Kreativität und Hermeneutik in der Translation. Группа авторов
was not Celan’s native language, he was right to recognise the multilingual context of Celan’s poetics. In fact, Celan wrote in the immediate aftermath of the war in both Romanian and German (see Cassian 2015). For Celan’s translators, it is first and foremost necessary to understand the sources of his creative engagement with the German language: his poetics.
Translation also involves reflecting something of these creative processes and the poetics that gave rise to them in the translated poem, and this is only likely to be possible if translation itself is seen by the translator as a creative process. The end result, if one considers poetic translation in this way, is a translated poem which can do far more than accurately reflect the original. It has its own poetics, so it allows its new readers to engage creatively with it. That is, it allows readers to think, to reflect, to re-think, to change their views of the world, just as the original poem did. If I read a Celan poem translated by Michael Hamburger, for example, I can only engage with it fully if I know it is a poem written by Hamburger that translates a poem written by Celan. The reading process is different because not only is the work different but so is the reading context, and the background knowledge against which it is read, that is, the cognitive context of the reader. The reader needs to be aware of this difference. If translation is the type of writing that ensures the survival of the text, because a text, as Walter Benjamin said, has an inherent characteristic of “translatability” (Benjamin 2012: 76), then such survival is only possible if new readers can engage fully with the translated text, thus allowing the original text “to exceed its own limitations” (Brodzki 2007: 2).
2 Holocaust Poetics
Particularly when we are translating poetry that has its origins in clearly identifiable historical events, we might expect accuracy to be our main concern. The poetry of Paul Celan is often referred to as “Holocaust poetry” (cf.e. g. Schlant 1999: 9). “Holocaust poetry” can be defined narrowly as poetry written at the time of the Holocaust or more broadly, as poetry influenced by, or bearing a clear relationship to, the events of the Holocaust (cf. Rowland 2005: 3).
However one defines it, all definitions have in common that they refer to poetry that is a response to real and extremely traumatic events. But it is a poetic response, and it is important to consider what that means. When Holocaust scholars speak of Holocaust poetry as “testimony” (Rowland 2014: 1), or as poetry that has the role of “keeping memory alive” (Rich 1993: 141), those terms express only part of what characterises Holocaust poetry (however broadly or narrowly defined). When translating it or discussing its translation we need to know what is peculiar to poetry as a type of writing, and what these characteristics of poetry mean for the translator. As Gubar (2003: 255) notes, Holocaust poetry is memorable in part because poetry is memorable by nature. Poetry is a particularly appropriate form to express emotion and suffering (see Boase-Beier 2015: 4f.). And, according to cognitive poetics, the poetic way of thinking is the most basic and innate, because the mind is inherently literary (see Turner 1996). Most importantly, poems in particular work by having cognitive effects on their readers, so the creative engagement of the reader is potentially greater when reading a poem (Boase-Beier 2015: 6–8). If we assume that all poetry embodies a particular poetics and that the translation of poetry involves the translation of poetics (see Boase-Beier 2015: 14–16), then reading a Holocaust poem for translation depends upon an ability to engage with Holocaust poetics.
If we fail to consider Holocaust poetry as poetry, there is a danger that we will treat it as though it provided documentary accounts. With translated Holocaust poetry, such a view leads inevitably to a narrow concern with questions of accuracy, inadequacy and loss. Thus Lawrence Langer in his Holocaust anthology, Art from the Ashes, says that reading translated Holocaust poetry is “frustrating” because “verse usually resits” the “close approximations to the original” that he seems to think are the essence of literary translation (Langer 1995: 553). For Langer, this perceived lack of “close approximations” to the original text prevents the reader from grasping “the dense cluster of associations emerging from a particular verbal and historical culture” (Langer 1995: 553).
Such statements beg many questions. Can we assume that the readers of the original would have had access to these associations? Does the language of poetry, when not translated, allow such access? What are “close approximations to the original”? In fact, there is no reason to assume that Holocaust poets wrote only or primarily to communicate facts, and especially not to those who already know them. And most Holocaust poets were also translators. So there is no reason to assume that they were resistant to the idea that poetry could be translated. A critic who takes seriously the fact that Holocaust poetry is poetry will need to consider the ways in which the translator has engaged with its poetics.
As I noted in the previous section, when we read for translation we compare the source text in front of us with the target text it is to become and the source language with the target language into which it is to cross. Style is the result of choice (see Short 1996: 68–71; Verdonk 2002: 5f.), which may be conscious or unconscious, and we see in the stylistic features of the text a mind-style, from which we try to reconstruct the poetics that led the poet to make particular stylistic choices. So we need to understand as much as possible of the poet’s background and context, and what might be inferred, from the poem together with this background, of the poet’s concerns and state of mind. This is important to the translator because, while we could argue that there is such a thing as Holocaust poetics, we are always dealing also with the individual poetics of the poet in question.
Many scholars have noted that there are some common characteristics of Holocaust poetry, which are sometimes described under labels such as “awkward poetics” (Rowland 2005) or “traumatic realism” (Rothberg 2000). They include the use of breaks in narrative thread, or in syntax (Hamburger 2007: 29), the use of prosopopoeia, or speaking for others (Gubar 2003: 178; Martin 2011: 98), “obscurity or ambiguity” (Felstiner 1995: xvii) and many other stylistic features, such as repetition or fragmentation of words that are typical of representations of trauma (Felman 1992: 29).
Particularly in Holocaust poetry written in the years after the Holocaust, we would expect to find more reflection on the process of writing poetically about Holocaust events and effects, so we might expect more fragmentation, repetition, ambiguity and other such stylistic features.
Holocaust (including post-Holocaust) poetry, then, is not documentation. It is based on factual events but, apart from poetry written in ghettos or in those concentration camps where small clandestine acts of creative activity were possible, such as Buchenwald (e. g. Kirsten/Seeman 2012), it rarely recounts facts.
More often, especially when written in the years after the Holocaust, it expresses a traumatised state of mind, a concern with language and the way it was manipulated, and a focus on representation itself, which is possible in poetry because of what Jakobson called its “focus on the message for its own sake”, rather than for what it means or conveys (Jakobson 1960: 356).
Translating Holocaust poetry is only possible if that poetic context is understood in the way it is realised in the poetics of a particular poet. But, more than this, if we try to translate Celan’s poetics, we can hope that the new reader will not only be able to engage with the translated poem, but also to get a sense of Celan’s poetics when doing so, as embodied in the style of the new poem (cf. Schleiermacher 2012: 54f.).
3 Translating the Poetics of Paul Celan
Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920. His family were German-speaking Jews, living in the then Romanian town of Czernowitz, in Bukovina. As a child, besides speaking German and Romanian, he learned Hebrew, French, Latin, and Greek, and later English and Russian. His multilingual background was partly the result of the changing fortunes of Czernowitz, with its many occupations, partly the result of good schooling, partly a reflection of the life of educated Jews in Central Europe before the Second World War, and partly a reflection of Celan’s developing interest in language and languages (see Boase-Beier 2015: 91f.).
His experience of the Holocaust came at first hand. He had been forced to return home from his study of medicine in Tours on the outbreak of war. 3 years later, when Celan was