Badiou, Poem and Subject by Tom Betteridge;

Author:Tom Betteridge;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Reading Celan’s ‘Homecoming’

Paul Celan’s 1955 poem ‘Heimkehr’ (‘Homecoming’) is from his third collection Sprachgitter (Language Mesh). ‘Homecoming’ also names Michael Hamburger’s translation of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Heimkunft’ from the turn of the nineteenth century.26 In their difference, these titles serve to unfold a fundamental contrast in tone and emphasis between the two poems.

‘Heimkehr’ is Celan’s title. Its meaning in everyday German – homecoming, or the return home – is lent poetic nuance by its suffix’s derivation from the verb kehren (‘to turn’ in English) and its distance from the verb kommen (‘to come’).27 To make ‘turning’ resonate beneath ‘coming’ in this way is to offer an understanding of homecoming in which completion is deferred; ‘home’, whatever or wherever that may be, is turned towards, not found and returned to. Beneath ‘Heimkehr’, then, operates a privilege afforded to embarking rather than returning itself. In idiomatic German, the verb kehrer is also used to evoke an introspective pensiveness – in sich gekehrt – or an introspective person more generally – ein in sich gekehrter Mensch.28 Any turning towards home, for this poem, is tethered to a subject in a self-reflexive, interrogative mode, and the choice of kehrer in this case also serves to make sure that any questioning of the outside – borders, boundaries, territory, homeland – is imbricated with the internal dynamics of the individual subject. Finally, kehren is also the German verb for ‘to sweep’. Imbuing Celan’s title with a distant sense of clearing, kehren evokes both the flattened features of an unidentifiable home or homeland and the historical caesura understood by the signifier ‘Auschwitz’,29 but also the promise of marking out a journey upon an empty, pure space.

By contrast, Hölderlin’s title, ‘Heimkunft’, harnesses the verb kommen in its suffix -kunft. This word-choice changes little of the immediate sense in German, for which -kunft operates to denote ‘come’ in conjunction with other prefixes, for example in Ankunft – ‘arrivals’.30 Harnessed poetically, however, it offers consonance with künftig, an adjective denoting ‘future’. In Hölderlin’s title, then, we are invited to think the ‘futurehome’ to which we shall return, and this is to imbue the homeland with a sense of prior verification or guarantee. Hölderlin’s dedication of the poem ‘to his relatives’ (an die Verwandten) only serves to consolidate this construction of homecoming which privileges a return, in the future, to origins, to place of birth, but also to abiding structures of familial support. The contrast with Celan’s ‘Homecoming’ becomes sharply focused here if we accept John Felstiner’s reading that the ‘you’ of Celan’s poem is an address to his mother, shot in the Autumn of 1942.31 Celan’s ‘Homecoming’ begins from a wholesale evacuation of those preconfigured, identifiable structures towards which Hölderlin seeks a return.

If there is a negative encounter with lost home in Celan, however, there is also a positive one, to which the final minutes of Celan’s ‘The Meridian’ speech, made on reception of the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960, attest. Homecoming, its Hölderlinian form subverted and supplanted, is conceived instead

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