Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan

Author:Paul Celan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374714215
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

III

“Schwarz” | “Black”

August 3–9, 1964. First notes closely connect to the next two poems.

Kronland | crownland: Celan’s homeland, the Bukovina, today part of Ukraine, was a (partly autonomous) crownland of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire.

“Hammerköpfiges” | “Anvilheadedness”

August 3–15, 1964. Lefebvre makes an interesting comment—valid for English as well as for French—concerning the translation of two terms in this poem, the neutral word Hämmerköpfiges and Silbriges, which, he writes, are “adjectives made into substantives that designate an apparent substantiality (that the proposed translation unhappily reduces into nouns—and thus into metaphors, which is not the status of the original terms)” (RDS, p. 92).

Hammerköpfiges | Anvilheadedness: The first drafts add the word Wolken, indicating the meteorological origin of the word, as “anvil clouds.” But the vocabulary quickly moves to horse-connected imagery, so that the first image of a possible “hammer-headed” horse cannot be excluded, thus:

Zeltgang | palfrey pace: The ability of certain horses (palfreys—the word comes from the German for horse, Pferd) to advance in a smooth, ambling gait rather than at a trot.

kentaurisch / gebäumt | centaurishly / rearing: The “palfrey” here becomes the centaur, half horse, half man, usually shown holding a bow and arrow, as archer, which is Celan’s astrological sign.

“Landschaft” | “Landscape”

August 3–16, 1964. Started in Moisville, where Celan noted on the back of the leaf on whose other side he sketched out the poem “Schwarz” | “Black”: “in dieser / Stunde der nuschelnden / Urnenwesen / lebten wir königlich nach / den erfüllten Gesetzen der Liebe” (in this / hour of the mumbling / urnbeings / we lived like kings according to / the fulfilled laws of love); the first actual draft has “Garotten- / Spanisch / von Rauchmund zu Rauchmund” (Garotte- / Spanish / from smokemouth to smokemouth), while the final version has simple “Gespräche” | “conversations” (TA Atemwende, p. 92). Lefebvre suggests that of this Spanish horizon there remains only “the half-shell (Jakobsmuschel | pilgrim’s scallop) of the pilgrims of St. James’ Way (the pilgrimage route to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostalla in Galicia, Spain) and the possible allusion to an execution. The Spanish state used the garrote to execute its condemned until 1975. But Muschel also calls up, via Mauscheln, the Jewish speech of the exiled, of the wandering pilgrim Jew (just as the urn and the smoke connote the crematory ovens)” (RDS, pp. 231–32).

Wiedemann (BW, p. 734) adds the following information: “During a visit by Celan’s friends Jean and Mayotte Bollack in the summer of 1964 to Moisville, Peter Szondi’s letter to the editor (6/25/1964) against Hans Egon Holthusen’s review of Die Niemandsrose in the FAZ of 5/2/1964 was at the center of the conversation: Holthusen had repeated his thesis, already stated in 1954, that phrases like ‘The mills of death’ were just made up and had no relation to the real. Afterward, Celan was hosted by the Bollacks in their house in the Périgord region of France.” That visit possibly inscribed in the “Tollhäusler-Trüffel” | “bedlamite’s truffle,” as the Périgord is famous for its truffles.

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