Inner Workings Read online

  What might have been the word Celan was expecting? ‘Pardon’, suggests Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in his book on Celan and Heidegger. But he soon revises his guess. ‘I was wrong to think . . . that it was enough to ask forgiveness. [The extermination] is absolutely unforgivable. That is what [Heidegger] should have said.’12

  To Lacoue-Labarthe, Celan’s poetry is ‘in its entirety, a dialogue with Heidegger’s thought’. (p. 33) It is this approach to Celan, dominant in Europe, that has done most to take him out of the orbit of the ordinary educated reader. But there is an opposing school, to which Felstiner clearly adheres, which reads Celan as a fundamentally Jewish poet whose achievement it has been to force back into German high culture (with its ambition to locate its ideal origins in classical Greece), and into the German language, the memory of a Judaic past that a line of German thinkers culminating in Heidegger had tried to obliterate. In this view Celan certainly answers Heidegger but, having answered him, leaves him behind.

  Celan began his professional life as a translator and continued to do translations to the end, principally from French into German but also from English, Russian, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and (in collaboration) Hebrew. Two volumes of his six-volume Collected Works are given over to his translations. In English Celan devoted himself particularly to Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare. Though his German Dickinson is less rhythmically jagged than the original, he seemed to find in her a kind of compression, syntactic and metaphorical, that he could learn from. As for Shakespeare, he returned again and again to the sonnets. His versions are breathless, urgent, questioning; they do not try to imitate Shakespeare’s grace. As Felstiner puts it, Celan sometimes ‘[edges] beyond dialogue with the English into argument’, rewriting Shakespeare in accord with his sense of his own times. (p. 205)

  For his own translations of Celan, Felstiner takes hints – as no translator before him has done – from Celan’s manuscript revisions and recorded readings, as well as from French versions approved by Celan. An example will show what use he makes of these researches. Celan’s longest poem, ‘Engführung’ (‘Stretto’), begins with the words ‘Verbracht ins / Gelände / mit der untrüglichen Spur’, removed into the terrain (or territory) with the unerring (or unmistakable) track (or trace). What is the best translation of verbracht? A French translation of the poem overseen by Celan uses the word déporté. However, if we check Celan’s German version of the voice-over to Alain Resnais’ documentary film about the death camps, Night and Fog, we find French déporter translated by German deportieren. Deportieren is the word regularly used in official documents for the deportation of prisoners or populations, where it has an abstract and euphemistic colour. To avoid such euphemism, Felstiner eschews the cognate English word deported. Instead, recalling the idiomatic use of verbracht by internees, he translates it as ‘taken off’: ‘Taken off into / the terrain . . .’ (SPP, pp. 118–19)

  Many of the translations in Felstiner’s Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan already appear embedded in the text of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, but for republication they have been revised and in most cases refined. Part of Felstiner’s enterprise in the earlier book was to explain, in terms that a reader without German will understand, the nature of problems that Celan sets for a translator, from unexplained allusions on the one hand to compressed or compounded or invented words on the other, and how he, Felstiner, has responded case by case. Inevitably this entails justifying his own strategies and word-choices, and thus to one of the more unfortunate features of the book: an element of self-promotion.

  Among recent translators of Celan, Felstiner, Popov and McHugh (hereafter Popov-McHugh), and Pierre Joris stand out. If Joris is less immediately engaging than the other two, that may be because he has set himself a more difficult task: whereas Felstiner and Popov-McHugh claim the freedom to select the poems they find most congenial (and, by implication, to avoid those that frustrate their best efforts), Joris gives us the two late collections Atemwende (Breathturn; 1967) and Fadensonnen (Threadsuns; 1968) in their entirety, some two hundred poems in all. Since it is by now accepted that Celan composed in sequences and cycles, with poems within a given volume referring backward and forward to other poems, his project is to be applauded. It does, however, bring problems in its train. There are plenty of incompletely achieved poems in Celan, and, more to the point, plenty of moments of near total obscurity. The temperature of Joris’s pages is, understandably, not always white hot.13

  Felstiner selects and translates about a hundred and sixty poems, distributed over the whole of Celan’s career, among them some moving early lyrics. Popov-McHugh’s selections come mainly from the late work. The overlap between their two volumes is slight: fewer than twenty poems. Only a handful of poems are common to all three translators.

