Showing posts with label britney suite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label britney suite. Show all posts

Friday, March 23, 2007

Meeting Paul Celan



Albrecht Durer: Melancholia I (1514)


This is the text of a paper I gave at the Poetics of Exile conference at Auckland University in July 2003. It was an attempt to contextualise the Celan translations I intended to read out to them, without including the scaffolding of the rest of the Britney Suite.

I had a curious presentiment that there would to be a German professor present who would query my translations, bona fides, etc. and denounce me as a charlatan. Sure enough, there was a German professor there (it was, after all, an international conference). Sure enough, he did try and question my translations, undercut my simplistic view of Celan's poetics, etc.

Unfortunately for him, he chose to question one of the few expressions I'd actually rendered impeccably. And his attempts to explain that the idea of silence was an old poetic trope which went back at least as far as von Hoffmansthal fell on largely deaf ears ... I mean, who cares? Either it's a compelling idea or it isn't. What does it matter who came up with it first? That seemed to be the attitude of the rest of the audience.

There were a lot of sessions running simultaneously, so people would try and drop in for one bit of the hour, then dart off to another talk somewhere else. Nevertheless, I had a fairly respectable turnout, including a learned-looking gentleman who turned out to be one of Gunter Grass's English translators.

Anyway, hopefully this will understand a bit of what is supposed to be going on in - at any rate - the Celan sections of my Suite. It sounds a bit defensive to me now, as if I needed a lot of special pleading to justify what I'd just been up to. But that's probably a consistent trait with me anyhow:

Meeting Paul Celan

… for whom is it designed, then, the earth? Not thought up for you, I can tell you, nor for me – well, then, a language without I and without You: He, rather, It. Do you understand? They, instead, and nothing else.

– “Conversation in the Mountains”
(Celan, Gesammelte, 3: 170-71)[1]

There’s a persistent theme of meeting in Paul Celan’s work, most famously embodied in his 1967 encounter with the philosopher Heidegger. He composed a short poem a week later, still anticipating a “kommendes / Wort / im Herzen” [a coming word in the heart] (Celan, Gesammelte, 2: 255; Felstiner, 1995, 244-47). It was, nevertheless, a disappointment. What words could pass across that gap: between the rationalising ideologue and innocent victim of Nazism?

There are meetings with Nelly Sachs, his fellow Holocaust survivor, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966; with the members of Gruppe 47 in 1952, one of whom commented to him “You … recited in the tone of Goebbels” (Felstiner, 1995, 65); with Martin Buber in 1960 (Felstiner, 1995, 161); with the Hebrew poets of Israel in 1969. They bulk large in his mind and in his work, but are somehow never entirely satisfactory.

Then there is “Gespräch im Gebirg” [Conversation in the Mountains] (1959) – one of Celan’s few pieces of prose, and the only one which could be described as fictional. Actually, it’s more of a fable, written in the tradition of Kafka, or indeed Buber’s Tales of the Hassidim.

It was quiet, too – quiet up there in the mountains. It wasn’t quiet for long, though, because when one Jew comes along and meets another, then it’s all up with silence, even in the mountains.
(Celan, Gesammelte, 3: 169)[2]

The language is bizarrely repetitive and teasing, enshrining, again, a kind of non-communication.

*


Good, let them talk …
(Celan, Gesammelte, 3: 170)[3]

Paul Celan (born Antschel) was the quintessential exile. He was born in what is now Romania, incarcerated in a Nazi work camp during the war, and escaped to Vienna shortly afterwards. From Vienna he went to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life, apart from a visit to Israel and occasional excursions into Germany itself.

Germany is the point, of course. The place he is in exile from. Although he wasn’t born there, all of Celan’s poetry is written in Hochdeutsch, his mother-tongue (literally): the language of the family circle. He also spoke (of course) Romanian, Russian, Yiddish, the languages he heard around him – studied French, English, Hebrew – but German was the language in which poetry happened. Always. Even when he was spewing out endless adolescent love lyrics, pastiches of Heine, Rilke, Stefan George (see examples in Chalfen, 86-87, 128-29).

