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 translations, 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 theoretical considerations of his translation practice, thus shed light on the nature of Celan’s particular complexity, making plain the distinction between obscurity 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 translation, 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 scholarship attempts, then, to reverse the process to which Celan submits all his texts; for Celan’s drafting process invariably consists in excising concrete references, 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 references, 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 ‘gesture’, 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. In their attempts to deal with this issue of reproducing sense and essence, Hamburger and Paterson both use the terms ‘faith’ and ‘trust’. Each differentiates between these terms, but their approaches to them differ significantly, and a consideration of precisely how they are different yields a better understanding of Hamburger’s use of these terms, and consequently of his approach to translation. For Paterson, ‘faith’ is too strong a word for any kind of translation, because it presupposes that a poem has an ‘essence’ that may therefore be reproduced in the translation. Since he denies the presence of such an essence, he replaces ‘faith’ with ‘trust’, arguing that a ‘trustworthy’ translation does not require such an ‘essence’, but only an attempt to translate the poem’s paraphraseable sense and to imitate its unparaphraseable sense (those elements of a poem that Paterson describes as akin to music).14 By contrast, Hamburger accepts the term ‘faith’, but uses it in conjunction with ‘trust’. He states that Celan placed his trust in his readers, that they themselves would place their trust in the words on the page, a trust that they would pass through bafflement to understanding. In other words, Celan expected his readers to trust the poem’s potential for meaning. Such an understanding of Celan’s poetics is most clearly evoked in his ‘Flaschenpost’ motif. Celan entrusted the poem to the bottle’s course, hoping (but by no means certain) that it would reach its ‘Herzland’, its understanding recipient:

11 Hamburger, Translator’s note on “Wolfsbohne”, p. 397. 12 Hamburger, Introduction. In: Poems of Paul Celan, p. 32. 13 Don Paterson: Appendix. Fourteen Notes on the Version. In: Rainer Maria Rilke: Orpheus. A Version of Rilke. London: Faber and Faber, 2006, pp. 73–84. 14 Paterson, p. 78.

66 Das Gedicht kann, da es ja eine Erscheinungsform der Sprache und damit seinem Wesen nach dialogisch ist, eine Flaschenpost sein, aufgegeben in dem – gewiß nicht immer hoffnungsstarken – Glauben, sie könnte irgendwo und irgendwann an Land gespült werden, an Herzland vielleicht.15

It thus becomes apparent that Paterson’s and Hamburger’s conceptions of fidelity and trust differ in their focus. Paterson is concerned with how a translation may be evaluated, and if it is to be judged ‘faithful’ then there must be an essence against which such fidelity can be measured. By contrast, Ham- burger’s ‘faith’ refers to the translator’s relationship to the original poem. For a translator to be unfaithful, in Hamburger’s eyes, is therefore not for him to fail to respond to any putative essence, but the opposite: for him to attempt to attribute single meanings, roots, definitions, sources and dates to the poem. Instead, to keep faith with the poem is to do as Celan did, to trust that the reader will seek and find meaning in the poem without immediate reference to details beyond the text itself. Hamburger wrote that scholarship cannot ‘resolve’ the ‘essential difficulty and paradox’ of Celan’s poetry.16 Likewise, it is not the translator’s task to resolve that essential difficulty. Rather, this difficulty and paradox represent precisely the essence that Paterson denies, yet with which Hamburger aims to keep faith. To keep faith is therefore to keep open; to resist the temptation to gloss, explain and ground; to follow the poem into its own obscurities. Hamburger concludes the introduction to his translations of Celan’s poetry by making specific reference to this issue of trust, which, he claims, goes to the core of Celan’s poetic project:

I have picked out a few questions of interpretation as instances of Celan’s characteristic procedures, which rest on an extraordinary trust in his reader’s capacity to respond to the dominant gesture of a poem without access to the circumstantial data.17

Hamburger’s conviction that Celan expected his readers to respond to the original poem without falling back on ‘circumstantial data’ puts him, as translator, in a difficult position. It implies that if he were to seek a way in to the poem through mining it for all available details of its genesis and background, then he would be breaking faith with the poem and so with the poet himself. And yet the question remains as to whether he will be able to respond to – and reproduce – the ‘dominant gesture of the poem’ without access to those circumstantial details. To do so, Hamburger has to delve into scholarship while

15 Celan: Bremer Rede. In: Gesammelte Werke in sieben Bänden. Ed. by Beda Allemann and

Stefan Reichert. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, III, 185–86 (p. 186). 16 Hamburger, Introduction. In: Poems of Paul Celan, p. 20. 17 Hamburger, Introduction. In: Poems of Paul Celan, p. 34.

