mad meth math: paul celan’s “bei wein und verlorenheit”
I understand that the Jewish-German poet Paul Celan is, at times, obscure. I won't pretend I have the skills it takes to translate him; partly because of his goal of dismantling the "Master's Language" of Nazi Germany, that is, by stripping the language of Hitler and Heidegger and Auschwitz down to some "core" or ultimate "truth" he could bear witness to the horrors he had once lived through. But the real reason I have never attempted a translation is because I don't know German.
I do appreciate, however, the need to find a new language to express something inexpressible; years after my psycho-vac1 during Peace Corps I had no words to bear witness to watching the children of the state-run orphanage I worked at die. Is it enough to say I was powerless to change that? Is it enough to say we live in a world where children are born simply to be abandoned, institutionalized, abused, starved and when they die buried in the city's landfill all before five years of age?
I believe in the mysticism of words — once you have found words which are considered to be the supreme reality that you are trying to express, once you have found the value of that existence — then you have taken something as abstract and unspeakable as "horror" and, as Shakespeare once put it, turned "them to shapes and gave to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." In other words, you have made them into a truth.
This is why I can never dismiss the complexity of Celan's work as gibberish as others have; how does one speak anything about the Holocaust? Yes, perhaps stripping a language down to some hidden core is that right approach? It is hard to know, since it didn't work for me and I am not sure it did for Paul Celan either … at least not all the time The more I read his work the more I must admit that one person's complexity is another person's ambiguity — both can be fertile and extraordinary in the right hands. Sadly, those hands weren't always Celan's; but when that approach does work it is amazing.
Celan killed himself forty-one days after I was born, April 20, 1970, by drowning himself in the river Seine. Of all his work, this poem, "bei wein und verlorenheit," blows the top of my head off every time I read it. I have read many translations of the German, but Popov and McHugh's is the best.
Bei Wein und Verlorenheit, bei
beider Neige:ich ritt durch den Schnee, hörst du,
ich ritt Gott in die Feme — die Nähe, er sang,
es war
unser letzter Ritt über
die Menschen - Hürden.Sie duckten sich, wenn
sie uns über sich hörten, sie
schrieben, sie
logen unser Gewieher
um in eine
ihrer bebilderten Sprachen.
–Paul Celan
With wine and being lost
With wine and being lost, with
less and less of both:I rode through the snow, do you read me,
I rode God far–I rode God
near, he sang,
it was
our last ride over
the hurdled humans.They cowered when
they heard us
overhead, they
wrote, they
lied our neighing
into one
of their
image-ridden languages.(translated from the German by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh)
- I am fascinated that the term "psycho vac," something I thought was a Peace Corps word, has made its way into the Urban Dictionary. It reads, "to move someone out of a hot zone…especially an international relief/foreign aid worker who has flipped his or her lid..(term mentioned in NYTimes magazine)" [back]