The Truth Is in the Detail
On Paul Celan’s writing between languages.
Photo: Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. © Parisian private estate of Paul Celan, private property of Eric Celan.
The unsettling images in John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath (1962) were collaged from lines found in a children’s book. I’ve often privately repeated phrases like “his Swedish copper forehead” or “the lake a lilac cube.” This language is hermetic and synesthetic. Beautiful and puzzling, it evokes impossible—or barely possible—forms of aesthetic experience, what is sometimes termed the surreal.
I mention Ashbery’s second book (for me, his best), as a way of suggesting, via analogy, what I cherish about a different poet. Ashbery’s weird pictures hint at some of the reverberating visual, spatial, and sonic effects of the poetry of Paul Celan, whose work is, at least on the surface, primarily fashioned from German. Celan’s writing constitutes an utter re-shaping of that language, equivalent, in its originality, to the invention of a fictional idiom, such as the alphabet of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). But to say that Celan invented a sham German is wrong. Celan’s operations are neither positivist nor completist; they are instead a form of tuning.
Celan’s German is in sometimes-agonized dialogue with the other languages he spoke: Romanian, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, English, and Russian. Simultaneously, it exhibits his erudition in the technical vocabularies of the sciences of matter and life: geology, mineralogy, meteorology, botany, biology. He turns his expertise toward no lesser institution than the German lyric poem—i.e., Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke. Celan’s “German” “lyric” poetry reformulates Teutonic philosophy and artistic ideals for a second, postwar modernity, by turns appropriating eerie forms from folksongs and fairytales, romantic reveries and biblical accounts; and by turns spluttering into devastating indictments of the Third Reich, conversing with the architecture and administrative strategies of industrialized ethnic cleansing. It represents an unusually thorough reckoning with the state of the world in the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, it is so visually spare and musical as to be inexplicable in straightforward semantic terms.
Anne Carson has written that the language of Celan’s poetry “bears about the same relation to standard German as a crystal of granite to a range of hills.” That’s an excellent start, but to understand the full impact of his verse, you’d probably have to put the crystal back into the hill country and have it vibrate out messages to the rest of the rock—to which that rock might or might not respond. Celan wasn’t interested in reform, dominance, or even contrast. What he was after was conversation.
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This summer, two books offer different conversations with Celan: Rosmarie Waldrop's translation of Celan’s collected prose, Conversation in the Mountains (New Directions, 2026), is newly reissued, and Anna Arno’s biography, Paul Celan: A Life (Belknap Press, 2026), appears in a translation from the Polish by Soren Gauger. Read in tandem, the books suggest not only divergent approaches to Celan's writings, but differing ideas about what it means to encounter this pivotal poet at all—and what the reader may expect from the exchange.
Conversation in the Mountains is named for a parable by Celan included in its pages; the collection was first published in 1986 and remains an ambiguous document. Left to his own devices, it’s unlikely that Celan would have republished the prose he wrote as occasional experiments, gifts, or means of appeasing prize committees. Nevertheless, this collection permits us to see the poet at work, debating with himself about how best to explain himself in sentences, should such an act (of conversion) be necessary or possible. The 10 pieces in Conversation in the Mountains, plus an intriguing single sentence in French printed in 1970 in the poetry journal L’Éphémère, are, in their slender bulk, mostly items that might have been left out of the collected prose of another, more effusive poet. These include a dreamy meditation on the surrealist painter Edgar Jené, a series of aphorisms titled “Backlight,” several replies to bookstore and newspaper polls, a letter, two speeches associated with German literary prizes, an address to the Hebrew Writers Association, and the titular fable concerning two Jewish men who meet in a high-altitude zone.
I struggled to articulate my emotions as I moved through these pages. I almost certainly read the collection in the early 2000s and, composing this review, read it three more times. I was startled by “Backlight,” which offers a version of Celan one encounters only in summary form in his poems: a writer concerned with narrative irony. The last of “Backlight’s” prose units is the most sharply delineated:
He taught the Law of Gravity, furnished proof after proof, but people turned deaf ears. Then he took off into the air and, floating there, repeated the lesson. Now people believed. But nobody was surprised when he did not come down again.
Here Celan explores his longstanding concern with the language of persuasion and its pro forma aspects. The protagonist is able to convince his audience to accept the truth of a major law of the physical world only by performing an impossible act (according to the law in question). Despite the witnesses’ new credence, they have no expectation that the speaker himself will obey. It seems to please them when their instructor confirms their own earlier beliefs—permitting them, in this way, to accept what he has to say, while simultaneously invalidating the content of his words. The speaker is put, as we say, into an untenable position.