67 ensuring, firstly, that his versions do not bear any trace of that attention to extraneous data and, secondly, that they do not reduce the poem to the particular data that he has located. Two of Hamburger’s translations provide examples of the complexity of this approach. In the first case, with Hamburger’s rendering of Celan’s poem ‘Coagula’, the translator initially felt unable to ascertain the poem’s ‘dominant gesture’. He therefore required the work of scholarship to un- cover certain details that brought this gesture to light and consequently rendered it, for him, translatable. The second poem, ‘Eis, Eden’, presents an example of how Hamburger’s particular mode of translation may allow this gesture to shine through the new version even without recourse to scholarly studies. As the title suggests, Celan’s poem ‘Coagula’, from Atemwende, draws on alchemical imagery.18 In Atemwende, it forms a pair with the poem ‘Solve’ which, composed on the same day on which Celan completed ‘Coagula’, appears to refer to the alchemical process. This process, which starts with ‘calcinatio’, the reduction of the substance to an ashy powder by applying intense heat, continues by dissolving (‘solve’), purifying and coagulating (‘coagula’) it into gold. That final phase, coagulation, is associated within alchemical symbolism with the union of two opposing principles – sulphur and mercury, male and female, king and queen, sun and moon – and is often referred to as a ‘chymische Hochzeit’. Hamburger does not mention this alchemical context, but states that he felt unable to translate the poem until he had ascertained the position of the ‘Rosa’ figure – as the victim or survivor of violence – since this impacted on his rendering of the highly ambiguous final word ‘Kolben’. He therefore initially delayed translating this poem until he had discovered as much as he could about the poem’s potential allusions. In the meantime, scholars gradually identified such allusions, coming to focus in particular on the central position of Rosa Luxemburg as the poem’s ‘Rosa’ figure, while also acknowledging that it may refer to Celan’s Romanian acquaintance Rosa Leibovici, and to the character called Rosa and the ‘rosa Wunde’ in Kafka’s story ‘Ein Landarzt’.19 Variant editions of ‘Coagula’, which appeared after Hamburger had published his translation, include the full name ‘Rosa Luxemburg’ and so make plain the case for that particular allusion. Further, the conjugation in the poem of the name ‘Rosa’ with Romanian buffaloes recalls an episode from Luxemburg’s life. In 1917, while incarcerated in a prison in what was then Breslau, Luxemburg wrote of her distress at glimpsing the brutal treatment of buffaloes that were employed to draw carts delivering goods to the

18 Celan: Coagula. In: Gesammelte Werke, II, 83; Hamburger’s translation is printed in his Poems of Paul Celan, p. 295. 19 Franz Kafka: Ein Landarzt. In: Schriften. Tagebücher. Briefe. Kritische Aufgabe: Drucke zu

Lebzeiten. Ed. by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann. Frankfurt / Main: Fischer, 1994, pp. 252–61.

68 prison.20 Barbara Wiedemann reports that Celan referred to Luxemburg’s published letters from prison in notes in early 1962.21 Margarete Susman reported Luxemburg’s experience in her study Vom Geheimnis der Freiheit (1965), and Celan referred to it in a letter to his Romanian acquaintance Petre Solomon in November 1967.22 Here, Celan makes explicit the connection between the Romanian buffaloes seen by Luxemburg, and Kafka’s ‘Ein Landarzt’:

Les bisons roumains aperçus par Rosa Luxemburg à travers les barreaux de la prison convergent avec les trois mots du Médecin de campagne de Kafka – et avec ce nom: Rosa. Je coagule, j’essaie de faire coaguler.23

