Celan, Kafka & the Glottal Stop

I just read an essay by Matthew Landis on the connection of certain themes in Paul Celan’s poetry & Jacques Derrida’s writings, especially those of the trace, the breach, the break. A fascinating essay indeed, the reading of which I recommend — it’s here. I would like, however, to suggest that when thinking through Celan (or any other foreign-language poet) via his poems it is essential to rely not only on one translation & its accompanying introduction, but to go to the original and quote it too, to allow for a more comparative approach that cannot but enhance the reading and interpretation of the poems. A shame in this case, because Landis’ reading is otherwise very convincing.

But when, for example, Landis speaks of the poem FRANKFURT, SEPTEMBER, he quotes the last stanza in the Popov/McHugh translation:

The glottal stop is breaking
into song.

This allows for the beginning of an interesting meditation on the effect of the glottal stop, based on the line break after “breaking” — a reading made possible by performing it on the translation. Celan’s original reads:

Der Kehlkopfverschlußlaut
singt.

in my — certainly more literal — translation:

The glottal stop
sings.

Landis’ reading may possibly be teased from Celan’s own words, though at least to my ear, the German “laut” and “singt” suggest the transformation of the — silent, withheld — sound of the glottal stop into song over what is a smooth line-“break” that does not flaunt its “breaking” quality here. It may even be read as the rather joyous constat that even the sound of such a heavy long German word as “Kehlkopfverschlusslaut” does end up as song, while the heavy-handed Popov/McHugh translation foregrounds something that is certainly not explicit in Celan’s own verse, if intended at all.

A bit further in the essay, Landis goes for the throat, I mean, the importance of the glottal stop, by trying to connect that linguistic instance to the life of the poet. He writes:

Celan’s life story is marked by one particularly tragic example which places the metonymic device of the “glottal stop” in a particular perspective. While a boy he was sent to a work camp and his family (Romanian Jews living in Germany) were sent to Auschwitz. While in Auschwitz, Celan’s mother died from a wound to the throat. The singularity of one’s death, that death is one’s “ownmost possibility” as Heidegger repeatedly claims in Being and Time is marked by the wound which erased the voice of Celan’s mother.

[Note: Celan and his parents did not live in Germany, but in Czernowitz, then part of Rumania, today part of the Ukraine. They were not sent to Auschwitz, but to work camps along the Bug river, on the Romanian/Ukrainian border].

Landis gets his information via the Popov/McHugh’s introduction where they center on that glottal stop (also the title of their book) by connecting it to the manner in which Celan’s mother is supposed to have died: “from a wound in the throat.” It makes for a nice & tidy connection, but in 40 years of reading Celan and the vast Sekundärliteratur on his work, I have never come across this bit of information. From all we actually know (check, among many others, Israel Chalfen’s biography of the young Celan, or the appendix to the Celan/Celan-Lestrange correspondance, or Walter Emmerich’s book), she died by the traditional Nazi execution technique: the “Genickschuss” — or shot in the nape of the neck or back of the head, i.e. a bullet from behind (even the Nazis didn’t much care to look their victims in the face), and not from the front, as “a wound in the throat” (and thus possibly in the “Kehlkopf”) wants us to believe. An unnecessary little bit of stretching the known facts to prove the theory and justify the importance of the title seems to be going on in that intro.

Not that Landis’ meditation on the glottal stop itself isn’t valuable and accurate, and important in both Celan and Derrida. It is. And his considerations of breach and interruption are much to the point — it’s just a shame that it relies for his information on one flawed translation and that book’s introduction, at a time when more than 6000 pieces of Celan Sekundärliteratur are available.

Another little thing: the Popov/McHugh translation also heavy-handedly mistranslates a stanza by adding a line so as to point to what Celan leaves elegantly & tightly implicit yet visible, namely the Kafka reference in that poem. In Celan’s German:

Die Simili-
Dohle
frühstückt.

(My translation:

The imitation
jackdaw
breakfasts.)

in theirs:

The pseudo-jackdaw
(cough-caw’s double)
is breakfasting.

Indeed the “Dohle,” our jackdaw, in Czech is “kavka” and Celan wanted that reference to a writer who was very important to him, but I don’t think translators should explain such references by adding a line of their own making that is simply not in the poem. Kafka too was conscious of the derivation of his name from that bird, and his father had the bird inserted into the family crest. Kafka is present in Celan’s work in many other places & the Dohle-reference is thus visible for any careful reader of those poems. For any such reader of Celan & Kafka the poem contains other Kafka references, such as the word “frühstückt” – breakfast — which links it to a line in K’s story “The Hunger Artist,” and the fact that Kafka died from a “Kehlkopftuberkulose.”

In the manuscripts of the Celan poem, the title was given as “Frankfurt, ע, September” and alternatively as “Frankfurt, Ayin, September” — i.e. it included the glottal stop in the title readable as referring to the interruption / breach / letter, thus the glottal stop, and possibly to what is also in our alphabet often pronounced as a sort of glottal stop, i.e. the initial “K” of Kafka’s name. (cf. the commentaries to this poem in the “Gesamtausgabe in einem Band” Paul Celan: Die Gedichte, edited by Barbara Wiedemann — Suhrkamp 2003).

It is, finally my contention, that an over-psychologizing reading of Celan will almost always get to a kind of existential despair that is indeed present in Celan, but often misses the light-side of that darkness: Celan’s desire & will (not only for witnessing) but for the creation of an art that speaks of possibilities of openness, of light, of air to breathe, despite all. There can be song (the poem’s last statement) despite death, here the death referenced is Kafka’s by tuberculosis of the throat — no need in this case to bring in Celan’s mother’s, a death present only in the sense that his whole life is lived under that shadow, with no need for it to be fore grounded by the poet in each & every poem.

Here, the poem’s end-word says that there can be singing, despite death and even in or despite of the weird surroundings of the Frankfurt
book fair (the setting of the poem), because (Kafka’s) words have survived, are still singing. It is, I believe, a more optimistic poem than psychologizing interpretations (and/or the Freud & his cockchafer dream in the poem) makes it out to be. As Celan demands in the poem: “For the last / time psycho-/ logy.” Or as Celan says in another poem: “es sind / noch Lieder zu singen jenseits / der Menschen” in my translation: “There still / are songs to sing beyond / mankind.” Trace-songs, maybe, but songs.

Ps. Permit me to reproduce the poem discussed above — its is the opening poem of the volume Fadensonnen / Threadsuns in its entirety, in both the original and in my translation:

FRANKFURT, SEPTEMBER

Blinde, licht-
bärtige Stellwand.
Ein Maikäfertraum
leuchtet sie aus.

Dahinter, klagegerastert,
tut sich Freud’s Stirn auf,

die draußen
hartgeschwiegene Träne
schießt an mit dem Satz:
“Zum letzten-
mal Psycho-
logie.”

Die Simili-
Dohle
frühstückt.

Der Kehlkopfverschlußlaut
singt.

FRANKFURT, SEPTEMBER

Blind, light-
bearded partition.
A cockchaferdream
floodlights it.

Behind it, complaint-rastered,
Freud’s forehead opens up,

the tear, hard-
silenced outside,
links on with the sentence:
“For the last
time psycho-
logy.”

The imitation
jackdaw
breakfasts.

The glottal stop
sings.