Paul Celan, his birthday
Paul Celan’s 92nd birthday was yesterday — he was born 23 November 1920. I waited out Black Friday to post on it. So, to celebrate the man, here, in my translation, a poem, the last one in the final posthumous volume Zeitgehöft / Timestead:
Vinegrowers dig up dig
under the darkhoured watch,
depth for depth,you read,
the invisible
one commands the wind
to stay in bounds,you read,
the Open Ones carry
the stone behind the eye,
it recognizes you,on a Sabbath.
* * *
Rebleute graben
die dunkelstündige Uhr um,
Tiefe um Tiefe,du liest,
es fordert
der Unsichtbare den Wind
in die Schranken,du liest,
die Offenen tragen
den Stein hinterm Aug,
der erkennt dich,am Sabbath.
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Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000-2024
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“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
Happy belated and posthumous Birthday greetings to Paul Celan. One hopes the commanded wind is always at his back.
I’m curious as to why you have “dig up dig” when “graben” appears only once. In the third stanza, I’m also wonder why you chose to make “the invisible / one” the subject of the sentence, acting on the wind, while in the German “der Unsichtbare” is the object of the sentence.
François, hi: 1) actually it should be read as “dig up dig / under…” which is my attempt to translate the “Um” of umgraben. maybe too much or too heavy handed.
2) grammatically the German construction is complex, but the subject is “der Unsichtbare” i.e. the meaning is “der Unsichtbare fordert den Wind in die Schranken” (“den Wind” is in the accusative, i.e. is the object)
Thanks, Pierre. It makes sense now.