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John Felstiner
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."
 eruda
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
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