Breathturn into Timestead Read Online Free Page A

points to some of the directions the late work will take. For the first time Celan uses a single compound word as a title, something he will do for all subsequent volumes; for the first time it contains poems, albeit only five, devoid of individual titles—something that will become the norm in the late work; the language has now given up nearly completely the long dactylic lines and the rhymes of the first three books, while the brief, foreshortened, often one-word lines have become more frequent. Most important, some of the poems are clearly what has been called Widerrufe : attempts at retracting, countermanding, disavowing previous poetics—those of other poets, but also his own earlier stance. The poem “Tenebrae,” for example, is a carefully constructed refutation of Hölderlin’s “Patmos” hymn, which, as Götz Wienold has shown, 19 negates the (Christian/pagan) hope for salvation expressed in Hölderlin’s lines “Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch” (Close / and difficult to grasp is God. / But where danger lurks, that which saves / also grows); simultaneously the poem inverts and negates the (Judaic) hopes regarding God’s promises as expressed in the psalms, specifically Psalm 34, and in other places in the Bible that are alluded to, mainly Isaiah 43:20 and Leviticus 17. In a similar vein, the title poem, “Sprachgitter,” takes issue both with Gottfried Benn’s famous essay Probleme der Lyrik and with the optimism of Psalm 126.
    However, Celan’s Widerrufe are not only addressed to German poetry and the scriptures. He also calls into question his own earlier poetics. One can thus read “Engführung,” the great poem that concludes Sprachgitter , as a rewriting with different poetics of the “Todesfuge,” as Hans Mayer 20 and others have done. This critical stance toward his early poetics remains perceptible in several poems of the late work and is thematized in the opening stanza of a poem in Breathturn :
    W EGGEBEIZT vom
    Strahlenwind deiner Sprache
    das bunte Gerede des An-
    erlebten – das hundert-
    züngige Mein-
    gedicht, das Genicht.
    E RODED by
    the beamwind of your speech
    the gaudy chatter of the pseudo-
    experienced—the hundred-
    tongued perjury-
    poem, the noem.
    The neologism “Meingedicht” is based on the German word Meineid , “perjury,” but because Celan breaks the word the way he does, one cannot but also hear in the prefix the possessive mein , “my.” As Jerry Glenn has suggested, 21 this “allude[s] to Celan’s own early attempts to come to terms with the past in elaborate, colorful metaphors.” The new language of the addressed “you,” which here seems to be the poet himself, his new “beamwind”-language, aims to erode the “gaudy chatter” of the early work, and lead into a bare northern landscape of snow and ice: nordwahr , “northtrue,” as another poem puts it, where the true “unalterable testimony” which it is the poet’s job to create can be found, located deep in the ice, as an Atemkristall , a “breath-crystal.”
    What all of Celan’s Widerrufe seem to have in common is a deep dissatisfaction with traditional (and that includes modernist) poetics, and a need to push toward a new vision of writing and the world, and of the relationship between those two. For Celan, art no longer harbors the possibility of redemption, in that it can neither lead back to or bring back the gods, as Hölderlin suggested, nor can it constitute itself as an independent, autonomous aesthetic sphere of Artistik , “artistry,” as Gottfried Benn sees it, and behind Benn, the tradition that starts with Mallarmé. It is this new poetics tentatively proposed in the Meridian speech that is implemented throughout the late work.
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