These words thus function as a retrospective interpretation of one element of ‘Coagula’, and impute to Celan a conscious association of alchemy with his own poetic project. In this context, the term ‘Kolben’ with which Celan closes his poem functions itself as a site of conjugation: it can be translated as a rifle butt, and therefore indicate Luxemburg’s execution by rifle shot as well as the brutal beating of the Romanian buffaloes; and it is the term used for the vessel in which alchemists conduct their experiments, the retort. It is that polysemous term ‘Kolben’ that caused Hamburger to delay translating ‘Coagula’ until he had ascertained the status of the Rosa figure. Following conversations with acquaintances of Celan and with Beda Allemann, who was preparing the historical-critical edition of Celan’s works, Hamburger learnt that ‘Rosa’ could refer both to Luxemburg and to Leibovici.24 Satisfied that ‘Rosa’ could refer to Luxemburg, he ‘risked’ the translation for the 1987 edition of his Celan translations, rendering ‘Kolben’ as ‘rifle-butt’. However, in 1990, Hamburger was reminded of the term’s alchemical connotations, and so concluded that his first attempt was ‘wrong’. He therefore altered it to render ‘Kolben’ as ‘retort’, which carries both the alchemical image and the echo of the rifle-shot.25

20 From a letter to Sophie Liebknecht, 24 December 1917. In: Rosa Luxemburg: Gesammelte Briefe, 5 vols, ed. by Georg Adler. Berlin: Dietz, 1984, V, pp. 349–50. 21 Barbara Wiedemann: Coagula. In: Paul Celan: Gedichte. Kommentierte Ausgabe. Frank-

furt / Main: Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 741–42. 22 Margarete Susman: Rosa Luxemburg. In: Vom Geheimnis der Freiheit. Gesammelte Auf-

sätze, 1914–1964, ed. by Manfred Schlösser. Darmstadt / Zurich: Agora, 1965, pp. 271–83. 23 Letter from Celan to Petre Solomon, 23 November 1967. In: Solomon: Corespondent¸a lui Paul Celan cu Petre Solomon. In: Paul Celan. Dimensiunea româneasc5. Bucharest: Kriterion, 1987, pp. 209–241 (p. 238). 24 Allemann’s assurances that the Rosa Luxemburg was implied were confirmed when the historical-critical edition of Atemwende was published in 1990, since an earlier draft of ‘Coagula’ includes the full name ‘Rosa Luxemburg’. Celan: Werke. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. I. Abteilung. Lyrik und Prosa. Band 7.2. Atemwende: Apparat. Ed. by Rolf

Bücher. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 1990, pp. 188–90. 25 Hamburger, On Translating Celan, p. 415.

69 Nevertheless, despite Hamburger’s own comments on the importance of scholarship for his translation of this poem, no immediate trace of that engagement is evident on the surface of the English translation. The translator has delved into scholarship and made use of the relevant factual information not to explain the final term, but as much as possible to allow that term to remain in the same ambiguous and polysemous relationship to the other terms in the poem as ‘Kolben’ does in the original. This instance of interaction between translation and scholarship thus makes plain the relationship between those two forms of textual engagement, and bears witness to the fact that Hamburger directed his translations at ‘those readers who are not scholars’. The translation does not explain the poem and so risk restricting it, but it reproduces the poem in all its obscurity and polysemy, thus giving the reader ‘such intimations of the original as translation is capable of giving’. If the translation of ‘Coagula’ was completed by way of scholarship, then Hamburger’s rendering of another poem with alchemical connotations, ‘Eis, Eden’, may be defined as one that succeeds by remaining outside of scholarship.26 It does not require scholarly research for its successful execution, as was the case with ‘Coagula’, yet its completed form remains open to the possible meanings that may be uncovered by such research. ‘Eis, Eden’ is key to an examination of Hamburger’s engagement with Celan’s poetry for three reasons. Firstly, it rhymes, and as such presents the translator with a particular problem. As one of the few rhyming poems among Celan’s later œuvre, this form is of particular significance, and for a translator to lose the rhyme in an attempt to remain faithful to the sense would arguably change the poem beyond recognition. This kind of poem thus focuses our attention onto the particular difficulty of poetic translation: that it requires that the sense and the form be conveyed in such a way that the relationship between them remains constant. Secondly, ‘Eis, Eden’ is exemplary of the status of all of Celan’s poems as forms of translation themselves, in that they have their roots in Celan’s readings and personal experiences, which are then combined in the poem into a new and unique formulation. Consequently, any translation of Celan’s poetry becomes a translation of a translation, and requires us to consider how much a translator must know of the poem’s ‘original’ – of its potential sources and impulses – if they are to produce a successful translation. One of these impulses in ‘Eis, Eden’ is the discourse of alchemy, which scholars have found to be implicit in many of the poem’s images, and this discourse indicates the third reason why a translation of ‘Eis, Eden’ is so significant. For just as Celan employed alchemical terminology in order to theorise his own poetic practice, so these terms may be used as a way of considering the nature of