This parable indicates an uncomfortable dynamic inherent to human politics. To convince a public whose most deeply held ideas are “wrong,” one must simultaneously perform those mistaken ideas as if they are true; this is the only way to smuggle in a revolutionary concept, so called. Human minds, Celan suggests, cannot simply be changed like a switch, on/off, even under pressure of incontrovertible evidence. Rather, additional terms must be appended, like a dialect that coexists with a supposedly official national language. In a more pessimistic reading, this anecdote might suggest that the critics of fundamentalism must become fundamentalists themselves before they can be heard in the public square.
There is much to unpack in Conversation in the Mountains. “Backlight” speaks for itself, as does the title story, which scholars take to be an allegorical meditation on Celan’s tense rapport with the critic Theodor Adorno, he of the “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” pronouncement. (Celan’s career could be seen as an affront to Adorno’s most repeated claim.) In “Conversation,” two Jewish men, Gross and Klein, Big and Little, discuss what to do given the difficulty and probable impossibility of using language to communicate, for the language they have is “not for you and not for me”; it is instead a language that functions only with respect to the third person, “nothing but He, nothing but It . . . and She, nothing but that.” The foreclosed quality of all that should ostensibly be natural to Gross and Klein—the flowers and the glaciers, plus human speech—provokes a realization that what each of them do have is the state of being en route. It’s not denied to them to be underway, which is not nothing.
As much as I enjoyed worrying my way through “Backlight” and “Conversation in the Mountains,” the other short pieces in the collection seemed arid and elusive after a less-productive fashion. “The Meridian,” the speech Celan gave on October 22, 1960, upon receiving the Georg Büchner Prize, is often esteemed as among the most important texts he composed. While its frequently cited passage about the Atemwende, or a “turning of breath,” is powerful, a simple translation of Celan’s address does not quite suffice—in part because Anglophone audiences likely lack familiarity with Büchner’s plays, which Celan cites in detail, and in part because so much of the meaning of the speech comes from Celan’s ironic mode of addressing his German audience, something already partly lost in print. The brittleness of this piece, which almost seemed (if you can believe this) objectively outraged at how little I was taking in of it, made me uneasy. I had a similar haunted and unsettled feeling about much of the remaining short prose. Again, although Conversation in the Mountains is legible in English, its sense feels aborted, as if it stops short just before it meets me.
Is this translation accurate to the original? To be frank, I’m not sure that this is the issue. Indeed, accuracy in translation may not suffice where Celan is concerned. Celan is a musical, punning stylist. The sense he makes is not normal. Then again, Celan’s sense is hardly scarce in German, even if his words are. So how could this project have been handled differently, to give us some of Celan’s multivalent tunefulness in these days when we need it? I think of Walter Benjamin’s well-known recommendation in “The Task of the Translator” that texts be retranslated for new eras. A more experimental, multiform approach might have been apropos. Could footnotes have been appended to allow Celan’s references and resonances to expand, for example? It might have been nice to take Celan at his polyphonous word(s).
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By his own account, Celan came from a convivial lost world of “human beings and books.” Born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz (or Chernivtsi)—a mid-size city formerly the capital of Bukovina, a region straddling the border of modern-day Ukraine and Romania—he grew up in an ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse milieu. His beloved blond mother spoke a High German derived from the Habsburg Empire. She was later shot in 1942 in a camp somewhere in contemporary Moldova after being deemed unfit for work. By the time of her death, Celan’s father had already succumbed to typhus on an unknown date. Celan, who’d chosen to hide from the deportation squads on the weekend of his parents’ abduction, survived hard labor and eventually made his way to Paris after the war.
In 1952 he published his second collection, Mohn und Gedächtnis, or Poppy and Memory, which included his celebrated poem “Todesfuge,” or “Death Fugue,” a work that has become inextricably linked to the German project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—reckoning with the past. Working as a translator and college-level German instructor, Celan married, became a French citizen, and had a child, all while continuing to publish in German. In the late 1950s, the widow of French poet Yvan Goll accused Celan of plagiarism, a charge that was eventually discredited but that nonetheless wounded him. He was frequently subject to antisemitic attacks in print and in public, yet he also received major awards, including the prestigious Büchner Prize in 1960. He spent half a year in a psychiatric clinic between 1965 and 1966. Four years later, he visited Israel, the only time he left Europe. In 1970, he drowned in the Seine in an apparent suicide. All this is far too cursory a summary.
