Kreativität und Hermeneutik in der Translation. Группа авторов
Celan himself committed suicide in Paris in 1970.
The sudden loss of his parents, his particular grief for his beloved mother, and his feelings of guilt because he had survived, were crucial for the direction that his poetry, which he had begun writing as a teenager (Chalfen 1979: 58), was to take in future.
Celan’s poetry, like that of many other poets who survived the Holocaust but were severely traumatised by it (e.g. Rose Ausländer, Nelly Sachs), developed over time to become less explicit, dealing less with actual or imagined events, and more with the poet’s reactions to them. In Celan’s case, his later poems, especially those written in the last few years of his life, and while he was undergoing treatment for psychiatric illness, display what his translator Ian Fairley calls “synaptic denseness” (Fairley 2007: xv). No doubt influenced by his reading of Benjamin (see Felstiner 1995: 96), he often thematises Benjamin’s view that there was a creative spark in language, left there since it was originally used by God to create the world (see e. g. Benjamin 1992). But Celan emphasises the non-instrumental character of language, casting doubt on its ability to call anything into being through poetry, or speech or communication (cf. Hamacher 1994: 237). As is the case with Sachs, Celan is most famous among readers for his earlier post-war poetry. His pre-war poetry (like Sachs’s) is less well-known to readers, though it has been the subject of several critical studies (see Patrut 2006: 34), and a few of his earliest poems have been translated by John Felstiner (2001: 2–15).
His later poetry, though it has attracted much critical attention (see, for example, the studies in Fioretos 1994), is often seen as complex, and as difficult to translate (see Hamburger 2007: 24). His most anthologised poem in English, according to Granger’s 1997 and 2007 index to poetry in anthologies (Frankovich 1997; Kale 2007), is “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue) (Celan 1952: 37ff.).
One poem which is not listed at all by Granger is “Mit Äxten spielend” (Playing with Axes), first published in 1955 in Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold) (Celan 1982). It seems only to have been translated into English by one or two translators, for example by David Young (2010), though it has appeared in many other languages, for example, Ukrainian (Rykhlo 2014) and Japanese (Iiyoshi 1990). I begin with my translation of the poem, to make things easier for readers who do not speak German.
Playing with Axes
1 Seven hours of the night, seven years of waking:
2 playing with axes,
3 you lie in the shadow of righted corpses
4 – oh, the trees that you cannot fell! –
5 crown of the unsaid at their heads,
6 at their feet the pickings of words,
7 you lie and you play with the axes –
8 in the end you will glint just like they do.
The poem suggests a traumatised state of mind, that toys with ideas of revenge, regret, and helplessness. If it was originally conceived or composed around 1950, soon after Celan had gone to live in Paris, the seven years could refer to the time since he learned of his parents’ deaths. Seven is also an important number in Jewish mythology: there are seven working hours of the day, seven days of the week, seven branches of the menorah, seven species that symbolise the fertility of Israel (see Frankel and Teutsch 1995).
For the reader of the above English poem, as of any poem, interpretation is important: we want to make sense of the poem. At the same time, there are many aspects to the poem which defy straightforward interpretation: what are righted corpses? What are the pickings of words? Is the “you” of the poem the poet or some imagined reader? Thinking about these ambiguities in particular can lead us to consider the state of mind the poet was expressing, as conveyed by the translator. Because mind-style, as described above, is a reflection in the style of a text of the state of mind informing it, it is crucial that a translator pays attention to mind-style, and that a reader of the translation trusts the translator to have done so. We would expect to find the poet’s mind-style especially in such stylistic figures as ambiguity, repetition of structures and sounds, and metaphors. A reader who reads the poem “Playing with Axes” in English translation must be able to engage with the poem in this way, and also to experience cognitive effects, and the possibility of re-thinking the way the world is understood.
That is to say, the poem must allow the English reader to read creatively (irrespective of whether she or he actually chooses or is able to do so), to go beyond the sort of simple reading for pleasure and mild cognitive effects such as sadness, empathy or anger that could be termed everyday or non-analytical reading (see also Stockwell 2013: 264). Creative reading is always potentially analytical, open to the possibilities of the language of a poem, considering its poetic make-up, reflecting on one’s own ways of thinking and how they might change in response to the poem.
In reading the poem above creatively, the reader’s awareness that it is a translation, that it is an attempt to communicate in other words and in another language something said by another person, is crucial, a point to which I return in Section 4. This is because the images of inertia and the suggestion that words are substituted for action gain a different context when it is a translator speaking, and an English-speaking audience in the early years of the 21st century listening, from that which they had for a Holocaust survivor speaking and a German audience listening more than 60 years ago. It is to be hoped that the reader will understand the translator is telling someone else’s story and yet will still be able to get at least some sense of Celan’s poetics.
Since the above poem is my own translation, I am able here to consider in more detail the process of creative reading of the original for translation which preceded my English version. Here is the original poem “Mit Äxten spielend”, in German, with a gloss in English.
Mit Äxten spielend
with axes playing
1 Sieben Stunden der Nacht, sieben Jahre des Wachens:
seven hours of-the night seven years of-the waking
2 mit Äxten spielend,
with axes playing
3 liegst du im Schatten aufgerichteter Leichen
lie you in-the shade of-up-righted corpses
4 – o Bäume, die du nicht fällst! –,
o trees which you not fell
5 zu Häupten den Prunk des Verschwiegenen,
at heads the showiness of-the silenced
6 den Bettel der Worte zu Füßen,
the beggar’s-loot of-the words to feet
7 liegst du und spielst mit den Äxten –
lie you and play with the axes
8 und endlich blinkst du wie sie.
and at-last blink you like they
There are many points in this short poem at which an analytical and creative reading for translation involves a consideration of the poetics that resulted in these particular forms. I shall mention just 5 such points here.
(1) The title, repeated in line 2, recalls idioms such as “mit dem Feuer spielen” (“to play with fire”) and especially the phrase in Celan’s most famous poem, “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue) (Celan 1952: 37–39), “er spielt mit den Schlangen”, literally “he is playing with (the) snakes”. The reader thus has the sense of a character tempting fate, but not actually taking action. Furthermore, we might link this near-idiom with another such instance in the poem: “den Bettel der Worte zu Füßen” (the pickings of words at their feet). This phrase recalls the idiom “jemandem den ganzen Bettel vor die Füße werfen”, literally “to throw the whole pile of junk at someone’s feet”, which means that you throw everything (e. g. your work) down in front of someone and say you have had enough. The phrase also recalls, and contrasts with, “die Axt an etwas legen” (to