Category Archives: Nomadics

Ilya Kaminsky on Paul Celan, Poetry Magazine

Of strangeness that Wakes us by Ilya Kaminsky

Published Poetry Magazine, January 2013.  A Publication of the Poetry Foundation

Todesfuge, by Paul Celan is a poem that I have mentioned here on Poethead in a variety of guises since I first read the poet Paul Celan in Fathomsuns’ and ‘Benighted’ (Carcanet, Trans. by Ian fairley)

Later, I went on to acquire the book, Paul Celan  Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner which has a chapter entitled, ‘A Fugue After Auschwitz (1944-45 ) /your ashen hair Shulamith’, detailing Felstiner’s approach to the translation of Todesfuge. I blogged my reading of Todesfuge  here .

In many ways I do not feel as if I will ever finish with the reading of that poem. I feel that this blog space is too limited to write about Paul Celan and his dedicated translators including, Ian Fairley, Pierre Joris, and John Felstiner. However, when an interesting article or translation of Celan emerges I link to it here. Poetry Magazine (January 2013) has an article on Celan’s poetry, including some discussion of Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge. The text of the Felstiner translation of Todesfuge is included in Of strangeness that Wakes us by  by Ilya Kaminsky.

Here Kaminsky discusses Celan’s alleged hermeticism , which the poet himself denied. He looks at the issues of expressing the experience of the Jewish poet Post-Holocaust and at Adorno’s exhortation that ‘it is barbaric to write poetry after the Holocaust’.

Poetry had to be written after the Holocaust, as art had to occur. Weil or Tuominen would describe poetry written in cataclysmic times as a poetry of necessity. 

The expression of the WWII diaspora poet in the great Todesfuge becomes, in Felstiner’s words an encapsulation of or/ the Guernica of Post-War European Literature. Those readers of Celan who come to Poethead to link to Celan’s works will be intrigued by Kaminsky’s discussion on Celan’s poetic-process, his approach to language, to the creative-process, and to his expressing of  human catastrophe

On Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge Kaminsky says,

‘In my private library, this is one of the great translations of the twentieth century. But the word “translation” to my mind is misleading. This translation (or any great translation, for that matter) is not a mirror. While one appreciates Felstiner’s haunting use of German words interspersed with English, this striking and powerful juxtaposition of languages doesn’t happen in Celan’s poem.’ (Of strangeness That Wakes Us )

The sheer brokenness of the mother-tongue in Celan’s expression is precisely what allows for linguistic multi-layering within a translator-approach to the poet’s work. It is precisely this that Felstiner divines and uses in his translation, and whilst it may not appeal to the purist, it is that seamless juxtaposition and use of the German that gives the Felstiner translation its evocative quality.

Get Poetry Magazine and read the entire Felstiner translation which is embedded into his wonderful article on Paul Celan.

Note:  I linked a Pierre Joris essay on Paul Celan here in August 2010, regarding Todtnauberg , as well as numerous references to Celan’s work. Essays on Celan and his translators are too all-encompassing to limit to (or add to) existent blog-posts. I recommend that readers with an interest in Celan  visit Poetry Foundation, Pierre Joris’ Nomadics blog, and Jacket 2 for further discussion on the work of Paul Celan.

Poetry FoundationYouTube of Todesfuge.

Text Translation of Todesfuge

My blog on Todesfuge

‘Aluine’s Gardens’ by C. Murray

Aluine’s Gardens

Before the house
behind the sea,
a garden.

Before the mountain
behind the house,
a circuit of trees.

Before the small house
behind the grey sea,
A strip of lawn enclosed with box.

Before the tall mountain
behind those six white walls of house,
rows of young alders a circuit make.

Before the house of three steps up
behind the rocky strand down to the sea,
a wild field conceals her garden’s bloom.

Before that shadow the reek casts onto green fields
behind the grass rolling and tumbling to rocky beach,
her lawn encloses varieties of bees.

Before Croagh Patrick,
the Reek,
a mazed world wherein shadows flit.

Before the house where grasses tumble to rocky shore,
behind the sound where gather the gulls, a small ingress,
a light step to rose’s bloom, lawn of green.

Before the cloud-shrouded reek
behind the house with fish in the windows,
there is a forest of trees, a flitting child.

Before the small house where wind’s flute and bassoon
mocks the squake of gulls,
a strip of lawn to where butterflies play.