26 Celan: Eis, Eden. In: Gesammelte Werke, I, 224. Hamburger’s translation is printed in: Poems of Paul Celan, p. 195.

70 translation and in particular of Hamburger’s translations of Celan’s poems. These three issues intertwine and interact in ‘Eis, Eden’ to raise and respond to central questions regarding Hamburger’s ‘faithful’ rendering of Celan’s poetry. ‘Eis, Eden’ is a prominent example of the status of Celan’s poetry as a combination of sources, intertexts and experiences. The alchemical motif proves useful in conceptualising this status, for the result of this conjugation is not a collection of its constituent parts, but rather a wholly new form, the components merged in such a way that the poem cannot be reduced to those constituents. ‘Eis, Eden’ itself comprises two key intertexts, which have been seized on by scholars in attempts to interpret the poem. The first to be identified is one that is indicated by the form itself. As Winfried Menninghaus notes, the strong rhythm sets the poem in stark contrast to the others in this cycle and consequently the poem seems to announce itself as the ‘Import eines Fremden’.27 Through resemblances in the form and imagery, Menninghaus then identifies this foreign import as the Christmas carol ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’, which narrates the birth of Christ ‘mitten im kalten Winter’.28 Secondly, investigations into Celan’s personal library have uncovered his annotations of an essay by Ernst Bloch from 1959 on the alchemical text Chymischer Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreutz Anno 1459.29 Bloch asserts that the alchemical process as practised by the Rosicrucians was aimed not at the fabrication of gold, but at the reversal of the existing world order, a return to an earthly paradise akin to the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Indeed, phrases underlined by Celan in his own copy of Bloch’s essay focus on this association of alchemy with resurrection, described as an ‘Ostertag contra Eis und Banden’, and as a ‘wake-up call’: ‘Wach auf, gefrorener Christ’.30 In her annotated edition of Celan’s poems, Barbara Wiedemann records which sections of Bloch’s essay were underlined by Celan, and so provides the raw materials for a compelling interpretation of the poem that would draw connections between the ice, Christian imagery and alchemical motifs, conjuring up an alchemical reaction that would seek to return the world to an earthly paradise.31 Reference to Luxemburg’s writings, as they were read and annotated by Celan, further compounds this association. In 1966, Celan underlined a sec-

27 Winfried Menninghaus: Wissen oder Nicht-Wissen. Überlegungen zum Problem des Zitats bei Celan und in der Celan-Philologie. In: Menninghaus and Werner Hamacher (eds): Paul

Celan. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 1988, pp. 170–90, p. 175. 28 ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’. In: Evangelisches Kirchen Gesangbuch, 34th edn. Hamburg: Wittig, 1972, p. 23. 29 Ernst Bloch: Andreäs “Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz anno 1459”. In: Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959, II, pp. 740–46. Celan’s copy of Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung is held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA) in Marbach am Neckar. 30 Bloch, p. 741. 31 Barbara Wiedemann: Eis, Eden. In: Paul Celan, Gedichte, pp. 678–79.

