Stanford Today Edition: March/April, 1998 Section: Features: Speak Through My Words WWW: Speak Through My Words
From Neruda to Celan, the life and love of a literary critic
By John Felstiner
What does it mean nowadays, and what does it matter, to be a literary critic? To think day in, day out about poems, let's say, and to write and teach about them?
Far more than when I entered this profession in 1961, today everything goes - from abstruse philosophical theory to minute linguistic analysis; from tracing biblical filaments in Emily Dickinson's verse, for instance, to assessing the men or women in her life; from Allen Ginsberg's kabbalist Buddhism and tantric Judaism to the sneakers he wore in Prague, now accessible to scholars in Stanford's poetry archive. And at the prick of a pin this whole undertaking may collapse. Recently Ken Kesey recalled: "You know, I don't think Allen read any criticism at all!"
If I had to identify my own approach, I'd call it Mid-Fifties New Criticism, but smelted countless times over the years and reblended with what has seemed purifying or enriching. Such is my interpretive approach the close scrutiny of whole poems - but that approach is pervaded (it should go without saying) by upheavals lived within earshot of: World War II, Vietnam, Israel, Chile, and on and on. Plus, of course, a lifetime's ordinary personal losses and provisional gains.
From college, I still hear the senior British critic I. A. Richards cajoling us to read a poem for that which makes it irreplaceably itself and not some other thing. And daily more precious to me, from so far back, is my mentor Bill Alfred valuing a stanza of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde for "that attention to detail which is a species of love." Decades later when I came upon Paul Celan underscoring Walter Benjamin's maxim on Kafka - "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul" - I recognized my true ground.
Attentiveness, Aufmerksamkeit: Kafka had it, and I look for literary critics, in some way corresponsive with our authors, to practice attentiveness as well. Celan, who lost family, culture and homeland to the European Jewish catastrophe and to what he called "the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech" - Celan in a late lyric, facing a scriptural "text-void," tells us: "Hear deep in / with your mouth."
What seems to me worth trying for, especially in teaching, is access not merely to the text but to that galvanic recognition we sometimes get in encountering genuine art - what T.S. Eliot called "music heard so deeply that you are the music while the music lasts."
Celan spoke of poetry as an encounter made of "radical questioning." Here I'd like to suggest one form of encounter, of attentive questioning, that has primed my task as a literary critic. For in writing on Pablo Neruda, I learned that the act of verse translation especially requires every resource: history, biography, tradition, theory, philology, prosody. Then, the intimate to-and-fro of finding and losing rhythms, sounds, overtones, allusions and ambiguities attempts a voice-to-voice recognition where critical and creative energy fuse. "Hear deep in / with your mouth."
In his longest, most challenging poem, "Stretto," Celan embeds these imperatives: "Read no more - look! / Look no more - go!" From me they demand the active witness of translation. Elsewhere he said: "Poetry no longer imposes, it exposes itself." Likewise a critic-translator may fully, deeply expose the process of translation so as to vivify a poem in question.
In titling my previous book, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, I liked the ongoing present participle and also its open-ended ambiguity - not only Neruda's but his translator's way to the cantos on Macchu Picchu. Then after 15 years of dwelling with Paul Celan's poems in a mother tongue that suddenly brutally turned murderers' tongue, I proposed as title another participle and ambiguity, "Translating Celan: The Strain of Jewishness."
Neruda and Celan: How might two so different poets coincide in a single translator? I can respond to that question with a fantasy that visits me now and then, or that I visit: It is late spring 1939, in Paris. Pablo Neruda arrives to assist the Spanish Republican refugees. Paul Celan had reached Paris on November 10, 1938, a day after Kristallnacht, the massive pogroms against German and Austrian Jews. For the first time, Neruda and Celan are in the same place.
In what I see as a fantastic and fortunate coincidence, Neruda's friend, the surrealist Paul Éluard, whom Celan would later translate, brings the younger, German-language poet to meet the already-celebrated South American. Over wine in a Left Bank café (at this distance in time, I can't quite make out the name on the awning), they talk about politics and poetry. Then Éluard has a daring thought: Might these poets translate one another? But Neruda has no German, Celan no Spanish. Suddenly, in an uncanny and piercing foresight, the two men realize that at that very moment, just north of the Bronx, playing with his crayons is a little boy going on 3 who will one day translate them both into English. Smiling solemnly, the poets raise their glasses, congratulate each other and go their ways.
Now, what made me gravitate to Pablo Neruda's writing? And having immersed in it, what opened me to Paul Celan?
First, it was moving from the East Coast to California in 1965, away from the Anglo-Europeanism of my education into a pan-American meridian: Stanford, Macchu Picchu, Chile. Then, the Vietnam years brought a questioning of Cold War perspectives that put the indigenous genius of Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1945), Neruda's epic evocation of the ancient Inca city, into a sharp new light. I had to find a North American voice for his speech to the buried, forgotten Andean Indians who quarried, hauled, cut and set the stones: A travès de la tierra,
All through the earth join all
the silent wasted lips
and out of the depth speak to me this long night
as if I were anchored with you here.
Maybe the task of translating such lines primed me for lines such as these from Celan's "Deathfugue" (1945), written after 19 months at forced labor and the murder of his parents:
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
Again an obliterated, obliviated people, except that here they are Jews in a death camp, and it is their voice we are made to hear, not a bardic poet's voice.
When Neruda - or rather, when in my words Neruda - says to the Americans he has anchored with, "You won't come back from time under ground. / No coming back with your hardened voice," I hear a tone and a beat I must have heard later in translating Celan:
There was earth inside them and
they dug . . .
they did not grow wise, made up no song, thought up no kind of language.
They dug.
Except that here they are not constructing an Inca city but digging their own graves.
Loss, especially where a translator is concerned, at some level seeks restitution. In Macchu Picchu's closing verse the poet says, Hablad por mis palabras y mi sangre, "Speak through my words and my blood." Lately I've heard that in Paul Celan's voice. For him that imperative, uttered to a lost people, cost not less than everything. In 1970, a few months before Neruda arrived in Paris as Salvador Allende's ambassador, Celan at 49 drowned himself in the Seine. He had done all he could of saying "Speak through my words and my blood" - a more drastic imperative, I still remind myself, than their translator need ever address to Neruda and Celan. ST
John Felstiner, a professor of English at Stanford, has written The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature (Knopf, 1972) and Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (Stanford, 1980). His book Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale, 1995) received the 1997 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.