Before the sheltering reek
and behind this small house of gardens,
a simple circuit of trees.

Birds sing there.

© C Murray, all rights reserved.

With thanks to Anora McGaha who first published the poem on the Books by Women website
http://booksbywomen.org/aluines-gardens-a-poem-by-c-murray/

With thanks to the PIWCC who published the poem on the Diversity blog of the PEN International Women Writers Committee,
http://www.diversity.org.mk/index.php?option=com_multicategories&view=article&id=41%3Amurraychris&catid=33%3Awomen-writers&Itemid=38&lang=en

‘Fire of the Gaels’ by Aine Mac Aodha

Fire of the Gaels!

 
‘She is every woman
who struggles for survival
in a world of prisons
of one form or another.
Her stories, etched on the
landscapes of the universe.
She is the mouth
of the Blackwater,
the secrets of the Alder,
the writing on the caves
and the shedder of light.
She is the blueprints
of the past,
the wishes of the unborn,
the spirit of the crops
and the heat of the sun
bursting on buds.
Shes the midges on the lough,
the guardian of the wells,
the bones of the earth
and the ties that bind
by spirit and blood.
Shes the songs sung so often
renewed on the lips of the young.
Her tongue fiery can cut like an axe
or sooth like a lullaby.
She is goddess of the people,
the fire on the hills.
Shes the shadow on the stones
glinting on river beds.
The breath of a new morning,
and a beacon in the night.
She is every woman.
She is Aine,
fire of the gaels.’
 

Fire of the Gaels is © Aine Mac Aodha, all rights reserved. The poem was first published in Argotistonline

Aine Mac Aodha lives in Omagh. Her work has been published internationally as well as locally, and in the UK. She is a Founder member of The Busheaneys Writers Group and The Derry Playhouse Writers. Her work has appeared in Luciole Press, The Glasgow Review, Irish Haiku, Pirene’s Fountain and Argotist online to name a few. She begins much of her writing at her Residencies at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Monaghan and is greatful to her time spent there.
Her poetry is plainly written, she is inspired by the Irish landscape and by poets Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Rumi, Basho and many of the modern poets today.

Related links

‘The Willow’s Whisper, A Transatlantic Compilation of Poetry from Ireland and Native America.

Thank you to Julianne Ní Chonchobhair, who has facilitated this short post with information and articles on the poets.

A note about the editors of  ’The Willow’s Whisper’

Jill M.O’Mahony is a Lecturer in The Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland. She has previously studied English Literature and Sociology in  The National University of Ireland, Maynooth and The University of  Manchester. She is working on a doctoral research project which focuses  on performance, liminality and event in Native American Poetry. She  lectures in the Sociology of Consumption, Modern Ireland, Narrative  Identities and Communications. Her research interests include Political  Anthropology and Transcultural Literature.

Dr. Mícheál Ó hAodha currently works at the University of Limerick  where he lectures in the Department of History, School of Languages,  Literature, Culture and Communication, UL, Ireland. He has published  widely on many aspects of Irish migration, diaspora, social geography and  oral history – including American“Outsider”: Stories from the Irish  Traveller Diaspora. (2007) (with T.J. Vernon); The Stranger in Ourselves:  Ireland’s “Others” (eds. M.Ó hAodha, University of Limerick; D.  O’Donnell, University of Limerick and C. Power (Centre for Ethnicity and  Health, University of Central Lancashire, UK) (2007). Screening Difference:  Visual Culture and the Nomadic “Other” (with A. Huether and D. Waldron) (2009), Migrancy, Memory and Repossession: Women on the  Historical Margins (2010); His most recent book is “The Turn of the  Hand”: A Memoir from the Irish Margins (with Mary Ward) (2010). Between 2006 and 2008 he was an AHRC scholar in the School of Arts,  Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester. He has also written  fiction and poetry in collaboration with other Irish writers including Colum McCann and Gabriel Rosenstock. His next book is due out shortly  as part of the Re-imagining Ireland series – Peter Lang, Oxford.

I am adding here some release notes for the anthology will be released on the 16th of February 2012.

There is a Nomadics category in this blog, which looks at dispossession, migrancy, rootlessness, outsider poetry and diaspora. I asked Julianne Ní Chonchobhair if I could feature a poem or two from the compilation on this blog,  and she very kindly agreed. In keeping with the theme of the Saturday Woman Poet idea, I have decided to feature poet Allison Adelle Hedgecoke , with thanks to Julianne Ní Chonchobhair. Info about Allison Adelle Hedgecoke is available via the Poetry Foundation website.

