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Abstract
This article critically engages with the pathos of impossibility as it is employed with respect to translation in general, and to the works of Paul Celan in particular. I argue that the allegation of impossibility rests on the tenacious persistence of an equivalence model of translation, despite the anachronism of this model in the field of translation studies. I demonstrate the endurance of this model by considering responses to translations of Paul Celan – an author whose works, perhaps more than any other's, have been declared “untranslatable”. This claim, I argue, rests in part on an oversimplified view of Celan's poetry as a struggle with the German language, but it also implies a conventional, equivalence-based model of translation. Drawing on interpretations of Celan by Yoko Tawada, among others, I argue that Celan's poetics offers the basis for an alternative model of translation, one founded on a relationship of response and dialogue rather than resemblance and equivalence.
Note on contributor
Kurt Beals is assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013. Along with translation, his research interests include avant-garde and experimental poetry and its relationship to media history and information theory. He has translated a number of works from German into English, including books by Anja Utler and Regina Ullmann.
Notes
1. I gratefully acknowledge the publishers of the works cited in this article for kindly granting me permission to reproduce excerpts from their publications. The individual acknowledgements appear in an endnote the first time each work is cited.
2. I do not mean to draw a clear-cut distinction here between translators and literary critics, on the one hand, and academic translation theorists, on the other. Such a distinction would be inappropriate for many reasons, foremost among them the fact that many individuals play both roles at different times. However, the rhetoric of failure seems to surround the discipline of translation more persistently in non-academic writing; the distinction is thus one of genres, not of persons.
3. As Derrida writes in another essay, it is precisely the difficulty of translating poetry – Celan's poetry, but also poetry in general – that makes this translation necessary: “The poem is not only the best example of untranslatability. It also gives to the test of translation its most proper, its least improper, place. The poem no doubt is the only place propitious to the experience of language, that is to say, of an idiom that forever defies translation and therefore demands a translation that will do the impossible, make the impossible possible in an unheard-of event” (Derrida Citation2005, 137). With the exception of the special case, not infrequent in Celan's work, of “the multiplicity of languages in the same poem” (ibid., 22), Derrida can thus be read as generally insisting on the possibility, or even necessity, of translating the very works that most nearly approach untranslatability.
4. Acknowledgement: “Von Dunkel zu Dunkel” and “Nächtlich geschürzt”: Paul Celan, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, © 1955, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH.
5. Acknowledgement: all excerpts from Michael Hamburger's translations in Poems of Paul Celan are copyright © 1988, 2002 by Michael Hamburger. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.
6. It should be noted that “übersetzen” is an inseparable-prefix verb, so the conjugated form is “übersetzt,” whereas “übersetzen” is a separable-prefix verb, with the conjugated form “setzt … über”. Thus, the literal meaning “to ferry across” is correct in this context. However, the more common “übersetzen” is unmistakably implied as well, as Derrida (Citation2005, 55) also notes. This doubling also occurs in a poem from Celan's collection Atemwende – “sie setzt / Wundgelesenes über” (Celan Citation1983, 2:24) – which Felstiner (Citation2001, 217) translates as “it bears / wound readings across”. The argument for a reading of “Von Dunkel zu Dunkel” that emphasizes the role of communication, dialogue and even translation is strengthened by the fact that this poem itself forms part of a poetic dialogue between Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Celan's 1948 poem “Corona”, in which he writes “wir sehen uns an, / wir sagen uns Dunkles” – in Hamburger's translation, “we look at each other, / we exchange dark words” (Celan Citation1995, 48–49) – is echoed in Bachmann's 1952 “Dunkles zu sagen” (Darkness spoken), which begins “Wie Orpheus spiel ich / auf den Saiten des Lebens den Tod / und in die Schönheit der Erde / und deiner Augen, die den Himmel verwalten, / weiß ich nur Dunkles zu sagen” – in Peter Filkins’ translation, “Like Orpheus I play / death on the strings of life, / and to the beauty of the Earth / and your eyes, which administer heaven, / I can only speak of darkness” (Bachmann Citation2006, 10–11). Celan's “Von Dunkel zu Dunkel”, in its turn, adopts a number of motifs from “Dunkles zu sagen”, including the river, which in Bachmann's poem is a clear reference to the Styx. Given this context, Hamburger's emphasis on the ferryman is certainly justified. However, what his translation loses is the parallel drawn between the act of ferrying and the function of translation and dialogue. I am grateful to Maya Barzilai for drawing this intertextual reference to my attention, and for her many other helpful comments on this article. Acknowledgements: “Corona”: Paul Celan, Mohn und Gedächtnis, © 1952, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH. Ingeborg Bachmann, excerpt from “Darkness Spoken”, translated by Peter Filkins, from Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. Copyright © 1978, 2000 by Piper Verlag GmbH, München. Translation copyright © 2006 by Peter Filkins. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Zephyr Press, www.zephyrpress.org.