To return to that crystal invoked by Anne Carson: in a 1964 letter to G.B. Fischer, Celan wrote, “The truth is in the detail.” My Celan—a subjective character to be sure—is a poet of awesome and inexhaustible detail; of muted sounds wrung from vowels topped with umlauts; of weird substances and juxtapositions; of the non-semantic cries of infancy, agony, grief, and pleasure. His work is prodigiously inventive, full of freshly coined terms that evoke infinite worlds of sensation, even as he maintained that the poem was a “lonesome,” wandering thing that could ground itself only on its own “margin.” I was probably compelled to study German, I realize now, because of what is in Celan’s work: sonic modulations, unusual use of pronouns, vivid images, and above all the conviction that the poem’s speaker contains multitudes while at the same time failing to exist. “Todesfuge” tells of a black milk that is associated with the grinding time of the camps. The “Master” of this poem plays with “snakes” and writes. Elsewhere, there are “threadsuns,” a “timefarm,” a “snowpart.” “Du,” the German informal “you,” can, in Celan's hands, also mean “I,” “she,” “he,” “they,” and “we.” When Celan uses the conditional, the air changes color.
Meanwhile, languages other than German seep up through sound. The names of the dead are present, if not explicit. A poem containing almonds (Mandeln, in German) alludes to the surname of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose work Celan translated and treasured, for example. There is never a moment in a poem by Celan when every aspect of each word—its origins, its meaning, its phonetic reading, each letter, the appearance of each letter, the space around each letter and each word—is not carefully weighed, considered, and activated. All the white space of the page, what Celan called Wortlücke and Leerstelle, word holes and empty places, similarly feels “written,” as if Celan has somehow additionally written this down, written even the unwritten and/or silent parts. We might think of Celan as a concrete poet, given his attentiveness to lexical time, sound, the absence of sound, and the physicality of the poem. Yet Celan’s lyrics are inevitably circular and therefore move more like incantations, dreams, or even ditties than the multimedia texts of concretism. “Psalm,” one of his most celebrated poems, turns on the paradoxical word Niemand, “nobody,” a name for an absence. “Praised be you, nobody,” Celan writes. “For love of you we want / to bloom.” As the poem swells into a convincing synthesis of Emily Dickinson’s worship of her “Master” and Rilke’s orientation to death, Celan describes the anatomy of a rare flower, the “No-One’s-Rose,” whose sharp thorn has demanded the poem from the start. As Celan said, his poems cleave to themselves, always returning to the spot where they began.
Maybe this is obvious, but you can’t translate Celan. I mean, not really. Not that Celan’s work hasn’t been translated—in English alone, there have been more than a dozen attempts. But do the English phrases “speech-grille” or “language mesh” come anywhere close to the disturbing onomatopoeic vivacity of Sprachgitter, the title of Celan’s 1959 poetry collection? Some commentators have hazarded that Celan’s writing is already in translation, which is another way of indicating his multilingual upbringing and the decimation of the social and cultural world of his childhood. Yet, there were other principles at play. In 1954, he wrote in a letter to Hans Bender that he dealt “much more consciously” with German than he had before the war and before emigrating to France, though he was unsure of the full effects of these interrelated dislocations on his writing. “The How and Why of that qualitative change the word experiences, to become a word in a poem, I’m unable to define more closely even today,” he told Bender. He himself seemed to find the writing process a kind of hybrid mystery and miracle.
Celan speculated that his poems were a form of auditory witnessing, by way of which he might “overhear” language “becoming free,” a notion he partly borrowed from the French poet Paul Valéry. He was creating a literary space and a dialect in which to mourn and remember and survive, even as he was devising a new kind of time—or maybe a new kind of attention—in relation to words. All this had to be accomplished with very specific linguistic choices and grammatical operations: what the scholar Amy Colin has called “overcondensation.” No translation can fully capture this overcondensation of meanings and nonsense that so generously produces novel conditions for thought. Celan, a professional translator, was pristinely alert to this quality of his own work.
