{"id":5338,"date":"2010-11-23T06:41:44","date_gmt":"2010-11-23T10:41:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=5338"},"modified":"2010-11-23T07:40:03","modified_gmt":"2010-11-23T11:40:03","slug":"paul-celan-90","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/paul-celan-90\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Celan @ 90"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Today we would celebrate \u2014 we do celebrate \u2014 Paul Celan<\/strong>‘s 90th birthday. Below, some excerpts from my forthcoming translation<\/a> of the scholarly edition of The Meridian<\/strong>, specifically from the sections called “Breath” and “Breathturn.” These section titles are not Celan’s own but those of the editors; the texts come from Celan’s various notebooks and jottings spanning the months during which he composed his seminal essay “The Meridian”. Most of these thoughts and ideas ( at times indicated by “-i-” in Celan’s handwriting) did not make it \u2014 or at least not in this form \u2014 into the final essay.<\/p>\n

\n

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The poem comes into being through intercourse with something that remains invisible to us: through intercourse with language.<\/p>\n

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a meeting with language is a meeting with the invisible<\/p>\n

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The poem is monotone\/monotonic<\/p>\n

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The lightness (i.e. the floating away) of many a poem recalls \u2014 and that is, like high art a dream of great magic \u2014 the state of levitation. \u201cWith it I saw the power of heaviness end.\u201d He who attains this state as language and through language\u2014through = as poem\u2014 will realize\u2014 this dream and what\u2019s great in it lives on!\u2014, will realize art\u2014I am quoting a saying by A. Sch\u00f6nberg, and quote it according to T. Adorno\u2014\u2018Art doesn\u2019t come from being able to, it comes from having to.’ You see, there is also this kind of etymology: not through what has been derived from the imperceptible root do we have the true and the ground; we become aware of it through the root-distant branch (the branch that stands into time),the branch driven into time by the root.<\/p>\n

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Re metaphor, image etc:<\/p>\n

The pictorial is by no means something visual; it is, like everything else connected with language, a mental phenomenon. (Language: is that not an encounter with the invisible) It is, even in what is furthest from the voice, a question of the accent; in the poem the perception of its sound-pattern also belongs to the perceived image. (By the breath-steads in which it stands, you recognize it, by the crest-times) That is by no means the same as this or that cheap impressionistic tone-painting, timbre etc. It is, here too, a manifestation of language, a speechart that has to be heard in the written, i.e. the silent (The language-grille, which is also the speechgrille, makes this visible.)<\/p>\n

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The poem estranges. It estranges by its existence, by the mode of its existence, it stands opposite and against one, voiceful and voiceless simultaneously, as language, as language setting itself free, as language in statu nascendi<\/em>\u2014as Val\u00e9ry once said\u2026<\/p>\n

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\u2018What\u2019s on the lung, put on the tongue,\u2019 my mother used to say. Which has to do with breath. One should finally learn how to also read this breath, this breath-unit in the poem; in the cola meaning is often more truthfully joined and fugued than in the rhyme; shape of the poem: that is presence of the single, breathing one.\u2014<\/p>\n

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Breath:
\nThe poem remains, if you allow me a little critical jargon, pneumatically touchable.<\/p>\n

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here, on breathroutes, the poem moves<\/p>\n

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\u2022Voice\u2014direction (wherefrom <\u2014 ensouling
\n\u2195\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 whereto \u2014> death, God)
\nTimbre<\/p>\n

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Poems are not accumulations and articulations of \u201cword material;\u201d they are the actualizing of something immaterial, language-emanations carried through life-hours, tangible and mortal like us. These hours are, especially in the poem, our hours\u2014this is one of them\u2014; hours have no phenotype; we still write for our life.<\/p>\n

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… and the eternal, that is at the same time the mortal, kept safe in the word and in the word\u2019s finitude.<\/p>\n

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The poem is the detour from you to you; it is the route. It is also the route of language to itself, its becoming visible and mortal: therewith the poem becomes the raison d\u2019\u00eatre of language.<\/p>\n

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The poem as that which literally speaks-itself-to-death.<\/p>\n

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The poem: the trace of our breath in language
\n-i- the aura (Hauch) of our mortality, with which a language fragment goes over into nothingness and that vacancy thus arises, in which which gives form to the new<\/p>\n

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To write poems: a beginning without illusion.<\/p>\n

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The poet as person is given to the poem as its share\u2014<\/p>\n

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In the singular the common speaks.\u2014<\/p>\n

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The poem: a self-realization of language through radical individuation, i.e. the single, unrepeatable speaking of an individual.<\/p>\n

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All that has been transmitted is only there once, as voice; its reappearance, its respective present is a becoming-voiced of what has stepped back and is stored in the voiceless; decisive for its new appearance is its new voice; problems of style, are motives; themes etc. are co-extensive, not co-essential with poetry. (of the same origin)<\/p>\n

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Vocabulary etc.: Poems supposedly consisting of words\u2014no, n\u2019en d\u00e9plaise \u00e0 Mallarm\u00e9: The poem is, also in terms of its semantic meaning, the place of the singular, the irreversible; it is, to say it differently, the cemetery of all synonymics. (it resides beyond all synonymics<\/p>\n

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Breath = interval<\/p>\n

These intervals cannot be replaced with (human) empty space and time-segments!<\/p>\n

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Poems are narrows: you have to go through here with your life\u2014<\/p>\n

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\u2022 fateful\u2014a highly contestable word, and yet, allow me, to use it here as an auxiliary word: one has to live according to one\u2019s poems, if they are to remain true; and concerning this or that poem one has to ask oneself if one hadn\u2019t better left it unwritten. Even irreality has something of that imperative: Here you, life, have to go through.\u2014<\/p>\n

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To dress with attributes
\nNakedness
\nUndressing
\n\u2798
\nPoems: Equipment for a journey\u2014the decisive one, the single one, which does not know its goal, but its whereto\u2014<\/p>\n

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Distance: I mean distance, in no way do I mean future<\/p>\n

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… Bu\u0308chner\u2019s last words on his deathbed, Lenz\u2019s words (Moscow) have not come down to us\u2014it is the return into the just still voiced, as in Woyzeck\u2014it is language as involution, the unfolding of meaning in the one, word-estranged syllable\u2014: it is the \u2018rootsyllable,\u2019 recognizable in the death rattled stuttering, the language as what has returned into the germ \u2014 the meaning carrier is the mortal mouth, whose lips won\u2019t round themselves. Muta cum liquida<\/em>,\u2014and vowel-buttressed, the rhyme-sound as self-sound.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today we would celebrate \u2014 we do celebrate \u2014 Paul Celan‘s 90th birthday. Below, some excerpts from my forthcoming translation of the scholarly edition of The Meridian, specifically from the sections called “Breath” and...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5338","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=5338"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5349,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5338\/revisions\/5349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}