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Efrat Bloom Dissertation Final THIS PLACE OF POETRY: WRITING, DISPLACEMENT, AND THE POETICS OF THE MOTHER TONGUE IN H. LEYVIK, PAUL CELAN, AND SARGON BOULUS by Efrat Bloom A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in the University of Michigan 2013 Doctoral Committee: Professor Daniel A. Herwitz, Co-Chair Professor Anita Norich, Co-Chair Associate Professor Christi A. Merrill Associate Professor Shachar M. Pinsker Professor Anton Shammas © Efrat Bloom 2013 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude to my committee members, under whose guidance this dissertation took shape: to Daniel Herwitz, for his immense intellectual engagement and enthusiasm, and for being generous in every possible way; to Anita Norich, a true mentor, to whom I owe my love for Yiddish literature, and whose erudition and insightfulness were my trusted guide in an uncertain path; to Anton Shammas, for his kindness and persistent support, and for giving me the writer’s one best advice (“trust the process”); to Shachar Pinsker, in whose teachings about exile and homecoming in Jewish literature this study finds its origins; to Christi Merrill, who compelled me to think in abstract terms when I was grounded in the concrete and in concrete terms when I wandered into abstractness. I want to thank the Department of Comparative Literature, the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Institute for the Humanities, and the Rackham School for Graduate Studies—all at the University of Michigan—for making funds and other resources available for me for participating in intensive language courses and for traveling to conferences, as well as for creating frames for intellectual exchange with colleagues and fellows. Many friends and colleagues have read and responded to parts of this dissertation during the long course of its development. Among them I would like to mention Dana Freibach-Heifetz, Alexandra Hoffman, Amr Kamal, Artemis Leontis, Oren Segal, and Orian Zakai. Their friendship and support were staples to draw on in this long journey. ii This study would not have come into being without the support of my family, whose love traveled distances to reach me. Above all, it would not have been possible without my partner for the past eighteen years, Itai Gurvich, who struggled my struggles and made me endure with his own endurance. Only he knows what all this means. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..................................................................................................................... ii ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................. 1 Notes ........................................................................................................................................ 27 CHAPTER ONE ................................................................................................................................... 30 Into the Depths and Out of Language: H. Leyvik’s “Mima’amakim” (“Fromthedepths”) Notes ........................................................................................................................................ 64 CHAPTER TWO .................................................................................................................................. 71 Poetry and the Praise of Distance: Paul Celan’s “Tübingen, Jänner” (“Tübingen, January”) Notes ...................................................................................................................................... 103 CHAPTER THREE ............................................................................................................................ 106 The Holy, the Mundane, and the Sacred: Language and the Divine in Paul Celan Notes ...................................................................................................................................... 141 CHAPTER FOUR .............................................................................................................................. 145 The Ever-Escaping Word: Sargon Boulus’s “Ṣandūq, ‘Arūs, fī al-Fajr, Ilá Mīnā’” (“A Trousseau, a Bride, to a Seaport, at Dawn”) Notes ...................................................................................................................................... 180 AFTERWORD ................................................................................................................................... 183 Notes ...................................................................................................................................... 190 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................................. 191 iv ABSTRACT Absract This study examines the ways in which poetry written by displaced poets in their mother tongues becomes captivated by competing desires and how these desires are transformed into the capacities of the text. More specifically, this study uses close reading to illuminate how writing in the mother tongue, regarded here as an expression of the displaced poet’s rootedness (real or imagined) in his culture of origin, becomes a site of a phantasmatic return to an “origin” which is itself beyond language, outside it, or discontinuous with it, and which is therefore a threat to writing. The condition of displacement, I show, stirs in the poet’s natural (or naturalized) linguistic milieu a desire for an “origin” that transcends symbolic representation. And yet this desire seeks reconciliation within the boundaries of the text and is confined to the capacities of poetry’s formal and thematic devices. How the desire for the “origin” inflects and undermines writing and how the poem negotiates its relation to the “origin” lies at the center of this study, which portrays the ways in which an unattainable source is incorporated in the poem to create a new understanding of writing’s limitations and contingencies. "ממעמקים" Chapter 1 reads H. Leyvik’s transitions between Hebrew and Yiddish in (“Mima’amakim,” Hebrew for “from-the-depths”) as an inquiry, by the multilingual poet, into the mother tongue’s capacity to become the language of psychic exploration in a modern world in which tradition lost its allure. Chapter 2 explores poetry’s capacity to voice a trauma by questioning its locus between the unfathomable reality of the Holocaust’s aftermath and the darkness inhered in the German language as manifested in Paul Celan’s “Tübingen, Jänner” (“Tübingen, January”; in German). Chapter 3 examines Celan’s establishment of the human as v Hebrew’s source of sacredness and of prayer as a speech-brought-back-to-its-divine-source as a word of indictment, this in “Mandorla” (“Mandorla”), “Hawdalah” (“Havdalah”), and “Die Schleuse” (“The Lock Gate”). Chapter 4 discusses Sargon Boulus’s poem “Ṣandūq, ‘Arūs, fī al- Fajr, Ilá Mīnā’” (“A Trousseau, a Bride, to a Seaport, at Dawn”; in Arabic) as an exploration of the gains and losses implicated in poetry’s attraction to its origins. vi INTRODUCTION Introduction “For one in our profession, the condition we call exile is, first of all, a linguistic event: he is thrust, he retreats into his mother tongue. From being his, so to speak, sword, it turns into his shield” (Brodsky 108). Jospeh Brodsky’s statement in the Wheatland Foundation 1987 Vienna conference, though probably a faithful depiction of a poet’s experience, reflects a schism characteristic of the discourse about displaced writers’ linguistic practices—and one that, this dissertation suggests, should be regarded with care. The academic and non-academic literature continuously studies and reflects on the linguistic choices of writers who had re-settled, as immigrants, exiles, or expatriates in countries where the vernacular differed from their own language. For the most part, the predicament of such linguistic displacement is measured vis-à- vis the scope of change involved in the geographical transition: writers adopting a new language are closely contemplated for the losses and gains brought about by the renunciation of a mother tongue. The sense of alienation from the original linguistic community; the loss of what was perceived as “an intrinsic relationship between words and things,” signifier and signified (Kahn 107); the disappearance of “a trust in [one’s] own verbal powers” (E. Hoffman 118)1 that results from a compromised ability to trace and pronounce shades of meaning; the rigidity of the new language and its lack of inner resonance—these and other effects are every so often mentioned side by side with the benefit of gaining, through the adopted language, a new frame of reference, by which the prospects of enrichment triumph over, or at least mitigate, those of impoverishment.2 None of these noted effects is surprising: “Most of the culture is in the language and is expressed in the language,” the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman maintains (81).3 1 Language is a culture’s primary vessel and abandoning it unsettles, in Fishman’s words, “the way of life, the way of thought, the way of valuing, and the human reality”—indeed, one’s entire intellectual and psychological world. Brodsky’s extraordinary metaphor reveals the changed demands posed to language by the writer enduring
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