Read Online Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan - Free Book Online

knowledge I have been able to gather in English. My first aim has not been to create elegant, easily readable, and accessible American versions of these German (under erasure) poems. The aim has been to get as much of the complexity and multiperspectivity of Celan’s work into American English as possible, and if elegant moments or stretches of claritas occur, all the better. Any translation that makes a poem sound more accessible than (or even as accessible as) it is in the original will be flawed. I have doubtlessly not achieved what Hölderlin did with his translations from the Greek—to write Greek in German, and thus to transform the German, though that must remain the aim of any translator, just as it is the aim of any poet to transform his or her language.
    Paul Celan himself spoke to the difficulties in his work and suggested that they were inherent to a poetry that dealt with experiencing the actual world: “Imagination and experience, experience and imagination make me think, in view of the darkness of the poem today, of a darkness of the poem qua poem, a constitutive, thus a congenital darkness. In other words: the poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.” 32 But such darkness is not hermeticism, which would be willed obscurity for the sake of obscurity; it corresponds to the real darkness that surrounds us and that is inside us as much as it is inside the outside world. The poem thus does not try to throw some “light” (or fake “light-ness”) on either inside or outside worlds. This darkness should not, however, discourage us, but should remind us to read Celan with negative capability, that is, with what Keats defined as the needed ability to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
    For me as translator, and, I believe, for anyone coming to his work, Celan’s own suggestion as to how to read the work is still the best: “Lesen sie! Immerzu nur lesen, das Verständnis kommt von selbst.” (Just read and keep on reading! Understanding will come by itself.)
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    There are too many who have contributed in one way or another to this work over the past forty-five years for me to be able to acknowledge them all here individually. May they all be thanked, because without them this project would never have come to fruition—or with a much different and no doubt poorer result. Of course, it is I who am responsible for any and all remaining errors.

I
    Y OU MAY confidently
    serve me snow:
    as often as shoulder to shoulder
    with the mulberry tree I strode through summer,
    its youngest leaf
    shrieked.
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    B Y THE UNDREAMT etched,
    the sleeplessly wandered-through breadland
    casts up the life mountain.
    From its crumb
    you knead anew our names,
    which I, an eye
    similar
    to yours on each finger,
    probe for
    a place, through which I
    can wake myself toward you,
    the bright
    hungercandle in mouth.
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    I NTO THE FURROWS
    of the heavenscoin in the doorcrack
    you press the word
    from which I rolled,
    when I with trembling fists
    the roof over us
    dismantled, slate for slate,
    syllable for syllable, for the copper-
    glimmer of the begging-
    cup’s sake up
    there.
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    I N THE RIVERS north of the future
    I cast the net, which you
    hesitantly weight
    with shadows stones
    wrote.
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    B EFORE YOUR LATE FACE ,
    a loner
    wandering between
    nights that change me too,
    something came to stand,
    which was with us once already, un-
    touched by thoughts.
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    D OWN MELANCHOLY’S RAPIDS
    past the blank
    woundmirror:
    There the forty
    stripped lifetrees are rafted.
    Single counter-
    swimmer, you
    count them, touch them
    all.
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    T HE NUMBERS , in league
    with the images’