Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Celan’s ‘Denk dir’
Immediate responses to my last post, from two sites which regularly feature material on the poetry of Paul Celan: Ready Steady Book and This Space.
I’ll return to Celan and the various issues raised by my post at a later date. For the moment let me just respond in connection with one central issue, namely the meaning of Celan’s poem ‘Denk dir’, a title translated by Michael Hamburger as ‘Think of it’ and by John Felstiner as ‘Just Think’.
Steve Mitchelmore cites Ian Fairley:
Ian Fairley, in his knotty introduction to Fathomsuns, reads the abstraction and ambiguity of the same poem as essential to its meaning rather than obstacles to it. He suggests - though my understanding is fraught with uncertainty - that the poem is an implicit warning to Zionism and, more generally, the yearning for a homeland; a similar yearning - for clarity, for certainty, for an impossible homecoming - that we experience in reading poetry.
Instead (i.e. instead of a homestead), he writes that we must live in "the conflicted liminality of ... an unhousing which demands that we live ... with, or in, what is without." This seems to locate the brutalism inherent in patriotic utopianisn and enacts, instead, an imaginative engagement with a meridian - "the connective which, like the poem, leads to encounters". Denk dir; think of it.
I find it hard to recognise the poem in this reading. I perceive ‘Denk dir’ as celebratory; expressing exultation – a tone of delight, a gasp of surprise, a momentary texture of feeling not normally found in Celan’s verse. Steve refers to ‘the abstraction and ambiguity of the poem’; John Felstiner by contrast finds it ‘an unambiguous poem’ (Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, p. 241) Felstiner may be guilty of an over simplistic reading, but his interpretation makes sense of each line and word, fits the context in which the poem was written, and seems consistent with the significance of its publishing history.
What does the title ‘Denk dir’ refer to? Felstiner describes how the writing of the poem was triggered by Israel’s success in the Six Day war of 1967. That context, which he describes, is surely an inescapable biographical fact. He says that the title ‘registered the jolt that Jews everywhere felt’. My reading of Celan’s title is that it means ‘Just think – Jews who were once persecuted and weak and threatened with extinction now have a homeland and grow ever stronger’. Or: ‘Think of it! Thirty years ago Jews were in death camps. But now they have come through that suffering and found a home’. So the title evokes, in a familiar sense, the contrast between past and present, much as one might say ‘Just think – this time last year we were in a council flat in Bristol and here we are living on a farm in New Zealand’. The title is, in this reading, charged with amazement, perhaps even pride.
As a reading it seems consistent with the huge cultural shift in Jewish attitudes both to Israel and to the Holocaust outlined in Norman G. Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry (2001). Finkelstein identifies 1967 as the key year when everything changed. The outcome of the June war resulted in a comprehensive reconstruction of Jewish identity and of attitudes both to the Holocaust and Israel. Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky [in Fateful Triangle (1983)], identify the discovery of Israel’s utility to US foreign policy as the driving force behind that massive transformation. They make a convincing case. Yet ‘Denk dir’ suggests that a European poet, isolated in Paris, remote from US society, also registered that massive shift in sensibility. In Finkelstein’s account, the Holocaust was for decades a topic to be shunned; it was, for most Jews, a source of shame, an index of weakness, of massive suffering and genocide, endured passively, with relatively little resistance. Then, in June 1967, everything changed. Suddenly Jews weren’t to be kicked around any more; they could hit back against overwhelming odds and put their oppressors in their place. The shameful image of the weak Jew was replaced by the proud, strong Jew; suddenly, there were heroes – brave warriors like Moshe Dayan. The tradition of Jewish resistance to Zionism ebbed; Jewish identity became merged with the muscular Jewish state, and anti-Zionists were marginalized as self-haters and collaborators with anti-Semites.
Is Felstiner’s interpretation of the poem reductive and over simplistic? I don’t think Felstiner has a particular hidden agenda in his book. His orientalism is of a rather gentle kind, unconscious rather than bellicose. He is not out to score propaganda points and stresses that the war ‘had not swept [the poet] up on a wave of enthusiasm. Celan was, after all, a sick man, sometimes violent and even suicidal.’ (p. 243) Felstiner’s account of ‘Denk dir’ seems to me perfectly lucid and plausible, and supported by his privileged reading of manuscript variants. I don’t find Felstiner a reductive biographer, in the way that some critics are, such as James Atlas, writing on Bellow, or Stephen Greenblatt, writing on Shakspeare. My biggest grouch with his book is that there is too little biography, which may be something to do with Celan’s often solitary existence and ultimate elusiveness, and something to do with market forces. The English speaking world is perhaps not yet ready for an 850 page blockbuster biography.
‘Denk dir’ seems to have been written at some speed, and Felstiner’s interpretation, appears consistent with the publishing history of the poem. Celan rushed to publish the poem ‘right away in Zurich’ (Felstiner, p. 242). He also sent it to the German-born Israeli poet Natan Zach who translated it (presumably into Hebrew) and published it in Israeli’s main daily paper. The significance of this, it seems to me, is that Celan saw the poem as an act of solidarity.
It also appeared in Germany. And the following year Celan situated it as the final poem in his collection Fadensonnen. Why would he want to do that? Not, I think, because it just happened to be the last poem he happened to write before putting the collection together. Its privileged position is there for a reason.
