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Interpretation and Creativity in the Translation of Paul Celan
Jean Boase-Beier (Norwich)
Abstract: We might expect the translation of Holocaust poetry, since it arose from real historical events, to be concerned above all with accuracy, leaving little scope for creativity on the translator’s part. I argue that this is not so, however. For Holocaust poetry is not a document or an account, it is a poetic expression. Translators therefore need to read the text creatively, as poetry, being open to its poetic effects and also considering how they come about. While we can often find stylistic characteristics common to Holocaust poetry, and it makes sense to say that these originate from what we might want to call “Holocaust poetics”, poets have their own poetics. Paul Celan’s poetics arose in part from his multilingual background and his own personal experience of the Holocaust. Especially his later poetry expresses the state of mind of a speaker who is traumatised by events, and suffers feelings of guilt and inertia. The poem “Mit Äxten spielend” is one such poem. I show that, by examining its style, including particular uses of repetition and ambiguity, and of the etymological connections between words (in German and beyond) the translator can get a sense of the poetics driving the poem, and can imaginatively reconstruct the state of mind of its speaker. Translation that thus creatively engages with the original poem and the poetics behind it can hope to give the new readers not only a sense of the poetics of the original but also the possibility of creative engagement with the translated poem.
Keywords: Paul Celan, Holocaust poetry, translation, poetics, creative reading.
1 The Role of Interpretation and Creativity
When we consider translation, “interpretation” and “creativity” might intuitively seem almost to be opposites. Surely, when we interpret what a text says, we are trying to get as close as possible to what was meant? And when we write a new text based on our interpretation, accuracy, not creativity, is what is needed, we might think.
What I intend to argue in this contribution is that, in the translation of literary texts, and especially of poetry, it is never simply a question of accuracy, but rather that accuracy and creativity go hand-in-hand, both in the reading of the original text and in the writing of the translation. This is so because poetry, even more than other literary forms, works by engaging its readers and encouraging them to think, to reflect, to re-think and to change their view of the world. There have been many studies that emphasise this aspect of our reading (see e. g. Richards 1960: 43; Oatley 2011), and I have argued elsewhere (Boase-Beier 2015: 71–72; and see also Attridge 2004: 79–83) that these reading processes are themselves creative. It has also been noted by many translation scholars working on or within the hermeneutic approach (cf. Venuti 2012: 485) that is often traced back to Schleiermacher’s famous 1813 talk “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens” (On the different methods of translating) (see Schleiermacher 2012), that “the problem of translation is the problem of understanding” (Hermans 2007: 135), and that understanding involves individuals and their own context and background, especially in literary translation (see, for example, Stolze 1994: 181–212; 2011: 9; 2015). According to Siever, Schleiermacher, whose concern with creativity needs to be understood as part of the early Romantic tradition in German writing (Siever 2015: 154–156), was the first theorist to emphasise the creativity of literary translation.
But translating poetry does not only involve creative reading of the source text and creative re-writing to produce a target text. It also involves understanding and reconstructing the creative processes of the poet that have resulted in a work with which readers can fully engage. These poetic creative processes stem from what we might call the “poetics” of a particular writer, that is, the particular way of creating poetry peculiar to that writer, manifested in the style we see in the poems in question. The reader (whether a translator or not) has no direct access to a poet’s mind or the poetics that arises from that mind, but reading a text in order to translate it could be said to involve an imaginative reconstruction of these mental states and processes which has its basis in close, analytical reading (see Boase-Beier 2015: 14–15). Reading for translation involves paying particular attention to what has been referred to as mind-style (see Fowler 1977: 103), that is, the way the style of a text reflects the state of mind that informed it. Especially in the case of a poet like Celan, whose background was multilingual (see Boase-Beier 2015: 91f.), we would expect the translator to go beyond the non-translating reader, and also beyond the critic who is not considering translation, in that an inevitable part of the way a translator reads is to consider what might happen to linguistic, stylistic and poetic forms, such as metaphors, images, ambiguities and repetitions, when they cross a language boundary. In fact, as Siever (2015: 168) points out, Schleiermacher noted that part of the interpretation (and therefore also the translator’s interpretation) of a text involves exactly this consideration of the prospective new text, and its potential effects on the language it will become part of (see Schleiermacher 2012: 54). The translator’s reading is thus a particularly engaged type of reading (see Boase-Beier 2015: 87–101), and, it could be argued, a type of reading especially appropriate to Celan’s poetry, which, according to Derrida, embodies an awareness of German as a language “to struggle with” (Derrida 2005: 100). This awareness in part arose from Celan’s knowledge of the fatal consequences of striving for linguistic purity in Nazi Germany (see, for example, Klemperer 2015). Derrida argues that Celan’s poetics already contains a sort of translation from standard German to