t_i_n is blushing  Can I hide under your shell, martle (do martles have shells?).

James, they're not, though they said they might pay me for the review ;-) ... Believe it or not, the last 5 years' worth of Sainsbury's shopping is flying me out!

schoolboy error, Bryn

(bad luck though, I expect to do exactly the same next year)

t_i_n, you corporate slave, I expected at least Waitrose

Well, the following comes from Ian Findlay's passage on 'Denk Dir' in his introduction to the complete Fadensonnen, in which both poems appear:

The poem was begun on 7 June 1967, the day on which Jerusalem's Old City and Temple Wall were regained by Israeli soldiers during the Six Day War; that summer it was published in Switzerland, Israel (in German and Hebrew translation), and later also in Germany. Reference to 'the moorsoldier of Masada' in the poem's second line establishes an axis between two distinct moemtns. The first is the last resistance of Jewish patriots against the Roman occupation of Palestine in the mountaintop fortress of Masada in 72-73 CE, a siege which followed the fall of Jerusalem and desturction of the Temple, and which ended in the self-slaughter of Masada's defenders. The second moment concerns the concentration camp established by the National Socialist regime at Börgermoor in Westphalia in the 1930s, remembered for the resistance song of the Moorsoldaten interned there. Not only does this song, by its very existence, affirm the central proposition of Fadensonnen, but its first line can also be read as a cue for the first poem in the later eponymous volume: 'Wohin auch das Auge blicket, / Moor und Heide nur ringsum' [Wherever the eye travels, / Moor and heath lie round]. Running through 'Die Moorsoldaten' is the yearning for homeland ('Heimat') which Celan translates into the first paragraph of his poem. Vitally, however, his model refuses any note of lament: 'Doch für uns gibt es kein Klagen. / Ewig kann's nicht Wintersein. / Einmal werden froh wir sagen: / Heimat, du bist wieder mein!' [And yet we do not mourn. / Winter cannot last forever. / One day we'll declare with joy: / Homeland, you are mine once more!] In place of Klage (complaint, in its familiar and more formal senses, is here a resource either unavailable or exhausted), Celan's poetry - along with 'Die Moorsoldaten' - adopts the adversarial voice of Anklage: implicitly or explity, it indicts. This attitude of more than mourning bears importantly on the memorial fuction both described in and performed by 'Denk Dir', whose title phrase, meaning 'just think' or 'imagine', might also be translated by an admonitory 'remember'. The poem's last paragraph records that 'this came to me, / [...] from the ungraveable' - this being either the poem itself or the 'piece / of habitable earth' recovered in its penultimate paragraph. In either case, the provenance of this definite but indeterminate pronoun is the 'Unbestattbare', that which cannot be buried. The traditional function of the memorial event - its laying to rest of the dead - is denied this particular act. There being something implacable about remembrance in 'Denk Dir', it follows that memory should also prove unplaceable. The poem implicates the refrain of the Börgermoor inmates, which describes a routine of exhumation as much as inhumation: 'Wir sind die Moorsoldaten / und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins Moor' [We are the moorsoldiers / working spade into peat].
      The memorialising and aspiration towards homeland becomes that which cannot be buried, 'undying / in the extreme, / against / every barb in the wire'. In these lines we observe a deformation already discussed in relation to 'Hendaye': the 'Stacheldraht' named in the song of 'Die Moorsoldaten' becomes an image whose connotation of sacrifice and atonement is no more acceptable than that of confinement. Remembrance of 'Heimat' becomes in turn a locus of admonition and apostrophe; although, together with the moorsoldier, it is made an intern, 'ungraveable' memory resists interment. Internalised, and against the grain of a past which would otherwise bury it, the 'Unbestattabare' will not be laid to rest.'

(Ian Findlay - 'When and Where? Paul Celan's Fadensonnen' in Paul Celan - Fathomsuns and Benighted/Fadensonnen & Eingedunkelt, translated Ian Findlay (New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2001), pp. 23-24)

Whilst Findlay is certainly aware of Felstiner's work (as he references it elsewhere), his interpretation at the very least brings in the Six-Day War; in light of where his arguments are pointing in the above-mentioned passage, consider also the following:

Celan's apostrophe to the 'irdisch-unsichtbare / Freistatt' [earthly-invisible / franchise] of 'Die Teuflischen'. 'Freistatt' (meaning 'asylum) is another place occupied 'instead', offering sanctuary against temporal power, or refuge for - if not from - one's own condition. IN the absence of any other place which can house liberty or give shelter, this place, in spite of its potential to prosecute rather than protect, is determined upon. 'Freistatt' is the near neighbour of Freistatt ('free state') and elects as a synonym Heimstatt. The utopian aspect of this place, however named, is a matter of exigency; it repsents a homestead in home's stead.

This is the poem in question:

Die Teuflischen
Zungenspäße der Nacht
verholzen in deinem Ohr,

Mit den Blicken Rückwärts -
gesträhltes
springt vor,

die vertanen
Brückenzölle, geharft,
durchmeißeln die Kalkschlucht vor uns,

der meerige Lichtsumpf
bellt an uns hoch -
an dir,
irdisch-unsichtbare
Freistatt.

Could this 'irdisch-unsichtbare Freistatt' have something to do with the Zionist state?


Also, in Celan's address to the Hebrew Writers' Association in Israel on October 14th, 1969, he said:

'I came to you, to Israel, because I needed you.

I have rarely felt as strongly as now, after all I have seen and heard, that I have done the right thing - I hope not for myself alone.

I believe I have an idea of what Jewish loneliness means, and I understand, among other things, your grateful pride in every bit of green you planted and which now refreshes all that pass by. As I also understand the joy over every newly won, felt and fulfilled word which rushes to sustain the person who turns to it....Here, in your inner and outer landscape, I find much of the compulsion toward truth, much of the self-evidence, much of the world-open uniqueness of great poetry. And I believe I have encountered the calm and confident resolution to hold on to what is human.'