7. This undeniably difficult passage is translated by Felstiner as “the hundred- / tongued My- / poem, the Lie-noem” (Celan Citation2002, 247); by Hamburger as “the hundred- / tongued pseudo- / poem, the noem” (Celan Citation1995, 231); and by Pierre Joris as “my hundred- / tongued perjury- / poem, the noem” (Celan Citation2006, 107). Each of these translations is an attempt to convey the two meanings implicit in “Mein- / gedicht”: on the one hand, “my poem”, and on the other, “perjury poem”, a play on the German “Meineid”. “Genicht” is a neologism that suggests the reduction of the poem (“Gedicht”) to nothing (“Nichts”).
8. Yoko Tawada (Citation2007) makes a similar observation regarding the translation of punctuation in Celan's poems. Although punctuation marks are, in principle, perfectly translatable, Tawada writes, “that means that they do not open up in the process of translation; rather, they move with closed bodies from the original into a translation” (Tawada Citation2007, 39; see also 71; this translation and those that follow are mine, unless otherwise noted).
9. Acknowledgement: reprinted from Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner. Copyright © 2001 by John Felstiner. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton.
10. Acknowledgement: excerpts from Collected Later Poems of Paul Celan, by Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris. Translation copyright © 2013 by Pierre Joris. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
11. Acknowledgement: excerpt from Glottal Stop: 101 Poems ©1983 Paul Celan, English translations © 2000 by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
12. Anne Carson, in her reading of Celan's poem “Sprachgitter”, detects a similar “estrangement” or “intimate alienation” that “cleanses us of the illusion that we could talk” (Carson Citation1999, 33).
13. The obvious biblical reference point would be John 19:34–37: “But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side […]. They shall look on him whom they pierced”. In the 1545 Luther Bible, this passage reads “Sondern der Kriegsknechte einer öffenet seine Seite mit einem spehr […]. Sie werden sehen in welchen sie gestochen haben”. The 1912 revision preserves this wording with only minor changes in spelling. In the 1984 revision, the word “durchbohrt” appears in this passage: “sondern einer der Soldaten stieß mit dem Speer in seine Seite, und sogleich kam Blut und Wasser heraus. / ‘Sie werden den sehen, den sie durchbohrt haben.’ ” This is not the first translation to use “durchbohrt” to describe Christ's body: the 1951 revision of Franz Eugen Schlachter's translation reads: “sondern einer der Kriegsknechte durchbohrte seine Seite mit einem Speer, und alsbald floß Blut und Wasser heraus. […] ‘Sie werden den ansehen, den sie durchstochen haben.’ ” Thus, Celan could conceivably have consulted translations in which the word “durchbohrt” is used with reference to the body of Christ. Nevertheless, the fact that this translation was not used to describe Christ's body in the Luther Bible until a later revision (and thus not in Celan's own copy) deprives Gadamer's argument of any compelling lexical support, and would justify caution in translation to avoid overemphasizing this Christological interpretation. (Celan's copy of the 1897 printing of the Luther Bible by the Preußische Haupt-Bibelgesellschaft is housed in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.)
14. André Lefevere has suggested, to the contrary, that later translators may feel freer to adhere to the poetics of the original, rather than adapting it to the poetics of the “receiving system” (Lefevere Citation1982).
15. The translations of Celan's German here are mine. The corresponding passages in Shakespeare's sonnets are “When rocks impregnable are not so stout” and “where, alack, / Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?” Celan's translation also adds a second-person plural pronoun, transforming Shakespeare's “Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays” into “Und Tore, ehern, ihr steht nicht inmitten” [And gates, iron, you do not stand in the way] (Celan Citation1983, 5:334–335).
16. As Derrida writes of Celan, “Translation is desired by the poet – he wants to be read, to be translated” (though Derrida adds, “but I recognize that there is aggression and hand-to-hand struggle”; Derrida Citation2005, 168).
17. Pinti's discussion draws on Bakhtin's understanding of dialogism, which I have not addressed here due to space considerations. For other discussions of translation and dialogue from a Bakhtinian perspective, see Robinson Citation1991; Emerson Citation1983; Greenall Citation2006.