71 tion of Luxemburg’s writings, as cited by Susman, in which she makes an association between goodness and the alchemical process of solve and coagula: ‘Gut sein ist die Hauptsache. Einfach und schlicht gut sein, das löst und bindet alles und ist besser als alle Klugheit und Rechthaberei’.32 As Susman points out, this spiritual celebration of plain and simple goodness runs counter to the complex and non-spiritual realm of party politics, which ultimately led to Luxemburg’s murder. Luxemburg’s socialism is therefore best understood not within the framework of the formal Communism that developed in the interwar years, but as the consequence of her deep and lasting compassion for her fellow beings – which include the Romanian buffaloes – that led her to seek to fight injustice in all its forms. Thus Bloch’s assertion, that the Rosicrucians’ ‘higher alchemy’ aimed at a world in which social equality reigns, combines with Luxemburg’s association of alchemy and human goodness, to produce a clear correlation between the alchemical project and the utopian desire for a fair and good world. As such, ‘Eis, Eden’ may be read as a call-to-arms against perceived injustice, and in particular against the ‘gefrorener Christ’ who remains dormant in the midst of these abuses and unfreedom, characterised by Bloch as ‘Eis und Banden’. These intertexts have proved central to scholarship on Celan’s poem, but individually cannot be said to provide the key to the poem’s meaning. Menninghaus attempts to read the poem through its relationship to ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’, but ultimately concludes that such a focus on one element of the poem risks suppressing others and so producing a one-sided reading of the poem.33 An example of such an approach is provided by Fred Lönker, in his commentary on this poem (1997).34 Here, Lönker indeed focuses solely on the allusions to ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’, without any mention of alchemy, which results in a reading of the poem as highly negative. It is interpreted as a reversal of the Christmas carol, replacing the wintry landscape that forms the backdrop to Christ’s birth in the hymn with a ‘Totenlandschaft’ inundated by ice and inhabited by creatures frozen to death. Such scholarly knowledge of the components of this poem raises two questions when considering Hamburger’s treatment of it: firstly, whether Hamburger was aware of these apparent allusions; and secondly, whether such an awareness matters for his translation. I argue that, while such intertextual research does contribute to scholarly engagement with the poem, it need not be

32 Susman, p. 274. This underlining is dated by Celan 1. 11. 1966. Celan’s copy of Susman’s book is held in the DLA in Marbach. 33 Menninghaus, pp. 176 –77. Cf. Menninghaus: Anti Christ. Paul Celans zitierende Revision christlicher Kirchenlieder. In: Kaspar. Zeitschrift über den Umgang mit Literatur (1978), 13–23. 34 Fred Lönker: Eis, Eden. In: Jürgen Lehmann (ed.): Kommentar zu Paul Celans Die Niemandsrose. Heidelberg: Winter, 1997, pp. 108–11.

72 essential to the process of translation, provided that the translator is faithful to the ‘gesture of the poem as a whole’ – provided that, in other words, he follows it into its obscurities. In order to assess how this kind of translation functions, it is necessary to consider what a reader who ‘puts their trust’ in ‘Eis, Eden’, but does not recognise ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ or the alchemical allusions, gains from the poem, and how these impressions (the poem’s ‘essence’) are reproduced in the translation. Biblical allusions are manifest in the original poem, principally in the ‘Eden’ of the title, in the ‘Augenkind’ that evokes the ‘Christkind’, and in the resurrection in the final stanza. This allusive seam is intensified by a metre which Menninghaus designates a metrical citation, a ‘pastiche’ of the Volkslied form. Hamburger has reproduced the three stresses and the cross-rhyme that characterise this form and so allows the poem to do the same as the original: to evoke the hymnic qualities of the Volkslied (so evoking texts like ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’), which combines with the Christian imagery in the poem to render these religious associations one of the poem’s semantic layers. Crucially, Hamburger has succeeded in reproducing this sound without compromising the poem’s sense – at least, without radically altering the syntax or vocabulary – and it is at such points that this translator’s craft becomes particularly evident. An implicit and crucial idea contained in the notion that a reader may put their trust in Celan’s poems and the ability to draw meaning from them is that this meaning arises not only from the poem itself, but also from Celan’s other writings and, most immediately and significantly, from the present cycle. ‘Eis, Eden’ must be understood precisely in this way: as part of the whole cycle of poems in which it was printed, rather than in isolation. Within this cycle, and particularly in the constellation of poems formed by ‘Die Schleuse’, ‘Stumme Herbsgerüche’, ‘Eis, Eden’ and ‘Chymisch’, the loss that suffuses the poem, and that appears to refer to the Christian loss of paradise after Adam’s Fall, is lent a more recent identity.35 When read together, these poems create a constellation of the terms ‘Schwester’, ‘verlieren’ and ‘Gestalt’, and so create the impression of the loss of something close and palpable. Hamburger attempted as much as possible to retain the coherence of Celan’s cycles, and regretted instances when he felt unable to reflect that consistency.36 In the case of his translation of ‘Eis, Eden’, this section of the cycle is complete according to Celan’s original publication, and consequently the poems that form this constellation of images around loss are all present, so retaining the horizontal connections and associations between poems that contribute to a reading of ‘Eis, Eden’.

