|
John Felstiner
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."
 “There was
earth inside them and they dug . . .” Celan
&
“You won’t come back from time under
ground.” Neruda
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
|
|
