Paul Celan Was Born in Czernovitz

8/9/2019 Paul Celan Was Born in Czernovitz

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Paul Celan was born in Czernovitz, in Romania, in 1920. Until 1918, this region of Romania had formed part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a polyglot amalgam of nations

stretching from Austria in the west to the Balkans in the south-east. Though each region spoke itsown language, and many Jewish communities spoke Yiddish, German acted as the common

language for the empire as a whole. The speaking of a good German marked an individual as

both bourgeois and cultured, one who particpated in the cosmopolitan world of politics, art,literature and music.

Celan grew up speaking German at home and Romanian at school. He also understood Yiddish.His father's interest in Zionism (the movement dedicated to the refounding of a Jewish homeland

in Palestine) led to three year's education in a Hebrew school. Later he became fluent in French,Russian and Ukranian. A schoolfriend of Paul Celan wrote, 'We had no natural language. To

speak good German was something you had to achieve. You could do it, but it didn't come of itself.' (John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven 1995), p. 6) However,

German began as, and remained, his dominant language, in part through the insistence of hismother and her influence on his education. The first poet Celan remembered reading was Schiller

and he wrote his first known poems, as a teenager, in German.

German was both his mother's gift to him, which had made him a poet, and the weapon thatkilled her. The Germans deported his parents to labor camps in the Ukraine (ironically the region

from which much of Romania's 20th century Jewish population had fled in the nineteenthcentury to escape brutal pogroms) in the summer of 1942. Neither survived more than a few

months. Celan's father died of typhus: the Germans shot his mother that winter as unfit for work.Celan himself worked in several Jewish labor battalions before the Russians liberated Romania

in 1944. Unwilling to live under Russian domination, or the communism towards whichRomania moved in the 1940s, Celan moved first to Vienna, the one-time capital of the Austro-

Hungarian empire, and then to Paris.

Yet, though he could not live in a German-speaking culture, Celan could write in no other language. In 1948, just after he arrived in Paris, he wrote, "There's nothing in the world for

which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems isGerman.' (Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 56) Dennis Schmidt calls German 'the language of his [Paul

Celan's] deferred death.' Schmidt goes on to say that Celan's language is forced to "nourishitself...on words that have turned to 'black milk,' 'ash,' and the taste of cyanide on the tongue,

'bitter almonds,' by having been made serviceable for death." (Dennis Schmidt, Black Milk andBlue in Aris Fioretis, ed. Word Traces (Baltimore 1994), p. 114.

German thus represented both death and Celan's only hope of communicating the horror through

which European Jewry had lived. In the nearly thirty years that he wrote as a mature poet, Celandeveloped a German all his own, creating many more, and many less immediately

comprehensible, metaphoric compounds like Deathfugue. The vocabulary of the Germanimplicated in the Holocaust was inadequate, for Celan, to the task of expressing the agony of

extermination. The creativity of his language and its metaphorical density became acts of defiance against the German that had executed his parents and the many millions like them. In

his hands, language broke apart on the wheel of history and reformed in poetry. Death Fugue by



Paul Celan Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundownwe drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at nightwe drink it and drink itwe dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents

he writeshe writes when dusk falls to Germany your goldenhair Margaretehe writes it ans steps out of doors and the stars areflashing he whistles his pack outhe whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for agravehe commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at nightwe drink you in the morning at noon we drink you atsundownwe drink and we drink you

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpentshe writeshe writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margareteyour ashen hair Sulamith we dig a grave in the breezesthere one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot youothers sing now and playhe grabs at teh iron in his belt he waves it hiseyes are blue

jab deper you lot with your spades you others playon for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at nightwe drink you at at noon in the morning we drink youat sundownwe drink and we drink youa man lives in the house your golden hair Margareteyour ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the serpentsHe calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germanyhe calls out more darkly now stroke your strings thenas smoke you will rise into air then a grave you will have in the clouds there onelies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at nightwe drink you at noon death is a master from Germanywe drink you at sundown and in the morning we drinkand we drink youdeath is a master from Germany his eyes are bluehe strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is truea man lives in the house your golden hair Margaretehe sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave inthe air He plays with the serpents and daydreams death is



a master from Germany

your golden hair Margareteyour ashen hair Shulamith

The Triumph Of Achilles by Paul Celan In the story of Patroclusno one survives, not even Achilleswho was nearly a god.Patroclus resembled him; they worethe same armor.

Always in these friendshipsone serves the other, one is less than the other:the hierarchyis always apparant, though the legendscannot be trusted--their source is the survivor,the one who has been abandoned.

What were the Greek ships on firecompared to this loss?

In his tent, Achillesgrieved with his whole being

and the gods sawhe was a man already dead, a victimof the part that loved,the part that was mortal.

Landscape by Paul Celan tall poplars -- human beings of this earth!black pounds of happiness -- you mirror them to death!

I saw you, sister, stand in that effulgence.

Twelve Years by Paul Celan The linethat remained, thatbecame true: . . . your house in Paris -- becomethe alterpiece of your hands.



Breathed through thrice,shone through thrice....................

It's turning dumb, turning deaf behind our eyes.I see the poison flower in all manner of words and shapes.

Go. Come.Love blots out its name: toyou it ascribes itself.

Night Ray by Paul Celan Most brightly of all burned the hair of my evening loved one:to her I send the coffin of lightest wood.Waves billow round it as round the bed of our dream in Rome;it wears a white wig as I do and speaks hoarsely:

it talks asI

do whenI

grant admittance to hearts.It knows a French song about love,I sang it in autumnwhen I stopped as a tourist in Lateland and wrote my lettersto morning.

A fine boat is that coffin carved in the coppice of feelings.I too drift in it downbloodstream, younger still than your eye.Now you are young as a bird dropped dead in March snow,now it comes to you, sings you its love song from France.You are light: you will sleep through my spring till it's over.I am lighter:in front of strangers I sing.

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Paul Celan Was Born in Czernovitz