35 Celan: Gesammelte Werke, I, 222–28. Hamburger’s translations are printed in Poems of Paul Celan, pp. 190–203. 36 Hamburger, On Translating Celan, p. 414.

73 In ‘Die Schleuse’ (‘The Lock Gate’), for example, that which is ‘lost’ is designated as the word ‘sister’, a linguistic loss that is also associated with the loss of the Hebrew language, here represented by the terms ‘Kaddisch’ and ‘Yiskor’; and the loss of these Hebrew mourning prayers in turn indicates the lost potential for grief shared in the community. Here, ‘loss’ thereby encom- passes the poet’s mourning at the loss of his family and, more broadly, the loss of life in the Shoah. In the following poem, ‘Stumme Herbstgerüche’ (‘Dumb Autumn Smells’), that ‘lostness’ is again evoked, but is associated with a ‘palpable presence’. This evocation of absent presence, or present absence, also arises later in the cycle in the poem ‘Chymisch’ (‘Alchemical’), in the second stanza: ‘Great, grey / sisterly shape / near like all that is lost:’. In this final poem of this inner cycle, the loss again seems to allude to the Shoah, most patently in the description of burnt names, of ash and in the association of bodies and souls with smoke. So these poems cluster around ‘Eis, Eden’, their images and connotations echoing in that key term ‘Verloren’. By retaining the integrity of this constellation of poems, Hamburger’s translation of ‘Eis, Eden’ remains open to the same echoes and associations. One of the multiple associations evoked through this cyclical reading of ‘Eis, Eden’ is related to the ‘Land’ that is evoked in the first line. In Celan’s poem, the image may evoke both the lost paradise of Eden and, through the echoes of the poems surrounding it, the poet’s grief at the loss of his homeland, both in terms of the physical absence of his people (the Jews of the Bukovina) and the abstract loss of his homeland, which culturally and politically no longer exists. The phrase ‘Es ist ein Land Verloren’, and Hamburger’s rendering ‘There is a country Lost’, thereby allow for all of these associations, as well as the potential for others. Indeed, Hamburger’s use of the word ‘country’ makes yet more compelling that association with a geographical land, yet does not foreclose the biblical association. The success of Hamburger’s rendering becomes most apparent when set against others’ versions. John Felstiner, for example, renders the opening line: ‘There is a land called Lost’.37 The partici- ple ‘called’ is necessary to reproduce the metre, but in Hamburger’s translation it is nevertheless already implied in the capital ‘L’ on lost. Felstiner’s version closes down the line’s allusiveness, bringing it closer to the biblical lost paradise and distancing it from the array of associations that Celan’s and Hamburger’s lines allow. Hamburger’s capacity to keep faith with the poem’s ambiguities and difficulties is further evident in his rendering of the third line of ‘Eis, Eden’. Here, by translating ‘erforen’ as ‘died of frost’, Hamburger remains faithful to the integrity of the original language – the prefix ‘er-’ indicating death – and

