Paul Celan…
… born today, 23 November, 93 years ago, i.e. in 1920. Left in 1970; is stilled missed. But we have the work. Here is one of the first poems of his I translated back in 1968, the year after Atemwende / Breathturn, the volume from which it is taken, came out:
Eroded by
the beamwind of your speech
the gaudy chatter of the pseudo-
experienced — the hundred-
tongued perjury-
poem, the noem.
Evorsion-
ed,
free
the path through the men-
shaped snow,
the penitent’s snow, to
the hospitable
glacier-parlors and -tables.
Deep
in the timecrevasse
in the
honeycomb-ice
waits, a breathcrystal,
your unalterable
testimony.
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“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
This is a wonderful translation.
Dear Pierre,
I have a question about your translation: I’m curious why some of the compounds are hyphenated and some are not. Obviously, the ones with line breaks in them need to be hyphenated, and I think I understand why you use hyphens with “glacier-parlors and -tables” (so as to mark the double compounding). But why a hyphen in “honeycomb-ice” but not in “breath crystal”?
Some of those are decisions re legibility — English compounds are more difficult to read than German ones — so at times —as in the example you cite — I make the decision to hyphenate. Whenever I feel the compound does not harm the reading of the poem, I’ll use it.
Thanks, Pierre, for the explanation! Hope you have a good Celan session with Al F. this evening. (Or was it last night?)