  Between Felstiner and Popov-McHugh it is hard to choose. The solutions that Popov-McHugh find to the problems set by Celan are sometimes dazzlingly creative, but Felstiner has his brilliant moments too, most notably in his ‘Deathfugue’, where the English is in the end drowned out by German (‘Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland’). (SPP, pp. 31–33) Now and again there are substantive differences on how to parse, and therefore to understand, Celan’s knotted, compacted syntax; in such cases Felstiner is usually the more dependable.

  Felstiner is a redoubtable Celan scholar, but Popov-McHugh are no slouches in the scholarly department themselves. Felstiner’s limitations emerge when Celan calls for a light touch, for instance in the poem ‘Selbdritt, selbviert’, which relies on folk-song patterns and nonsense formulas. Popov-McHugh’s version is witty and lyrical, Felstiner’s too sobersided.

  Celan’s is not an expansive music: he seems to compose word by word, phrase by phrase, rather than in long breath units. While giving each word and phrase its full weight, the translator has to create rhythmic momentum too.

  ich ritt durch den Schnee, hörst du,

  ich ritt Gott in die Ferne – die Nahe, er sang,

  es war

  unser letzter Ritt . . .

  writes Celan.

  I rode through the snow, do you hear,

  I rode God into the distance – the nearness, he sang.

  it was

  our last ride . . .

  writes Felstiner. (SPP, pp. 138-9)

  I rode through the snow, do you read me,

  I rode God far – I rode God

  near, he sang.

  it was

  our last ride . . .

  write Popov-McHugh. (p. 5)

  Felstiner’s lines are rhythmically lifeless. Popov-McHugh’s ‘I rode God far – I rode God / near’ is not there in the original, but it would be hard to argue that its forward drive is inappropriate.

  There are many places, on the other hand, when the roles are reversed and Felstiner emerges as the more daring and inventive. ‘Wenn die Totenmuschel heranschwimmt / will es hier läuten,’ writes Celan: when the shell of the dead comes swimming up / there will be peals of bells here. ‘When death’s shell washes up on shore,’ write Popov-McHugh, merely going through the motions. (p. 1) ‘When the deadman’s conch swims up,’ writes Felstiner, leaping from shell to conch and to the conch’s trumpet-like, annunciatory function. (SPP, p. 89)

  There are also seemingly obvious points that Popov-McHugh miss. In one poem a Wurfholz, a throwing-stick, is flung out into space and returns. Felstiner translates the word by ‘boomerang’, Popov-McHugh inexplicably by ‘flung wood’. (SPP, p. 179; Popov-McHugh p. 11)

  In another poem Celan writes of a word that falls into the pit behind his forehead and continues to grow there: he compares the word to the ‘Siebenstern’ (seven-star), the flower whose learned name is Trientalis europea. In an otherwise excellent version, Popov-McHugh translate Siebenstern simply as ‘starflower’, failing to pick up the specifically Jewish resonances with the six-pointed Star of David and the seven-branched menorah. Felstiner expands the word to ‘sevenbranch starflower’. (SPP, p. 195; Popov-McHugh p. 12)

  On t
he other hand, the flower known in German as die Zeitlose, the timeless (Colchicum autumnale), is unimaginatively translated by Felstiner as ‘the meadow saffron’, while Popov-McHugh, with justifiable liberty, rename it ‘the immortelle’. (SPP, p. 201; Popov-McHugh p. 13)

  Sometimes, then, it is Felstiner who hits on exactly the right formulation, sometimes Popov-McHugh, to the point where one feels one could stitch together from their respective versions – with the occasional hint from Joris – a composite text that would improve on all three. Such a procedure would not be far-fetched or impracticable, given the stylistic commonality of their versions, a commonality stemming of course from Celan.