(in Paul Celan - Collected Prose, translated Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), pp. 57-58.)

A mainstay of Zionist propaganda is that the Israelis came to Palestine, 'a people without land for a land without people', where they 'made the desert bloom'. Celan would surely have been aware of this, and his reference to 'every bit of green you planted' should in my opinion be read in that context. And is the talk of 'your inner and outer landscape' really a purely spiritual affair, in light of the very concrete meanings such terms had, palpably obviously to anyone there at the time? As far as the 'compulsion toward truth', in light of the fact that the 1967 war was built upon propaganda from beginning to end, as indeed was (and is) most of Zionist mythology, there is more than a little unfortunate irony (maybe not intentional) in Celan's remarks.

The other books I have on Celan, including those of Szondi (marvellous book, for those who don't know it - includes the notorious rewriting of Adorno, to become 'After Auschwitz, one can no longer write poetry, except with respect to Auschwitz') and Lacoue-Labarthe (also a fantastic book), and collections with commentaries, do not discuss 'Denk Dir'.

For sure, yes.


You often assume I'm proposing major conclusions from simply raising certain subjects (also with orientalism/exoticism - most of what I write is massively critical of the whole musicological industry around that) - I'm not on the whole, just interested in opening them up for debate, that's all. That post was a response to Carl's one, simply to suggest that links between Celan's late poetry and events in the Middle East might be a little more complicated than simply being the invention of John Felstiner.

Here is ...auch keinerlei Friede with two translations...

Even if it's meant that way, which I don't really accept, he wouldn't have been the only prominent artist to have shown such support. Bernstein, Mehta, Stern, Barenboim, du Pré all travelled to Israel at the time; du Pré and Barenboim married there just after the Six Day War. Of course Barenboim's gone on to do some rather different and extremely praiseworthy work recently...

What's most important in Celan's case is the way in which the fabric of his work negates any kind of heroic gestures that would allow his work to be misinterpreted or misappropriated. At least I thought it did until I read the Felstiner article. Actually I still think it does.

One of our number has written the following:

"As far as I am concerned, the ‘modernist project’ is still in its early stages, at the beginnings of what Konrad Boehmer (paraphrasing Monteverdi) has referred to as the ‘terza prattica’, crucially informed by what is becoming an ‘age of digital reproduction’ beginning from the invention of electricity, in the same way as modal music has its roots in the human voice and tonal music in instruments. It is far too early to speculate meaningfully on what the implications of this may end up being. Nevertheless we ignore it at our peril.  For me this means resisting the evaporation of meaning, significance and process which often appears to be the defining characteristic of contemporary art, indeed is actually celebrated in the rhetoric of postmodernism. It does not mean scouring the cultural past for attractive, amusing and above all ‘accessible’ trouvailles, or retreating from reality into mysticism. It does not mean rediscovering tonality as if one would ‘rediscover’ that the earth is in fact flat or that the subconscious does not exist or that mass and energy are not interconvertible or that ‘the Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down’. It means abandoning all affirmation save that the work of art exists, as a token of the possibility of human dignity."

The last sentence seems particularly important to me...

That lots of prominent artists travelled to Israel at the time (some of them expressing support for the Zionist conquest, I believe) doesn't make the argument about the complicity of post-Holocaust writing with Zionist expansionism any the less important. It's at least a possibility that Barenboim's (much) later actions constituted something of a wish to (partially) atone, under the influence of his friend Edward Said.  Not everyone involved with the Palestinian cause believes Barenboim's work to be unequivocally praiseworthy, but that's another story...


Can you elaborate upon that? I'm not simply looking to condemn Celan on these grounds, just think this possible aspect of his work is a legitimate one for consideration. Indeed that could be said about a fair amount of post-Holocaust work. I find it hard to believe that many of the claims for Celan's importance would have such weight were it not for the historical and political considerations that are brought to bear upon such appreciation - in that context, surely the very meanings of that historical/political dimension ought to be scrutinised a bit?


Would that apply to a work of art created from the point of view of a right-wing Likud sympathiser who was also a Holocaust survivor as well? What constitutes 'the work of art' (i.e. what makes it 'art'?), and 'human dignity' in this context? That last sentence may be true, but does that mean that one should not look at such works of art critically? What about the latest Israeli Eurovision Song Contest entry? http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2024691,00.html

But why are you so unequivocal that to find any such resonances in the text is a form of misinterpretation? Are you 100% sure that Celan did not have a single thought, in the context of writing the poem, about the 1967 war that raged at the time?


Does that apply to interpretations of Celan's work in general that relate the poetry to the events of WW2 and the Holocaust, surely a fundamental element in most Celan scholarship? He may not 'clearly' mean things, but they undoubtedly inform his work - I doubt anyone would deny that in the case of the Holocaust. If it can be true for that event, why might it not be true for other events as well?


Even if one does not accept Felstiner's didactic interpretations, that doesn't make an invocation of the issue of Zionist expansion in the context of Celan's poetry an arbitrary exercise.


I have read quite a lot of the work. But we're talking about a particular poem here. More widely, the ways in which certain writing related to the Holocaust might equally well serve reactionary as well as progressive causes is a very real issue today, I believe, not least when American neo-cons and right-wing Zionists invoke the subject at every opportunity (there's a prominent strand of American political opinion that has done so ever since 1945 in order to bolster claims of the superiority of their own society and culture, and that's especially vociferous nowadays). These questions are not irrelevant to Celan (nor to numerous other figures).


Maybe - but why is that not a 'work of art' as well? And what precisely is the relevance of the quotation you provided in the context of this discussion?