![]() ![]() He had drowned himself in the Seine in late April 1970, six months before his fiftieth birthday. Indeed, can they get any closer?Ĭelan’s friend, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, wrote: I believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did so that once, at least, words and what is might join. ![]() The metaphors are too close to experience to dismiss it as abstract. It is clear, I think, that this is an insensitive reading. Some might dismiss this as tiresomely reflexive a poem about poetry. It is an uncomfortable fact that the bar to a poem’s key – this poem’s key – is the key to the poem itself. As we watch the snow gathering, pursuing an answer to explain why Celan chose this particular key – and there are grim details one can point to – prompts only a return journey to the poem. ![]() But clarification of what? Isn’t our sense of the opacity of translation also the sense of the rebuffing wind in Celan’s poem? Searching for the key to this poem, and being resisted, we sense the climate the poem reports. We assume a translation is second-hand and only the original can provide definitive clarification. The original was written in the early 1950s. This is a poem by Paul Celan translated from the German original by Michael Hamburger. Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan ![]()
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