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I don’t feel certain of Celan’s reputation today. After his death, his writing, which had been so overlooked in France that no book-length translations existed, became the subject of passionate analyses by poststructuralist luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Maurice Blanchot, and Alain Badiou. By the mid-1990s, numerous English translations and studies existed; Helen Vendler, not known as a fan of deconstruction, opined that Celan was the “greatest poet since Yeats.” In Germany, meanwhile, he had long since been fully canonized. Internationally, he was treated as a difficult poet by those who desired to read in this style, or as an intensely raw and stirring lyric poet by those who desired to read in that style—or, more unfortunately, as a tokenized witness. By the time I found Celan in the late 1990s, he seemed to me a writer who had contemplated and understood something about modern warfare, technocracy, and globalization that nobody else had, by which I mean that he had understood something about how language itself was affected by these things. And he gave you room to feel something—that was what the overcondensation did. There was room in his work to grieve some fragment of the enormous and ongoing quantity of destruction accruing to the storm of history. Carson calls this room “a fragment of unexhausted time.” I think that’s right.
Oddly, there’s nothing about any of this in Waldrop’s introduction to Conversation in the Mountains, which, again, is unrevised since its previous publication in 1986. Waldrop begins,
Celan’s prose writings make a slim volume. For Celan, whose poems moved ever closer to silence, prose was too noisy a medium. Not for him, the ‘buntes Gerede’.
(Buntes Gerede is colorful gossip.)
First, it must be said that Celan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, published in numerous volumes, reveals a person with many social ties, private—sometimes gossipy—concerns, and amorous dalliances. But the more sweeping claim, that Celan’s work “moved ever closer to silence,” seems incorrect. It’s true that in his later work, Celan, who had rejected conservative Judaism as a teenager, began to write about faith in terms that are more ideological compared with his earlier writing. But a loss of complexity is not the same thing as silence. It is possible that Waldrop means something less obvious, but it is not clear what that is. She does say that Celan “refuses to talk ‘technique.’” And: “Craft is a prerequisite for him, like cleanliness, not worth discussing.” This is more helpful, yet it’s inaccurate. One has only to read Celan’s letters to find copious reflections on his relationship to language and poetics. Meanwhile, his poems are so intensely concerned with the sound of writing, even with silence itself as a sound, that I don’t see how they ever approach plain silence as such, which is to say, silence as opposed to noise. To me, they obviate such a distinction; that’s what’s so fascinating about them. I’m tempted to say, yes for him, the buntes Gerede—so long as it’s breathless (not colorful) gossip about words.
Waldrop mentions Celan’s Jewishness in brief, which she glosses as “the condition of . . . being a stranger.” Some personal context could have been relevant, as Waldrop was born in Germany, and her father was compelled to join the Nazi Party, a fact she mentions in a 2024 interview with The Paris Review. (He was a schoolteacher, and membership was essentially compulsory for servants of the state). Surely, I thought as I read further, Waldrop will go into greater detail regarding Celan’s relationship to exile. When she does, it is to say that for Celan “there is a veil between him and nature, between him and everything.” I found this difficult to parse and still—quite earnestly—don’t know what sort of veil Waldrop means: literal? spiritual? a bit of both? Meanwhile, she does not mention the Second World War, the languages Celan spoke, his life as an unrecognized German writer in France, his later contemplation of Zionism, his death—any historical or cultural context that might help me to understand why she believes that there is a “veil” in the world for this “stranger.” I can guess, of course, but that would defeat the purpose of an introduction, unless Waldrop surmises that her reader already knows these things? Still, we want to hear her thoughts.
In one beautiful sentence, Waldrop describes Celan’s Atemwende, or breath turn. She writes, “Language is breathing for Celan, is life, is ‘direction and destiny’; and the poem, that which takes our breath away, yet gives it back and allows us to live.” This reflection is followed by some brief notes about the difficulties of translating Celan, the loss of double meanings. Yet, by Waldrop’s account these are always double meanings within German and do not consider the other languages Celan spoke, thought in, and wrote. Above all, it’s that he thought in these languages—that each thing he encountered had multiple names and was therefore pronounced in multiple parts of his throat, mouth, nose. The imagined breath that moves through the words he set into poems reached toward these multiple languages, this multiplicity of physical and verbal forms and gestures.
Then we come to the translations. Other writers have noted that Waldrop sometimes seems to miss what John Felstiner, Celan’s biographer of the 1990s, terms the “Judeo-German” turns of phrase in Celan’s prose. Yiddish is always present, re-inflecting Celan’s German. As Amy Colin and Andrei Corbea-Hoișie write in an article on Celan’s early artistic formation, when Celan speaks of what Waldrop translates as “people and books,” he uses the word Menschen, which connotes not just legal or ontological personhood but a broader concept of humaneness and magnanimity. A note or a parenthetical flagging this moment—along with others like it—might not have been out of place.