The following is an excerpt from The Willow’s Whisper , a poem by Allison Adelle Hedgecoke.

Crossing Sky Vault Worlds

for Vaughan

” Corn, Sunflower raise their faces toward Sun as she slides into
place among blue heavens.
Squash send floral swirls orange-red up into ground fog mist.

-
An ant angles his way watching constantly for morsels along the
path.
Violet morning glories stream upward reaching with their petals
wide open for bursting light.

-
Rays split seams of blue casting hopeful yellow-white strokes
beaming brightly. Seasons later,
Red Sioux Quartzite speckled white by snow and fully ice-crusted,
holds firm hallowed Sioux Falls grounds nearby.

-
Glass flows, creating prisms in century-aged windows across this
room. Rainbows flourish here. Long ago,
Black Dog spoke to his master, foretold the coming world flood in
time for a raft to be built sparing Real People.

-
Children in Quebec, before encroachment, pleaded for maple
sweets each fall. Were pumpkin lanterns lighted?
In my Huron grandmother’s midwifing beaded bag, the entire
universe gleams at me through pointed stars in dreams.”

-

© Allison Adelle Hedgecoke

A full list of the poets featured in the forthcoming  The Willow’s Whisper are included here , N. Scott Momaday, Allison Adelle HedgeCoke, Luke Warm Water,  Sherwin Butsui , Esther Belin , Joy Harjo , Nila Northsun,  Joseph Bruchac, Donna Beyer (nee McCorrister),  Travis Hedge Coke , Adrian C. Louis , Venaya Yazzie, Richard Van Camp , Odi Gonzales , Lee Maracle , Karenne Wood, Jules Arita Koostachin, Joan Kane,  Fred Bigjim.

John Felstiner, a translation of Todesfuge, by Paul Celan

“Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night/
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening/
we drink and we drink/
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes/
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta/
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped/”  (Todesfuge/ ST 2)(from Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew .  John Felstiner ,Yale University Press, 2005 )

0_0_480_350The above poem is excerpted from John Felstiner’s biography of Paul Celan, Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew , published 2005 by Yale University Press.  I lived with the poem  for a week in Mayo recently, where I transcribed it a number of times in order to get its music. 

During my transcriptions, I came across another rendering of the poem on YouTube, which I am adding here,  the Youtube reading is by Gerald Duffy. I am unhappy with the YouTube , possibly because I think it is read too fast, and maybe in this case some of the music feels lost. 

John Felstiner devotes a considerable amount of his text discussing the reasons for his choice of words in his translation of the poem,  and for that reason alone I would recommend the books and his notes on the difficulty the poem presents to the translator. I do not know if the book is online but the relevant chapter of the book is,  A Fugue After Auschwitz (1944-45 ) /your ashen hair Shulamith.

Felstiner discusses the state of the  poet who had lost both parents to the camps, his MS work and Todesfuge as the Guernica of post-war European literature.

Todesfuge is immense, challenging and multi-layered as a work. The story of the Death Tango is known to many people, there are images available to us. Celan composed the work in 1944 ,when information was beginning to emerge about the Final Solution.  Well over a decade later Sylvia Plath would struggle with those images and convert them into her tropes and archetypes. Nelly Sachs and Ingeborg Bachmann struggled with words and images to convey the horror.

Celan wrote it in 1944 with immediacy and utter control. Felstiner admits that it took him years to render as faithfully as possible the movement and symbols within the poem. His discussion of the problems with the poem is worth the book alone. Here in this poem is encapsulated the fear and helplessness of the final solution. I have read and listened to the poem over and over but nothing quite brings it right home than its transcription (in Felstiner’s translation).

“He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland/
he shouts scrape your strings darker you’ll rise up as smoke to the sky/
you’ll then have a grave in the clouds where you won’t lie too cramped/ ” (Todesfuge /ST 5)

The entire poem is at the following link ,though I would recommend the Felstiner chapters for discussion on the translator’s art and Paul Celan’s poetry :  
http://www.celan-projekt.de/todesfuge-englisch.html

 I wrote a short-story with an embedded poem based on my  transcriptions ,  though I am still reading  the  poem.

felstiners-celan

.