{"id":13097,"date":"2015-04-01T07:40:59","date_gmt":"2015-04-01T11:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13097"},"modified":"2015-04-01T07:50:04","modified_gmt":"2015-04-01T11:50:04","slug":"paul-celan-and-the-meaning-of-language-an-interview-with-pierre-joris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/paul-celan-and-the-meaning-of-language-an-interview-with-pierre-joris\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Celan and the Meaning of Language \u2014 An Interview with Pierre Joris"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/td>\n<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
\n

Above right:<\/span> Paul Celan, passport photo<\/span>
\nBreathturn into Timestead:
\nThe Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan<\/b>
\nA Bilingual Edition Translated and with Commentary by Pierre Joris
\n<\/small><\/span><\/big><\/span>Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 736 pages,ISBN-10: 0374125988<\/span><\/small><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Doug Valentine with Pierre Joris <\/b><\/span><\/div>\n
\n

Paul Celan and the Meaning of Language
\nAn Interview with Pierre Joris<\/span><\/b><\/center><\/p>\n
\n

 <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

There is great pleasure to be found in Paul Celan\u2019s poetry. His dazzling neologisms (\u201cwordwall\u201d, \u201csmokethin\u201d, \u201cicethorn\u201d) and surreal imagery are testaments to how powerful, beautiful and intriguing imagination can be. But his poetry is difficult to understand, its emotional content buried, it seems, beneath the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust…..<\/span><\/p>\n

_________________________<\/b>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Doug<\/b><\/span> <\/span>\u2013 Before we get to Breathturn<\/b>, would you please tell me what you think are the core conceptual and emotional components of Celan\u2019s poetry? You\u2019ve spoken of his relationship with the German language; the loss of his mother; his biting sarcasm; and his \u201coptimistic anarcho-socialist strain.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Pierre<\/span><\/b> \u2013 There can be little doubt that the core emotional experience for Celan was the loss of his parents, and especially the mother, in forced labor camps. Or, in a wider sense, he was shaped by those historical events that defined the generation(s) of Jewish (and non-Jewish) people who lived through the Nazi period. But it is important to note a very major difference between him and many, if not most, other survivors who were or became writers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As I wrote elsewhere, \u201cdespite the presence throughout the work (or better maybe below the work) of the events of the Nazi years, especially the murder of his mother, there is a strong refusal in Celan to let his writing become simply a repository for a narrative of the Shoah, in a profound contrast to most Holocaust writers, a major part of whose endeavor has been to dwell again and again on the past in order to chronicle with as much accuracy as it they could muster the events of their lives during those fateful years (Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi come to mind but also poets like Abba Kovener or Abraham Sutzkever). Not only did Celan not write such an autobiographical prosopopoeia, but\u00a0 he refused steadfastly to speak in public or private about the events connected with the Shoah. Symptomatic for this reticence is the following biographical comment from 1949: \u201cWith the exception of a one year stay in France, I, for all practical purposes, never left my native city prior to 1941. I don’t need to relate what the life of a Jew was like during the war years.\u201d This decision not to dwell on those years and the horrors they gave birth to \u2014\u00a0 no matter the shadow they throw on the rest of his life \u2014 informs the stance of his writing for the next quarter-century. One way to see you this is to examine the rewriting of the poem \u201cDeathfuge\u201d in the poem \u201cStretto\u201d \u2014 which I did in some detail in the introduction to my 2005 bookPaul Celan: Selections (University of California Press)<\/b><\/span>.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

continued here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Above right: Paul Celan, passport photo Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan A Bilingual Edition Translated and with Commentary by Pierre Joris Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 736 pages,ISBN-10: 0374125988  ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,56,83,90,91,103],"tags":[1645,1730,601],"class_list":["post-13097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-launch-books","category-interview","category-paul-celan","category-poetics","category-poetry","category-translation","tag-doug-valentine","tag-paul-celan","tag-pierre-joris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13097"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13102,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13097\/revisions\/13102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}