Mind's Eye: Notelets & Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan
Mind's Eye: Notelets & Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan, by Carol Rumens. Llandysul, Wales: Broken Sleep Books, 2024, 42 pp. $13.99 (paperback)
You might say that Carol Rumens has paid the ultimate compliment to Paul Celan's poetry: talking back to it in a voice that echoes the Romanian poet's own fractured but very nimble idiom. In 12 poems she calls “notelets”—intended to be read as letters to the poet, who died in 1970—she responds to some of the poet's main themes and to the events from which his poems emerged.
Then the British poet does something more daring: she presents a series of four conversations between Celan and an imaginary poem of his, "untitled and unfinished, but keeping him company during the last years of mental illness and suicide." Rumens has published more than 20 collections of verse, and her Poem of the Week column is a regular feature in The Guardian.
Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920, the only son of a middle-class, German-speaking family. They were part of the sizable Jewish community in Cernăuți, a university town and the capital of Romania's Bukovina region (now Chernivtsi in Ukraine). It was a literate place, "a region where people and books once lived," Celan later recalled. After completing a year of medical school in France, Celan returned home and began to study Romance languages.
When German troops arrived in Cernăuți, early in the Second World War, Paul was conscripted to do forced labor. His parents, along with thousands of people from their town, were driven from their homes and imprisoned in concentration camps, where both perished. Paul's father Leo likely died of typhus; his mother Fritzi was shot. The thought that he might have done something to save his parents would torment Paul and haunt his writing for the rest of his life.
After the war, Paul changed his last name to Celan—a reshuffling of the Romanian spelling of his birth name—and made his way to Paris. He secured a teaching position and soon began a second career as a translator, producing German versions of the work of poets ranging from Shakespeare to Frost. He also translated verse from the French, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, and Russian: Osip Mandelstam's poetry was a particular favorite of his. In 1952 Celan married the French artist Gisèle Lestrange; the couple had two sons, one who died shortly after birth and another who lived to adulthood.
Celan had begun writing verse as a teenager, and he continued to write it throughout his adult life, even when he was hospitalized for mental illness. His work, which includes several often-anthologized poems, was issued in 19 collections. Today, along with Rilke, Lorca, and Akhmatova, he is one of the best known European poets of the 20th century.
Rumens's first notelet takes its title, "A Changed Key,” from Celan's poem "Mit wechselndem Schlüssel" ("With a changeable key"). Since Rumens's collection depends on a reader's having Celan's poetic idiom in mind, here is my translation of that poem:
With a changeable key
you open the house in which
the snow of the unspoken drifts.
Depending on the blood that gushes
from eye or mouth or ear,
your key changes.
Your key changes, your word changes,
the one that can drift with the flakes.
Depending on the wind that pushes you back,
the word becomes caked with snow
Written in 1953 or 1954, these lines show how the archetypal and the personal can coexist in a Celan poem. They also take up one of his central themes: the limits of what we can say and the power wielded by what we cannot. The Rumens poem describes Celan's finding his parents' home empty after their arrest—his return to "a house where someone/should be home but isn't":
Perhaps you punched the window, dropped, terrified
thief into crystal-scattered nowhere
or jerked the back-door handle, cried out
and no one came hurrying through the kitchen. (p. 13)
She then imagines his seeing the train that carried his parents away, with "genocide-wheels/hammering, firing towards you.”
The next three poems continue this description of Celan's horrific wartime experiences. They put his poetry writing to the test—to write not just any poem, but, as Rumens puts it, “the poem that's with you/wherever you're allowed to take nothing with you."
The remaining eight poems in the book's first section explore a wide range of subjects, including Celan's deeply conflicted relationship with the German language, the callousness towards human suffering seen during the Covid pandemic, and the return to Europe of "the Old Normal," in the form of Russian tanks invading Ukraine.
There is also a "free translation" of Celan's poem "Eis, Eden" ("Ice, Eden") and "Night Fairy-Tale, Bukovina, 1941," a "variation" on Celan's early, surrealist poem, “Notturno," which closes with these lines (my translation, with the rhymes omitted):
The world is a circling beast
that creeps through the moonlit night.
God is its howling.
I'm afraid and freezing.
Rumens heightens the sense of menace, preserves the rhyme, and makes that howl raise a question:
"Run, the wolf-pack's cruising,
the cradle spins on a rod."
I'm scared, Mutti. I'm freezing.
That howl—is it us, or God? (p. 17)
There's a conceit at work in Rumens's four dialogues "between poet and poem," in that Celan's "imaginary poem" does not speak in the highly stylized language of the poet's late works, but in a hybrid voice that mixes the chatty with the oracular, as in "Slower, Stiller":
You washed me in gravel, wove me sandals of hair;
and I'm still on the road for you, long word-chain
whose form is homelessness. D'you have a light? (p. 33)
The exchanges between Poet and Poem are among the most imaginative aspects of Rumens’s collection. Here's an example from "In the Asylum”:
You flinched. Poem shrugged: Only an amateur
would call my type a healer.
“I'm healed to bloody pieces,” you conceded.
“Pieces are fine!' Poem caught your glance, and stared
into the future critical mass of critics. (p. 29)
The dialogues end with a free translation of Goethe's 'Wandrers Nachtlied" ("A Wanderer's Nightsong"), one of the most famous German poems. In a note, Rumen explains that she imagines it spoken by Celan's mother Fritzi to her son, when they are both "in a shadow-life beyond death":
"The wind has dropped
asleep, the hills
are silence-steeped,
no forest rustles,
wings are still.
And you? You will
in this unslept
unrest, know rest." (p. 34)
I hope Rumens's collection will encourage interest in Celan's incomparable poetry among English-speakers. John Felstiner, Michael Hamburger, and Pierre Joris have each published worthy translations of the German poems, and Jason Kavett has published English versions of the French translations that Celan himself wrote, ostensibly to help his wife learn German (Letters to Gisèle, 2024).
Any serious reader of Celan will also want to see Paul Celan Today, an excellent collection of 19 biographical and critical essays, edited by Michael Eskin, Karen Leeder, and Marko Pajevic (De Gruyter, 2021).
Reviewer Frank Beck is a writer and translator. With Raleigh Whitinger, he translated Lou Andreas-Salomé's sixth and final novel, Anneliese's House (Boydell & Brewer, 2021). His most recent thoughts on poetry and music can be found at www.diehoren.com.