  All three – Felstiner in his biography of Celan, Popov-McHugh in their notes, Joris in his two introductions – have illuminating things to say about Celan’s language. Joris is particularly telling on Celan’s agonistic relation to German:

  Celan’s German is an eerie, nearly ghostly language; it is both mother-tongue, and thus firmly anchored in the realm of the dead, and a language the poet has to make up, to recreate, to re-invent, to bring back to life . . . Radically dispossessed of any other reality he set about to create his own language – a language as absolutely exiled as he himself. To try to translate it as if it were current, commonly spoken or available German – i.e. to find a similarly current English or American ‘Umgangssprache’ – would be to miss an essential aspect of the poetry. (Breathturn, pp. 42–3)

  Celan is the towering European poet of the middle decades of the twentieth century, one who, rather than transcending his times – he had no wish to transcend them – acted as a lightning rod for their most terrible discharges. His unremitting, intimate wrestlings with the German language, which form the substrate of all his later poetry, come across in translation as, at best, overheard rather than heard directly. In this sense translation of the later poetry must always fail. Nevertheless, two generations of translators have striven, with striking resourcefulness and devotion, to bring home in English what can be brought. Others will without doubt follow.

  (2001)

  9 Günter Grass and the Wilhelm Gustloff

  GÜNTER GRASS BURST upon the literary scene in 1959 with The Tin Drum, a novel which, with its mix of the fabulous – a child hero who as a protest against the world around him refuses to grow – and the realistic – a densely textured realisation of prewar Danzig – announced the arrival in Europe of magic realism.

  Made financially independent by the success of The Tin Drum, Grass threw himself into campaigning for Willy Brandt’s Social Democrats. After the Social Democrats came to power in 1969, however, and particularly after Brandt resigned in 1974, Grass grew estranged from mainstream politics, occupying himself more and more with feminist and ecological issues. Throughout this evolution he nevertheless remained a believer in reasoned debate and in deliberate if cautious social progress. His chosen totem was the snail.

  Having been among the first to attack the consensus of silence about the complicity of ordinary Germans in Nazi rule – a silence whose causes and consequences have been explored by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in their groundbreaking work of psychohistory The Inability to Mourn – Grass is freer than most to enter the current debate in Germany about silence and silencing, taking up, in a characteristically cautious and nuanced way, a position that until the turn of the century only the radical right had dared to champion in public: that ordinary Germans – not just those who perished in the camps or died opposing Hitler – have a claim to be numbered among the victims of World War II.

  Questions about victimhood, about silence, and about the rewriting of history are at the heart of Grass’s 2003 novel, Crabwalk, whose main character and narrator arrives in the world during the dying throes of the Third Reich. Paul Pokriefke’s birthday is January 30, a date with some symbolic resonance in German history. On January 30, 1933, the Nazis took power. And on the same day in 1945 Germany suffered its worst maritime disaster ever, a real-life disaster in the midst of which the fictional Paul was born. Paul is thus a kind of midnight’s child in Salman Rushdie’s sense, a child fingered by fate to give voice to his times.

  Paul, however, would prefer to shirk his destiny. Sliding through life unnoticed suits his taste. A journalist by trade, he trims his sails to the political wind blowing strongest. In the 1960s he writes for the conservative Springer press. When the Social Democrats come to power he becomes a rather half-hearted left liberal; later he takes up ecological issues.

  There are, however, two powerful people behind him, both nagging him to write the story of the night on which he was born: his mother and a shadowy figure so like the writer Günter Grass that I will call him ‘Grass’.

  Pokriefke is Paul’s mother’s name; his father’s identity is unknown even to his mother. But from his mother Paul learns that he is connected in an accidental way with an important Nazi, Landesgruppenleiter (regional commander) Wilhelm Gustloff. Gustloff – a real-life personage – was in the 1930s stationed in Switzerland with orders to gather intelligence and recruit expatriate Germans and Austrians to the fascist cause. In 1936 a Jewish student of Balkan background named David Frankfurter called at Gustloff’s home in Davos and shot him dead, after which he gave himself up to the police. ‘I fired the shots because I am a Jew. I . . . have no regrets,’ Frankfurter reportedly said.1 Tried by a Swiss court and sentenced to eighteen years, Frankfurter was expelled from the country after serving half his time. He went to Palestine and subsequently worked in the Israeli defence ministry.

