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Keeping Faith: Michael Hamburger's Translations of Paul Celan's Poetry

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Keeping Faith: Michael Hamburger's Translations of Paul Celan's Poetry 10.3726/82039_63 Keeping Faith: Michael Hamburger’s translations of Paul Celan’s poetry Von Charlotte Ryland, Oxford In a copy of his volume Die Niemandsrose (1963) given by Paul Celan to his English translator Michael Hamburger, Celan inscribed the words ‘ganz und gar nicht hermetisch’. As Hamburger explains in his edition of Celan transla- tions, this negation of hermeticism would seem to relate to Celan’s conviction, held until his death, that Hamburger had been the anonymous author of a review of Atemwende (1967) in the Times Literary Supplement, in which that poetry had been described as ‘hermetic’.1 This misunderstanding, which caused a schism between Celan and Hamburger that was never fully healed during Celan’s lifetime, has two implications for a consideration of Hamburger’s engagement with Celan’s poetry. On the one hand, according to Hamburger, it put a stop to any fruitful discussions about Celan’s poetry that Hamburger and Celan might have had during those final years of Celan’s life; discussions which might, writes Hamburger, have given him ‘pointers’ as to the ‘primary sense’ of some of the poem’s more obscure terms and allusions.2 On the other hand, it casts a certain light over all of Hamburger’s translations of Celan’s poems: imputing to them an urge to give the lie to that term ‘hermetic’, by rendering Celan’s poems accessible. Hamburger’s translations are therefore not Nachdichtungen, ‘free adaptations’ that lift off from the original poem’s ground; yet neither do they remain so close to the original text as to become attempts at wholly literal renderings, providing notes and glosses where the ‘primary sense’ of an image or term is elusive.3 Rather, Hamburger realised that to write after Celan meant to retain the same relationship between the reader and the text; and therefore to reproduce the complexity and ambiguity that is constitutive of Celan’s verses. Hamburger’s translations, and his theo- retical considerations of his translation practice, thus shed light on the nature of Celan’s particular complexity, making plain the distinction between obscu- rity and hermeticism and demonstrating how the openness of Celan’s poetry can be based on such obscurity without resulting in a hermetic text. For Hamburger, therefore, writing after Celan involves neither adapta- tion nor literal rendering, but aims ‘to give a reader ignorant of the source 1 Michael Hamburger, Translator’s Note on “Wolfsbohne”. In: Poems of Paul Celan. Trans- lated by Michael Hamburger, 3rd edn. London: Anvil, 2007, pp. 395–97 (p. 396). 2 Hamburger, On Translating Celan. In: Poems of Paul Celan, pp. 405–22 (p. 411). 3 Hamburger, On Translating Celan, p. 418. 63 language such intimations of the original as translation is capable of giving’.4 However, Hamburger’s awareness that this original is defined by ‘extreme, insoluble polysemy or ambivalence’ renders the translator’s task a complex one: to translate a poem that is constituted by polysemy and defined by ambiguity, without reducing these obscure features that are essential to the original poems.5 So Hamburger does not seek to gloss or explain the poems, since that would amount to a restriction of the original poem – perhaps, even, to an admission of its own hermeticism. Rather, he follows the original poem into its obscurities. By refusing to explain the poem through translation, the translator accepts that the poem may be lacking an evident and immediate ‘primary sense’, and therefore leaves it open to a series of shifting and overlapping interpretations. This lack of obvious and specific meaning is part of the poem’s ‘obscurity’, and it thereby invalidates the apparent contradiction between obscurity and accessibility: the more obscure a poem is – the more it avoids specific reference – the more available it remains to interpretation.6 Consequently, it is this obscurity that renders the poems open, permanently accessible and directed in part at ‘the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unpredeterminable’, which Hamburger recognises as an integral part of the movement of Celan’s poetry.7 If a translator is to retain this openness, then he must also reproduce the poem’s obscurity. Through consideration of Ham- burger’s ambivalent position with regard to the use of scholarship for transla- tion, and an examination of two of his translations of Celan’s poems, in which the question of scholarly data is paramount, this essay explores what it means for Hamburger to write after Celan, such that he renders the original accessible to new readers without explaining away its essential obscurity. In addition to giving his readers ‘intimations’ of the original, Hamburger also states that he translates ‘for readers who are not scholars, and need a translation for that reason’, and indeed in his writings on these translations Hamburger returns repeatedly to the status of scholarship in Celan studies and in translation.8 Hamburger views scholarship primarily as the search for understanding through identifying allusions within the poems, thereby in- 4 Hamburger, On Translating Celan, p. 418. 