Celan and the Demands of Reading: a response to 'Correspondence' by Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs

Mark Thwaite

'Read', in the past tense, is too final. Good poetry - and why read bad poetry? - doesn't get 'read'; it isn't a box you tick, a task you complete. Good poetry is a perpetual enticement, a chronic beckoning: you keep going back because you need to keep going back, because good poetry keeps giving you more each time. Returning, re-reading: this is our responsibility. A responsibility taught to us by many careful readers, but perhaps, in the context of Paul Celan, by Jacques Derrida, who showed in his own careful readings what responsibility and reading truly mean.

Another, T.S. Eliot, taught us that poetry may be read on three levels. The sound and rhythm should be strong enough to keep the reader's interest regardless of a deeper understanding. A fuller level of understanding comes when you comprehend the poem's 'story'; but then a limitless, thrilling, ongoing engagement can begin to occur as you read on, and read again. Poetry is the house of possibility; it takes time to abide with fragments to realise their meaning.

Paul Celan is a limitless poet; a poet who requires our full attention, and our quiet patience. His dense, recondite work has challenged readers since the 1950s. His poetry keeps giving because, in truth, at first, it gives so little (which is why we have such a debt of thanks for his first readers, those translators to whom we are hugely in debt, like Michael Hamburger and Carcanet's Ian Fairley). For obvious reasons he sees through a glass darkly, but his shadow-drenched lens seems to disconcert and distort so much at first that we can't get a foothold on exactly what his poetry means.

But then we realise something. Celan's words are limpid, but appear so only if we adjust our expectations, allow his words to adjust our expectations: only if we are prepared to listen. Celan’s exactness clashes with what we think of as exact: the everyday is not exact, it is a cliché; realism requires vertiginous originality. But how can one be exact about what is truly unspeakable? One can only write knowing that one approaches and approximates, and that language fails you the while; you run after exactness, but the world gets away and your words fail. Beckett taught us about this failure because he knew failure and writing were synonymous. 

Language, of course, in Celan's case, was absolutely implicated in the violence he was writing about and writing after. 'Reachable, near and not lost, there remained amid the losses this one thing: language.' But German? After everything? Writing in that language was always already a brave defiance, a foolhardy act. It needed so much work not to allow worn words, decaying, imprecise words, weasel words, to distort and mislead. Celan’s poetry is sui generis, because it had to be.

Nelly Sachs asked: 'How can we possibly answer your love? Again and always again with love!' With love, fidelity and care to the words wrenched out of Paul Celan, to which we must attend, to which we have yet fully to attend. Words we may have read, but which will always need to be read, will always need a reading which is yet to come.


Mark Thwaite is the founder and managing editor of the UK-based literary website ReadySteadyBook, described by The Times as "one of the best places on the web for clever, wise, sparky book-related discussions and reviews.” Since October 2010 Mark has also been the Head of Online at the award-winning Quercus Books & MacLehose Press.

Correspondence

Correspondence (pictured, above), published in May by Carcanet Press, contains the letters between Nelly Sachs (1891–1970), recipient of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great German-speaking poet Paul Celan (1920–1970). Their correspondence lasted from 1954 until Celan's death by suicide. Sachs died the day Celan was buried.

What Paul Celan once said of his mother tongue holds as well for Nelly Sachs: 'Reachable, near and not lost, there remained amid the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death bringing speech.' Sachs put it this way: 'The frightful experiences that brought me to the edge of death and darkness are my tutors. If I couldn't have written, I wouldn't have survived...my metaphors are my wounds.' 

The correspondence includes lovely Sachs poems and interesting accounts of their meeting and of contact with other prominent writers of the time. The introduction and afterword are indispensable, as is the entire book. - Choice