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Somewhere in the midst of Anna Arno’s brilliant Paul Celan: A Life—originally published in 2021 in Polish as Paul Celan: Tam, za kasztanami, jest świat, or Paul Celan: There, beyond the chestnut trees, lies the world—the reader realizes that this is not a linear story. Arno, who also writes fiction, clearly sees human time less as a singular thread that connects the instant of birth to the instant of death than as a series of circular mounds or spiral-shaped tidepools connected to one another by the myriad living beings who visit these sites of prismatic intensity. (This is a Celanesque worldview, if ever there was one.) If it is not always clear how one moment of intensity shades into or becomes another, this is likely by design. Certainly, Arno’s narratology feels true to the way in which life has been lived after the Second World War.
Where Celan is concerned, there is also the matter of missing information. We don’t know, for example, the specific details of what happened on the night in late June 1942 when Celan’s parents were deported and he went into hiding with the help of a friend. Did Celan himself understand what had taken place—why, at base, his mother chose not to attempt to save herself, along with what he was choosing through resistance? As Arno reflects, at this time the “remaining residents” of Celan’s birth city Chernivtsi “knew too little about the executions, tortures, starvation, and disease” that awaited them in the camps. Celan seems to have acted on intuition, and as we zoom in, attempting to see this historical moment with the aid of Arno’s prose, we experience both a sort of gelling and resurgence of a lost reality and the paradoxical sensation that nothing but hearsay and incomplete documents remain. That Arno can conjure this heterodox and supremely moving version of Celan’s experience is quite a feat. Her biography replaces Felstiner’s 1995 account as the authoritative text on Celan’s life in English.
Another original feature of Arno’s biography is its sensitivity to Celan’s numerous relationships with women, inclusive of his extramarital affairs. Celan was a difficult husband, to put things mildly. However, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange is never portrayed as a victim in this chronicle, even if she obviously made sacrifices to give Celan more time to write, to demonstrate her devotion to him, and, as a “privileged reader,” to study his poetry in literal translations into French with an attentiveness that met his standards. Celan-Lestrange was a painter and printmaker. Her first child by Celan, François, died during birth due to physicians’ errors (forceps were used and an emergency caesarean came too late). A second, planned caesarean resulted in the Celans’ only child, Eric. The difficulty of these births must have affected Celan-Lestrange for the rest of her life, both physically and psychologically. Although this is a biography of Celan, Arno allows Celan-Lestrange significant space, including her relationship with the poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann, Celan’s other major love-interest, with whom she maintained a friendship and corresponded. In fact, Celan’s many entangled loves are the substructure upon which Arno’s biography rests, leading to the entangled or enmeshed system of intensities I mentioned above. There is no straight line in this book because it is so much about love.
Still, Arno’s is not a sentimental work. It can be tempting to describe all poets as recluses unable to participate in everyday life, given their legendary sensitivity to language, that most plentiful of social substances (not to mention their tendency to stay at home, writing). Arno’s Celan is neither silent nor secluded. He dispatches letters constantly, internationally, apprising friends and acquaintances of new ideas, new poems, and events. He translates almost compulsively. He is dedicated to his undergraduate students. He is a family man with a wife and child. Even so, Arno occasionally gives in to the pull of the legend of Celan as the ultimate outsider—a characterization the poet himself seems to have promoted. In one fascinating anecdote concerning Celan’s academic career, Arno writes:
Taciturn, introverted, he lived a double life, as in hiding. Jacques Derrida recalled that [he and Celan] had passed each other in the halls of the École Normale Supérieure for years before they were introduced. [Derrida] even recalled a staff meeting where one of his colleagues cried, “But, sir, do you not know that the language instructor we have here is the greatest living poet in the German language?’”
The news concerning poetry is slow. Linguistic barriers render it slower. Given Celan’s unequaled artistic achievement—forging an idiom that could describe the dawning of a second modernity after a global war—one might imagine that there would be parades in the streets each time he published a new book, or at least a Nobel Prize. That didn’t happen. But are you really surprised? Was he? If you know something of the recent-ish history of literature—Lorine Niedecker, another late modernist “overcondensator,” worked as a hospital cleaner and suffered decades of neglect by the American literary community—you can hardly be astonished that Celan was not mobbed in the normalien corridors after his introductory German courses. The more interesting question concerns the writer himself. What did he make of his situation? Could he survive outliving his own birth community, living in multiple foreign languages, with German itself included in this category?