I’ll return to Celan and the various issues raised by my post at a later date. For the moment let me just respond in connection with one central issue, namely the meaning of Celan’s poem ‘Denk dir’, a title translated by Michael Hamburger as ‘Think of it’ and by John Felstiner as ‘Just Think’.
Steve Mitchelmore cites Ian Fairley:
Ian Fairley, in his knotty introduction to Fathomsuns, reads the abstraction and ambiguity of the same poem as essential to its meaning rather than obstacles to it. He suggests - though my understanding is fraught with uncertainty - that the poem is an implicit warning to Zionism and, more generally, the yearning for a homeland; a similar yearning - for clarity, for certainty, for an impossible homecoming - that we experience in reading poetry.
Instead (i.e. instead of a homestead), he writes that we must live in "the conflicted liminality of ... an unhousing which demands that we live ... with, or in, what is without." This seems to locate the brutalism inherent in patriotic utopianisn and enacts, instead, an imaginative engagement with a meridian - "the connective which, like the poem, leads to encounters". Denk dir; think of it.
I find it hard to recognise the poem in this reading. I perceive ‘Denk dir’ as celebratory; expressing exultation – a tone of delight, a gasp of surprise, a momentary texture of feeling not normally found in Celan’s verse. Steve refers to ‘the abstraction and ambiguity of the poem’; John Felstiner by contrast finds it ‘an unambiguous poem’ (Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, p. 241) Felstiner may be guilty of an over simplistic reading, but his interpretation makes sense of each line and word, fits the context in which the poem was written, and seems consistent with the significance of its publishing history.
What does the title ‘Denk dir’ refer to? Felstiner describes how the writing of the poem was triggered by Israel’s success in the Six Day war of 1967. That context, which he describes, is surely an inescapable biographical fact. He says that the title ‘registered the jolt that Jews everywhere felt’. My reading of Celan’s title is that it means ‘Just think – Jews who were once persecuted and weak and threatened with extinction now have a homeland and grow ever stronger’. Or: ‘Think of it! Thirty years ago Jews were in death camps. But now they have come through that suffering and found a home’. So the title evokes, in a familiar sense, the contrast between past and present, much as one might say ‘Just think – this time last year we were in a council flat in Bristol and here we are living on a farm in New Zealand’. The title is, in this reading, charged with amazement, perhaps even pride.
As a reading it seems consistent with the huge cultural shift in Jewish attitudes both to Israel and to the Holocaust outlined in Norman G. Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry (2001). Finkelstein identifies 1967 as the key year when everything changed. The outcome of the June war resulted in a comprehensive reconstruction of Jewish identity and of attitudes both to the Holocaust and Israel. Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky [in Fateful Triangle (1983)], identify the discovery of Israel’s utility to US foreign policy as the driving force behind that massive transformation. They make a convincing case. Yet ‘Denk dir’ suggests that a European poet, isolated in Paris, remote from US society, also registered that massive shift in sensibility. In Finkelstein’s account, the Holocaust was for decades a topic to be shunned; it was, for most Jews, a source of shame, an index of weakness, of massive suffering and genocide, endured passively, with relatively little resistance. Then, in June 1967, everything changed. Suddenly Jews weren’t to be kicked around any more; they could hit back against overwhelming odds and put their oppressors in their place. The shameful image of the weak Jew was replaced by the proud, strong Jew; suddenly, there were heroes – brave warriors like Moshe Dayan. The tradition of Jewish resistance to Zionism ebbed; Jewish identity became merged with the muscular Jewish state, and anti-Zionists were marginalized as self-haters and collaborators with anti-Semites.
Is Felstiner’s interpretation of the poem reductive and over simplistic? I don’t think Felstiner has a particular hidden agenda in his book. His orientalism is of a rather gentle kind, unconscious rather than bellicose. He is not out to score propaganda points and stresses that the war ‘had not swept [the poet] up on a wave of enthusiasm. Celan was, after all, a sick man, sometimes violent and even suicidal.’ (p. 243) Felstiner’s account of ‘Denk dir’ seems to me perfectly lucid and plausible, and supported by his privileged reading of manuscript variants. I don’t find Felstiner a reductive biographer, in the way that some critics are, such as James Atlas, writing on Bellow, or Stephen Greenblatt, writing on Shakspeare. My biggest grouch with his book is that there is too little biography, which may be something to do with Celan’s often solitary existence and ultimate elusiveness, and something to do with market forces. The English speaking world is perhaps not yet ready for an 850 page blockbuster biography.
‘Denk dir’ seems to have been written at some speed, and Felstiner’s interpretation, appears consistent with the publishing history of the poem. Celan rushed to publish the poem ‘right away in Zurich’ (Felstiner, p. 242). He also sent it to the German-born Israeli poet Natan Zach who translated it (presumably into Hebrew) and published it in Israeli’s main daily paper. The significance of this, it seems to me, is that Celan saw the poem as an act of solidarity.
It also appeared in Germany. And the following year Celan situated it as the final poem in his collection Fadensonnen. Why would he want to do that? Not, I think, because it just happened to be the last poem he happened to write before putting the collection together. Its privileged position is there for a reason.
# posted by Ellis : 6:04 PM