37 John Felstiner: Ice, Eden. In: Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. New York: Norton, 2001, p. 155.

74 therefore reproduces the apparent paradox that whatever it is that has died still ‘glows and sees’ in the following line. To translate the term, as Felstiner does, as ‘numbed by frost’, irons out the apparent contradiction in Celan’s and Hamburger’s couplets: it is possible to be numbed and at the same time to glow and see. Nevertheless, it is precisely this removal of the jarring, apparently nonsensical factor, that ultimately renders Felstiner’s poem less mean- ingful than Celan’s and Hamburger’s, in that it reduces the polysemous nature of the poem. The suppression of death reduces the relationship between loss and the Shoah; as well as the allusion to the death of Christ, and therefore to his resurrection. This latter allusion in turn leaves space for the alchemical interpretation that has been brought to bear on the poem since Hamburger completed his translation. A similar moment can be found in the final line of the second stanza, in which Hamburger renders Celan’s ‘Augenkind’ as ‘eye-child’. In his introduction to these translations, Hamburger discusses the problem of translating Celan’s compounds, since English simply does not have the same capacity as German for creating such neologistic terms through compounding existing words.38 ‘Das Augenkind’ provides a key example of how Hamburger ad- dresses this issue. Rather than Felstiner’s ‘child of sight’, which again irons out the difficulty and complexity of the German term, ‘eye-child’ retains all the facets of ‘Augenkind’: it evokes the physical image, in particular the grotesque over-emphasis on eyes; it alienates through its neologistic quality; and it allows for the echo of the ‘Christkind’ that ‘Augenkind’ contains. Indeed, the assonance of ‘Eye’ and ‘Christ’ renders that parallel yet more striking in Hamburger’s translation. Hamburger’s rendering thus leaves the poem open to the possibility that ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ will later be identified as an intertext. Nevertheless, the use of the neologistic compound ‘eye-child’ requires a leap of faith on the translator’s part. It requires him to write something that does not make immediate ‘sense’, that raises more questions than answers, and casts more doubts than it resolves. In this way, Hamburger’s success at retaining the poem’s openness requires him to keep faith with the text to the point of reproducing its jarring moments and its ambiguities. To resist the temptation to explain these moments, to refuse to add in words where they appear to be missing in the original, or to restore to the original a grammatical and semantic integrity that appears to be lacking, is, perhaps counter-intui- tively, to allow the poem to continue to speak, beyond itself and into the future. To reproduce these moments that may initially appear nonsensical and may therefore be designated ‘hermetic’ by some readers is, on the contrary, to open

38 Hamburger, Introduction, p. 32.

75 the poem up, to render it, as Hamburger put it, ‘open to the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unpredeterminable’.39 In the introduction to his later editions of these translations, Hamburger evokes the image of dissolution, which resounds with alchemical connotations in the context of these considerations: ‘Yet it is as a translator, too, that I insist on the essential difficulty and paradox of his poetry. These can be illumined, but not resolved or dissolved, by scholarly research.’40 Oddly, this image appears to distance the conception of translation away from an association with alchemy. While Celan claims that he aims to coagulate, to fuse into a new whole, Hamburger’s intention is emphatically not any kind of fusion. He implies that such an action would reconcile what cannot be reconciled, namely the difficulty and complexity of Celan’s poems, by ironing out the tensions and contradictions that constitute the poems’ polysemy, and would therefore write over the original poem, dissolving it into the new version. The relationship between the translation and the original may thus be understood as one of tension rather than of fusion. The publication of Hambur- ger’s translations in dual-language editions makes this tension all the more palpable, for the reader is presented not with a new version that seeks to replace the original, nor to explain it. Rather, the translation interacts with the original to create a third space, constituted by the reader’s experience of both of the poems, an experience of continued openness and fruitful obscurity, with the hope and promise of future understanding. Thus the translation may take on a kind of alchemical significance. If the original poem is viewed as the site of alchemical reaction, whereby the elements of the poem combine with each other, with other poems, with theoretical texts by Celan and with putative intertexts, to create an ever-new form, then the translation may represent the continuation of this reaction. Whilst one element of the alchemist’s project is to produce the Philosopher’s Stone that will ensure the everlasting life of the individual, the translation, too, ensures the original poem’s vitality and endurance, precisely in its refusal to anchor the poem by rooting it in any one interpretation. Just as Celan ‘entrusted [his poems] to uncertainty’, so Hamburger does with his translations, and it is this trust that renders them rich and faithful renderings of Celan’s poems.41 And just as Celan did in his theoretical writings, so Hamburger succeeds in separating ‘obscurity’ from ‘hermeticism’: realising, in fact, that obscurity is necessary in order to keep the poem open and so is opposed to any hermetic intent. In this way, then, Hamburger remained faithful to those words inscribed by Celan in his copy of Die Niemandsrose: ‘ganz und gar nicht hermetisch’.

39 Hamburger, Introduction, p. 38. 40 Hamburger, Introduction, p. 24. 41 Hamburger, On Translating Celan, p. 421.