  Back in Germany the death of Gustloff was seized upon as an opportunity to create a Nazi martyr and stir up anti-Jewish feeling. The body was ceremonially brought back from Switzerland and the ashes buried in a memorial grove on the shore of Lake Schwerin with a four-metre high memorial stone. Streets and schools were named after Gustloff, even a ship.

  The cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff was launched in 1937 as part of the National Socialist programme of recreation for the working class, a programme known as Kraft durch Freude, strength through joy. It carried 1,500 passengers at a time in classless accommodation on trips to the Norwegian fjords, Madeira, and the Mediterranean. Soon, however, more pressing uses were found for it. In 1939 it was sent to bring back the Condor Legion from Spain. When war broke out it was outfitted as a hospital ship. Later it became a training ship for the German navy, and finally a refugee transport.

  In January of 1945 the Gustloff sailed from the German port of Gotenhafen (now Polish Gdynia), heading westward and crammed with some ten thousand passengers, for the most part German civilians fleeing the advancing Red Army, but also wounded soldiers, trainee U-boat sailors, and members of the Women’s Auxiliary. Its mission was therefore not without a military side. In the icy waters of the Baltic it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine under the command of Captain Aleksandr Marinesko. Some twelve hundred survivors were picked up; everyone else died. The death toll makes it the worst maritime disaster in history.

  Among the survivors is a girl (fictional) named Ursula (‘Tulla’) Pokriefke in an advanced state of pregnancy. In the boat that rescues her Tulla gives birth to a son, Paul. Put ashore with her baby, she tries to make her way west through the Russian lines but ends up in Schwerin in the Russian zone, site of the Gustloff memorial.

  By birth, then, Paul is tenuously linked to Wilhelm Gustloff. A more disturbing link emerges decades later, in 1996, when, idly browsing the Internet, Paul comes across a website called www.blutzeuge.de, where the ‘Comrades of Schwerin’ keep Gustloff’s memory alive. (A Blutzeuge is a blood oath. Blutzeuge day, November 9, was a sacred date on the Nazi calendar, the day on which the SS reaffirmed their oath.) From familiar turns of phrase he begins to suspect that the so-called Comrades are no more and no less than his son Konrad, a high school student, whom he rarely sees now that the boy has elected to live with his grandmother Tulla in Schwerin.

  Konrad, it emerges, has become obsessed with the Gustloff affair. For his history class he has written a
paper on the Kraft durch Freude programme, which his teachers have banned him from reading on the grounds that the topic is ‘inappropriate’ and the paper itself ‘severely infected with Nationalist Socialist thinking’. He has tried to present the same paper at a meeting of the local neo-Nazis, but it is too scholarly for his shaven-headed, beer-swilling audience. Since then he has restricted himself to his website, where under the code-name ‘Wilhelm’ he proposes Gustloff to the world as an authentic German hero and martyr, and repeats his grandmother’s claim that the classless Kraft durch Freude cruise ships were an embodiment of true socialism. (pp. 196, 202)

  ‘Wilhelm’ soon meets with a hostile response. Writing back to the website under the name ‘David’, a respondent asserts that Frankfurter was the true hero of the story, a hero of Jewish resistance. On his computer screen Paul watches as his son and the putative Jew argue back and forth.

  But a mere contest of words proves not to be enough for Konrad. He invites ‘David’ – who turns out to be of his own age – to Schwerin, and on the site of the demolished Gustloff monument shoots him as Frankfurter had shot Gustloff. Soon it emerges that his victim’s real name was Wolfgang, and that he was not a Jew at all but had been so possessed by feelings of guilt over the Holocaust that he had tried to live as a Jew in his German household, wearing a yarmulke and demanding that his mother keep a kosher kitchen.

  Konrad is unmoved by the revelation. ‘I shot because I am a German,’ he says at his trial, echoing Frankfurter’s words, ‘and because the eternal Jew spoke through David.’ Cross-examined, he admits he has never met a real Jew, but denies that is relevant. While he has nothing against Jews in the abstract, he says, Jews belong in Israel, not in Germany. Let Jews honour Frankfurter if they wish, and Russians Marinesko; it is time for Germans to honour Gustloff. (p. 204)