Paul Celan And The Future of the Poem
Manash Bhattacharjee The name “Paul Celan” in the title refers to not only Paul Celan the poet but also Paul Celan who talks about poetry. Celan is in dialogue with his craft; with others in his craft, as well as in dialogue with those he feels illuminate the possibilities and problems of his craft, that is, poetry. So, Paul Celan in the title is a poet who asks questions about poetry, including the fundamental question: What is poetry? The word “future” does not mean an unspecified, free idea of a future out there, future as such, but a specific moment or moments in future time that have a correspondence with the past, the future of a past, a past’s future, that creates a new reference point across time. But because this future is the future of the “poem”, a solitary product of time, the idea of the future here is not to be imagined in collective terms. Nor is this future a private one, because a poem is always intended for a reader. A poem, strictly belonging to neither the individual nor the collective, is always in relation with the world. That relation is of course political and tends towards the ethical. The conjunction “and” in the title means the future of the poem is not reducible to the name Paul Celan but is seen in conjunction with the poet’s idea of the poem’s future. I will probe into Celan’s reflections on poetry by looking at his famous speech on 22 October, 1960, The Meridian, which he delivered on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize. His Rumanian birth – marking him a foreigner – his narrowly escaping a Nazi labour camp sixteen years before the announcement of this prize, and his imbuing his German mother tongue with Hebrew and Yiddish influences that didn’t endear him to the German literary establishment, created, according to Ger Killeen, “an air of improbability” around Celan being awarded the prize. Despite being aware of these incongruities, Celan decided to brave what he revealed to a friend as “a dark summer.” In his acceptance speech, Celan delved into German dramatist Büchner’s works to chart out his views on art and poetry. He picked up certain key moments from the plays Danton’s Death (1835), Leonce and Lena (1836) and the incomplete Woyzeck (1837) as well as Büchner’s only short story, Lenz (1835). Büchner is the only name explicitly present in Celan’s speech. Büchner plays the role of an equator, the central figure, as Celan’s charts out the imaginary meridian of poetry. But there are others, more implicitly present, in the speech, including Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber and Osip Mandelstam. Amongst them, Celan’s engagement with Heidegger is the oldest, dating back to 1952, when he started reading Being and Time. I shall first trace Celan’s reading of Heidegger in relation to what matters in The Meridian speech. Towards and Not Towards Heidegger James K. Lyon, who has written in detail about the Heidegger–Celan affair (and whose research I will exclusively read from in this section), tells us Celan was an unspecialized novice in philosophy when he started reading Being and Time. Ignoring the question of Being in the text, Celan focused instead on the concepts, the vocabulary and what he marked as Heidegger’s “phenomenological investigation.” In terms of vocabulary, Celan picked up Heidegger’s style of using compound words like “being-no-longer-in-the-world” and “this-not-yet” as poetic moves which turned literal language figurative. This exercise also helped Celan gain command over the German language. In terms of concepts, Celan picked up quite a few of them. From Being and Time, the idea of truth as “unconcealedness” appealed to Celan, and he took note of the corresponding idea of “Being-in-untruth” as an essential characteristic of “Being-in-the-world.” The idea of truth was serious for Celan, but, unlike for Heidegger, it did not mean any abstract principle for him but a real characteristic showing itself through openness, candour, sincerity and, in negative terms, the opposite of deceitfulness, falsehood, shallowness. Celan found post-war Germany mired in untruth. As Lyon clarifies, the truth Celan passionately sought in his poems was not metaphysical but something specific, to be established temporally through time, event and person. While reading Being and Time, Celan also made two notations: one, the question of how poetry’s permanence is related to time, and, two, that poetry stands more in relation to world-time than time. Taking the notion of truth and time together, Celan made a twist of something he read in The Question of Being, where the philosopher had written how through forgetfulness a “past entity” concealed or lost from memory could be brought into unconcealedness or unconcealment by “thoughtful remembrance.” Celan translated “past entity” into “what was in the past” or “that which happened”, thus fixing the concept to a specific historical event of post–World War II Germany where there was rampant forgetfulness around him working overtime to obliterate the memories of the Holocaust. For Celan, truth as well as time were tied to the notion of memory and forgetting, centered on specific events in historical time, and he read Heidegger’s concepts through that lens of understanding. It marked a decisive shift in The Meridian speech. The other crucial aspect regarding Celan’s reading of Heidegger are the concepts surrounding language. Celan noted in his intense reading in 1953 of Heidegger’s Wrong Path, of the essay ‘What are poets for?’, where Heidegger calls language the house of Being. In the fall of the same year, Celan writes a poem, ‘With a Changing Key’, using the same metaphor: With a changing key You unlock the house where The snow of what’s silenced is driven. Once again we find, Celan taking up a Heideggerian concept to make a crucial alteration: If language is the house of Being, that house no longer offers an image of calm and security because inside it lies a frozen silence that is bound to confront the poet even when he tries to