These quandaries are answered most effectively and devastatingly toward the end of Arno’s biography, where she delves into the struggles with mental health that appear to have led to Celan’s suicide in 1970. Celan’s “delusions,” as Arno puts it, expressed themselves outwardly in bouts of rage and antisocial behavior. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he became increasingly alarmed by the woefully incomplete project of so-called denazification. He accused friends of supporting Hitler and distanced himself from publishers, authors, and prize-giving organizations that might have any association with the Third Reich. What the governments of Western Europe were unwilling to accomplish, Celan took on as a personal project, his “thoughts,” as Arno writes, “obsessively orbiting around German crimes.” Whether this all-consuming desire for justice was the product or cause of the paranoia that began to eat away at Celan’s ability to work and maintain relationships, we will never know. He became obsessed with portents and signs, painfully sensitive to bright colors, to the proliferation of numbers in public space—symptoms associated with schizophrenia. He was institutionalized repeatedly, at one time receiving physically debilitating insulin injections, an ineffective mid-century treatment the character Esther Greenwood also undergoes in The Bell Jar.
In the early months of 1970, he wrote to his wife “that poetry demanded ‘Abraham’s sacrifice’ from him,” in other words, that he considered killing his own son, perhaps in a misguided impulse to preserve the child from the murderous antisemitism that continued to reappear in Paris and elsewhere. In April of that year, he drowned himself in the Seine. The only note he left was an underlined sentence in a biography of the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who also famously struggled with mental illness: “Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart.”
Arno chooses to end Paul Celan: A Life almost abruptly, on a scene from the poet’s funeral, attended by some thirty people. A friend bent down to give Celan’s son Eric a kiss and later recalled, “‘He had changed; he was oddly like his father.’” It is a consuming and bleak moment, particularly given Celan’s desire that his son be free of the past and of the dangers he had endured during the war. But it feels accurate to events in a way that a summation of the poet’s greatness could never be. Felstiner’s Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew ends with a maudlin medley of selections from Celan’s poetry across his life, with Felstiner reflecting “For many European Jewish survivors, Celan’s [“Todesfuge”] remains the quintessence of whatever understanding they have after the catastrophe.” This sweeping assertion may be correct in some cases, yet it seems truer to Celan’s personal complexity not to shy away from the tragedy of the last decade of his life. Celan’s resourcefulness and unprecedented achievement—his miraculous survival—must coexist in our minds with the plain fact that he was overwhelmed by suffering at the age of 49.
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Returning to Celan in the summer of 2026 is by turns a harrowing and hopeful undertaking. But we do need a Celan for our times, a Celan who has to struggle with the minutiae of everyday life and intrusive thoughts even as he reaches toward a level of linguistic synthesis—an unheard-of style of compression or ultra-elusive frequency, choose your media-related metaphor—that has left readers gobsmacked, in his lifetime and after. The Celan who is a cipher, a person so alienated and extraordinary as to seem magical or perhaps nonhuman, may be of less use to us, even as we can’t fail to be impressed by that individual. For it is human to be really good at writing poetry. Rare, but human.
Yet all the “why” questions concerning what Celan did or didn’t do are ultimately less important than the messages his work sends. For he still has news for us about language, if we care to listen: that nonsense is an indispensable substance, both personally and politically. It must be genuinely nonsensical nonsense to help—nonsense that turns out to make sense was never nonsense at all. Although I doubt that I need to explain this, Celan’s nonsense is not analogous to an AI hallucination or a five-word hyperbole about the excellence or corrosive evil of something or other. It is something else entirely, a something that occurs alongside language but seems more deeply tied to the nonlinguistic movements of the natural elements, to the nonverbal capacities of our senses. It is allied with intuition and desire. It speaks in multiple verb tenses, past and future, simultaneously and with ease. It tends to come into being in few words.
Here is a wild proposition, then: Celan didn’t write in any language. He had to use German, or decided to use German, but he was writing in between languages and writing between and among various kinds of difference. The passage here was not wide, but he filled with it with song. I think of his poems as some small remainder of that music. An overflow that pushed letters into words and lines. The effort was herculean; the noise produced is small. This is the music of experience—the surplus of experience, if you will. Language may be its medium, but the message of this music is beyond language’s horizon. Its inexhaustibility is precisely what makes it so hard to understand and why each generation must reinterpret or retranslate it for themselves.
Lucy Ives is a novelist and critic. She has received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the Vermont Book Award in creative nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, Vogue, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction and nonfiction at Middlebury College.