5 Hamburger, Translator’s note on “Wolfsbohne”, p. 396. The phrase ‘yes and no unsplit’ is from Hamburger’s translation of Celan’s poem ‘Sprich auch du’ (1955). In: Poems of Paul Celan, pp. 106–07. 6 The term ‘obscurity’ is used here for the German word ‘Dunkelheit’, which for Celan is a positive and necessary feature of poetry, thematised in many of his theoretical texts and notes. See for example Celan’s notes, collected under the heading ‘Dunkelheit’ by the editors. In Celan: Der Meridian. Endfassung – Entwürfe – Materialien. Ed. by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 1999, pp. 84–95. 7 Hamburger, Introduction. In: Poems of Paul Celan, pp. 23–40 (p. 30). 8 Hamburger, On Translating Celan, p. 421. 64 creasing familiarity with the poet’s ‘range of reference’.9 This kind of scholar- ship attempts, then, to reverse the process to which Celan submits all his texts; for Celan’s drafting process invariably consists in excising concrete refer- ences, in reducing and condensing the text, until finally the date and place of composition are, in all but very few cases, removed. This retreat from any detail that would aid the scholar in ascertaining the poem’s allusions and references liberates the poem from these original foundations and so opens it up to a greater, perhaps endless, range of interpretations. Yet it is also this condensation that results in the poem’s obscurity. In his discussion of scholarship, a tension emerges within Hamburger’s own thought. He accepts that the translator must know as much as possible about any given poem’s background, and that he should therefore make use of existing scholarship for this purpose, but he also asserts that many of his translations of Celan’s poems were completed without this knowledge. Indeed, this lack of engagement with scholarship seems almost wilful on his part: he states that he completed the translations ‘without the help of annotated or variant editions, and with little reference to such critical studies as I happened to possess’.10 It is at this point that Hamburger’s falling-out with Celan, and the resulting lack of discussion that might have given Hamburger ‘pointers’ as to the poems’ ‘primary sense’, becomes significant; for this chance occurrence seems to have placed Hamburger in a particularly open relationship with Celan’s poems. Since he was not always given access by the poet to a ‘primary sense’ that may or may not exist, his only other option was either not to translate or to translate in such a way that it is impossible to reduce the poems to any one conjectured primary sense. In this way, Hamburger’s translations mark the point at which translation may appear to take a different route from scholarship. While a scholarly study may seek to pin down sense, to identify allusions and references and to show how they interact with one another, the translator’s task is to render the poem in such a way that it may still accommodate the full range of potential data that the original contains. The particular kind of scholarship that Hamburger rejects becomes most evident in the introduction to his translation of ‘Wolfsbohne’, a poem by Celan that makes explicit reference to the death of his parents, and which remained unpublished during his lifetime. Hamburger’s takes issue with a mode of engagement with the poem that would seek to focus on its ‘implications’, that is, on features apparently extraneous to the text itself: A great deal is likely to be written about the biographical, psychological, social, and historical implications of this poem, but not without detracting and distract- 9 Hamburger, On Translating Celan, p. 410. 10 Hamburger, On Translating Celan, p. 413. 65 ing from what the poem does by its reductive recourse to minimal words, halting speech rhythms, the bare bones of Celan’s art. If my version of it accords with that procedure, it will speak for itself.11 So Hamburger appears here decisively to distance himself from any putative ‘primary sense’ that a poem may contain, in the form of allusions and refer- ences, and instead directs the focus to the complete impression created by the poem, what he elsewhere calls ‘the gesture of the poem as a whole’.12 Hamburger’s considerations of a poem’s ‘primary sense’ and of its ‘ges- ture’, and the translator’s position in relation to these, is reflected in translator and poet Don Paterson’s musings on the nature of translation that accompany his recent versions of Rilke’s Orpheus (2006).13 While Hamburger seems to question the idea of a ‘primary sense’, so Paterson rejects the notion that a poem may have a single ‘essence’, which the translation would have to reproduce.
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