What can be done with language in the wake of the Holocaust? This was a core question for Paul Celan—poet, Jew, survivor—as he wrote in German, the language so brutally misused by Nazis. He answered with a body of difficult, brilliant work. Shirley Glubka, approaching Celan's poetry for the first time in her 70s, found herself writing as well as reading: "reading-through-writing." She worked in the ekphrastic tradition, producing twelve poems, each inspired by one of Celan's, "as if I stood before a challenging, compelling painting, perhaps one bordering on the abstract, and found lines of a poem forming—description, interpretation, meditation, or something that flew off quite into its own sky." Twelve brief essays followed, companion pieces for the poems. Glubka offers these poem/prose pairs, "deeply conscious of my debt to Paul Celan," with an introduction based on her reading of Celan's famous "Meridian" speech. The result is an unusual, carefully crafted, thought-provoking collection. SAMPLE TEXT EYES, AND THE STANDING HUMAN —after Paul Celan's "Stehen, im schatten" ("To stand, in the shadow") There is a sky above extends to infinity. It is wounded and healed. There is a shadow slashed across earth. It is the mark of the scar in the sky. There is a way of standing, alone, earth-rooted, under the sky, a way of standing without words under the long scar that shines in the infinite air, standing in the shadow, waiting for no one, enduring the silence, enduring the shine of the scar, the immensity, the eye of the absent god. On "Eyes, and the Standing Human"-- Celan: To stand, in the shadow of a scar in the air. —from "To stand, in the shadow" I turn Celan's image around and around, trying to see it, to know it. I pull at it like taffy, lengthening, softening. Celan uses 31 words for his poem, I use 83. There are spaces within his poem I cannot find my way to. We both stand alone. We both, though we are writing, are without words. His tiny poem enlarges itself until it reaches, "even without / language" to "all that has room in it." This is beyond me. I stand earth-rooted. Where does he stand? We are not told. My poem has a god, absent but explicit. There is no god in his poem. My scar, which appears several times, shines in infinite air. Celan's scar, appearing once, casts a shadow from its place the air. That is all we know. ~~~~~~ NAKED AND ANCIENT —after Paul Celan's "Welchen Der Steine Du Hebst" ("Whichever Stone You Lift") Reach for the word floating on flames, hermetic word, long imprisoned within the burning, fragile structure. Remember the bed, carved from cut trees, where you lay on assumed solidity, the bed which was and was not. Here is the stone you must lift. Unburned, warmed by flame, it has lain in its place all your life. Innocent forms caught embracing slither forth, naked and ancient, over the elemental earth. On "Naked and Ancient"-- Celan: Whichever stone you lift-- you lay bare those who need the protection of stones: naked, now they renew their entwinement… Whichever word you speak-- you owe to destruction. —from "Whichever Stone You Lift" Celan's poem starts with his stone. There are no flames in his poem, no burning structures, unless hidden in the crevices, or in the history. We both place a bed in the middle. His is (mysteriously, to me) one "where / souls are stayed once again." The existential status of these beds—these structures one might lie down on, rest on—is uncertain. I work my way to the stone, and to the naked ones exposed when the stone is lifted, to their embracing forms. "Whichever stone you lift" is the only poem, I learn, in which Celan uses the word "Destruction." It is a word for the Holocaust. Elsewhere, Celan speaks and writes of the Holocaust only as "that which happened." "Destruction" is the final word of his poem, the reality to which he owes his words, his life work. I end with my innocent forms, with my elemental earth. Little earthworms are what I see. Living, wriggling beings. Are Celan's entwined forms alive? I cannot escape the piles of bodies thrown together in the camps, have to remind myself again and again of their renewed entwinement in Celan's poem. Suddenly, having read his poem many times, having written my own poem in response, I see not only the starved dead human bodies but also the mangled words of the German language. Celan's work is the work of resurrection: "Naked / now they renew their entwinement." ~~~~~ JOURNEY TO THE TURNING WORD —after Paul Celan's "Sprich Auch Du" ("Speak You Too") When the light is high and the shadow contracts, do not stand waiting. Stretch upward with ardor into the limitless, a long journey. Night will arrive. A star will appear which you will touch. Carefully carry the desiring star, carry it downward along the slender thread you have become, carry it to open water where for the first time it saw itself. The yearning star wants to leap and dive with splashing young syllables, offspring of the turning word, the kaleidoscopic word forever forming, moving into and out of, now near and now far, dark unto death and erupting to glory–– Word which is-- is the you-- is the I-- is the Other. On "Journey to the Turning Word"-- Celan: But now the place shrinks, where you stand. Where now, shadow-stripped, where? Climb. Grope upwards. Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer! Finer: a thread the star wants to descend on: so as to swim down below, down here where it sees itself shimmer: in the swell of wandering words. —from "Speak You Too" It is the thread that catches me first, then this entire final stanza of Celan's "Speak You Too." My poem materializes, but without working the center of Celan's poem, which is: "Speak— / But don't split off No from Yes." I want to work with that center. I try again and again, but I am unable. Celan said it. I can't take it apart, I can't add. This is a pattern: I can never quite "translate" Celan. There is so much white space—the absence that hovers. There is always more. Celan ends with wandering words. I find myself with a turning word. My turning word is Celan's, though: his you, his thou, which turns and turns. Except that I am explicit—there is a questionable tightness to the final stanza of my poem, a lack of white space. I see this, but find I need to leave the lines as they are. Sometimes this happens. Order paperback of After Paul Celan: Journey to the Turning Word here Order eBook of After Paul Celan: Journey to the Turning Word here |