FruitFly

Paul Celan…I doubt I’m up to the task of ‘explaining’ anything by Paul Celan. He was brought up in a German speaking Jewish family in Bukovina. Both of his parents died in forced labour camps during World War 2. He was multilingual, fluent in German, Romanian, French, and able also to speak Hebrew and understand Yiddish. But he regarded German as his mother Tongue, and it is in German that he wrote the vast majority of his poems. But German was also the language of the Nazis, and his relationship with the language was anything but simple. I defy anyone to give a definitive interpretation of any poem by Celan, and I suspect that he did not compose with a single end in view. Instead, I believe he composed within something like a charged field of possibilities, a third space equidistant between word and world where both could meet and refract meaning in new ways, the way light and image are refracted by the planes of a crystal. Housed within that crystal are the redemptive efforts of the German language to re-engage the world, after…well, after all the horrors perpetrated in the name of National Socialism. Hence the neologisms, the fractured syntax. His precisions are different from the simple fidelities of description. He rarely makes big statements. He rarely writes long rythmic lines, unbroken by caesuras and subclauses. Big statements and rythmic, rising crescendos are the stuff of speeches, and hadn’t the Germans had enough of speeches? Then there is his deep interest in Jewish mysticism, apophatic approaches to a God who would not intervene on behalf of His Chosen People in their darkest hour. And this, I think, highlights one of the most interesting features of modern poetry in the second half of the 20th Century, it’s often demonstrated refusal to simply walk away. Instead, it attempts to set up relationships with the unanswering void, as if even emptiness can be cultivated to yield meaning. Celan’s poetry may always be on the verge of silence, because of the ever greater need to listen.

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