Standing Again(st): Reencounters of Resistance in Paul Celan's Translative Transformations

Abstract

The poetic oeuvre of German-language Bukovinian Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), defined by its haunting confrontation with the Shoah, has received extensive, sustained scholarly attention, being widely recognised as a cornerstone of post–World War II German-language literature. Nevertheless, his impressive corpus of literary translations spanning over forty poets and multiple languages has received comparatively little attention, having only recently sparked a closer examination within specific language contexts. This comparative philological study aims to fill this gap in Celan scholarship by examining his translations from English and Russian into German with the stated aim of drawing out an overarching poetics. In doing so, my study reflects on the interlocutory transformations that evolve between readings of Celan’s poetry and poetics, and his translations of texts by Alexandr Blok, Emily Dickinson, Osip Mandelstam and William Shakespeare, incorporating draft manuscripts from Celan’s literary estate. Celan’s intensive critical engagement with these authors over a period from 1958 to 1967 presents particularly expressive examples of different poetological phases threading from his Bremen and Meridian speeches into the gradual metamorphoses and radicalisation of his poetics in and into language. This allows for an illuminating investigation of his dialogical insistence on the intersecting historical specificities and poetologies unfolding in the encounters between the poets in the pronunciation of their differences, while exposing the actualisation of a poetologic-practical arch. This thesis argues for the development of this arch along the three overlapping but distinctive phases. Throughout them, a thematic triptych emerges that interweaves in the consistency of Shoah remembrance, Jewish critical thought and the resistance to being silenced – or: testimony, remembrance and resistance. By embracing Celan’s poetics of viewing meaning as threading through the specificities of our own standing in the world as a means of analysis, this study uncovers new perspectives, potentiating in the encounters of reading in the present, thus continuing an indispensable discourse that reverberates in particular relevance today.