and his best work (in the classic translation by Michael Hamburger) behind him.

     The poems are short: five words or so per line, with very few lines, and important premises for understanding are omitted. Celan was a Romanian German-speaking Jew with a French passport and a Christian wife, living in Paris. He “uses language as if he were always translating” (Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost, Princeton), or as if he were creating etymological crossword clues. The conundra and word-play create both the subtext and the text, though they can be as feeble as this:

THE TRACK OF A BITE, in Nowhere
This too
you must fight
from here on.

     One of the most accessible poems is ‘Powers, Dominions’:

Behind, in the bamboo:
barking leprosy, symphonic.

Vincent’s gifted
ear
has arrived.

     The conundrum is: what has this to do with angels, and just those particular orders? The “mad” connotation of “barking” is problematic. “Bellen” does mean “to bark”, but also “to boom”, “to crash”. Van Gogh’s cut ear would seem mad to the lepers, who would want to keep their ears, but lepers are not mad, nor presumably barking like dogs over the flesh. I’d have thought some word for pain, even “shrieking”, would be better, but I don’t know German. Clearly, one can speculate about what the situation symbolizes, but it seems to me an unpleasant poem.

     The poems are likely to appeal to those with a taste for three-dimensional crossword puzzles - and of course academics, as the poems give them something to do. Players will want to consult the German, which is welcomely present. I usually had to go to the German to understand the English. The German was certainly more musical and often less obscure. And what would you make of this translation?

SIGNAL, by harnstem and hertstem
occulted not, terrestrial,
the midnight archer hunts
by day the song of twelve through
marrow of treason and attaint.

What on earth is “harnstem” or “hertstem”? “Hirnstamm” in German is simply the ordinary word for “brainstorm”. The original - starting “SICHTBAR, bei Hirnstamm und Herzstamm, /unverdunkelt...” - is, more or less literally:

“VISIBLE, by brainstorm and heartstorm,
undarkened, terrestrial,
the midnight rifleman hunts,
at morning, the song of the twelve
through the core of betrayal and decay.”

The literal translation is at least intelligible, assuming the “song of the twelve” is the apostles (though it might be the bells of noon, the zodiac, the months, or whatever.) But I shouldn’t call it a great poem.

     Of course, the problems of translation are formidable. Something has to be sacrificed - and it’s often good English, as in Ann Carson’s versions too - though Celan exploits German idiom and Hamburger writes good English. The first line in the book shows the challenge: “Augenblicke, wessen Winke...” “Augenblick” is the ordinary word for “moment” but in origin means “eye-glance”. “Wink” means “sign, signal” but inevitably suggests the English “wink”. Fairley translates “Instants whose eyewink...”, which is not bad. One is tempted to invent one’s own versions - “Twinklings of an eye that signal...” (misleading though other connotations of the Biblical “twinkling” is), and the game is fun. It takes Fairely more than two pages of introduction to dismember the German, explicate and speculatively expand what is surely a very slight, obscure thirteenword poem. And how do you deal with his academese?

“The pursuit of analogy which is urged by,
and endeavours to constellate, the poem’s
grammatically discontinuous symmetries, is
returned to a residual literalism which, in the
first place, grounds this speculation.”

(He needs a good dose of Graves and Orwell, and an editor.)

     Celan’s hostility to the German language, understandable though it is, has led him to a despair about poetry, even a hostility to it. He feels he can only stammer. The dignity of his work comes from its grief, its art from the foregrounding of language, from riddling, and some musicality. But is this enough? It’s an illusion to think that Celan’s kind of poetry is difficult to write. The grief of the holocaust can make one overestimate the art, and it would be difficult to justify Steiner’s claim on the basis of the present volume, at least. I hope the imitators, who are always waiting, won’t latch on to Celan, as I think this would be a disastrous direction for poetry. Obscurity can only be justified by inherent complexity - and the surface of the best “obscure” poems, like The Waste Land, is enchanting. Economy is one thing, and a valuable one, but the factitious creation of unclarity is an evil.

     There is a cultural trend implying that twentieth-century history has nullified poetry, made it supererogatory. (Theodor Adorno, for instance; “The dimensions of poetry have shrunk... If poetry wants to survive it must abandon itself without reservation to the process of disillusionment that has devoured the traditional concept of the poetic.”) Such defeatism is likely to be self-fulfilling. Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Hughes are just three names that show how poetry, with its long history, can convey the ultimate desolations, and do so with clarity and sanity.