And yet,
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
It’s the most famous line in his most famous poem, “Todesfuge” [Death-fugue] (Celan, Gesammelte, 1: 41-42). “Death is a Master from Germany.” The poem adapts the cadences of the Song of Solomon to a contrast between the golden hair of an Aryan Margarete and the ashen hair of an Israelite Shulamith. Celan was appalled by how readily this poem was adopted by post-war Germanic kultur – how it was included in anthologies, taught in secondary schools as an expression of reconciliation and forgiveness. That was far too facile for what he had in mind, what he felt about his past, the death of his parents in the camps, the horrific relationship between a totalitarian culture and a totalitarian killing machine.

*


So who does it talk to, the stick? It talks to the stone, and the stone – who does it talk to?
(Celan, Gesammelte, 3: 171)[4]

In 2001 (for a film project called The Britney Suite) I translated five poems from Paul Celan’s final book Schneepart [Snow-part] (1971). My German is by no means fluent, but I knew that Celan, as a writer, set himself almost deliberately at variance with the idiomatic cadences of everyday speech. He was, in fact, as much in exile from German as he was from Germany. His way of emphasising this was to use technical dictionaries, archaisms, bizarre neologisms: anything to get away from fluency and ease.

Curiously enough, this can put the outsider at an advantage. One’s sense of idiom is just as likely to send one wrong in interpreting Celan as that common translator’s trick of hunting through lexicons for double-meanings. It’s generally safe to assume that he means all the possible significations of any given word.

It still seems a presumptuous thing to attempt to appropriate and adapt another person’s words – especially such particular words, prompted by such extreme suffering – at such a distance in space and time, but Celan’s own work as a translator encouraged me to persevere. His actual encounters with Heidegger and Gruppe 47 may have been discouraging, but the process of translation offered a better model of “the marriage of true minds” [Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI: “wo treue Geister sich vermählen” (Celan, Gesammelte, 5: 353)]. Osip Mandelstam, Emily Dickinson, Jules Supervielle kept up their sides of the conversation far more satisfactorily. In fact, two of the seven volumes of his Gesammelte Werke are devoted entirely to translation.[5]

I had help, too. After I had completed my initial versions, I showed them to Professor Dieter Riemenschneider and his wife, the poet Jan Kemp, and canvassed their views on the knottier passages. The end result is, of course, my responsibility, but I can’t say I wasn’t warned about the liberties I was taking.

More to the point, I felt that Celan offered me a precedent for non-cooperation, internal exile. His alienation from the life around him (he was a suicide as well as an exile) was not arbitrary, but prompted by the spirit of the age, our age of coercion and conformity. As with William Burroughs’ (roughly contemporary) cut-up project, Celan’s aim was to find a linguistic expression that was free of the infection of an increasingly oppressive authority. Burroughs cut up his sentences and rearranged them at random. Celan cut open his words to expose their hearts.

Whether I’ve communicated any of this in the translations themselves is for you to judge, but the experience of working on them, of meeting Paul Celan, has been a very important one for me. It’s hard to sum it up simply, but I would have to say that I see him less as a role-model than a fixed point – almost our pole-star – in the constellation of responses to the casual horrors and hedonism of modernity.

Notes:

[1] Paul Celan, “Gespräch im Gebirg.” In Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, herausgegeben von Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986) 3: 169-73 – “… für wen ist sie denn gedacht, die Erde. Nicht für dich, sag ich, ist sie gedacht, und nicht für mich –, eine Sprache, je nun, ohne Ich und ohne Du, lauter Er, lauter Es, verstehst du, lauter Sie, und nichts als das.”

[2]Still wars also, still dort oben im Gebirg. Nicht lang wars still, denn wenn der Jud daherkommt and begegnet einem zweiten, dann its bald vorbei mit dem Schweigen, auch im Gebirg.”

[3]Gut, laß sie reden...”

[4]Denn zu wem redet er, der Stock? Er redet zum Stein, und der Stein – zu wem redet der?”

[5] Celan, Gesammelte, 4 & 5: one 885-page dual-text volume for translations from the French, and another of 665 pages for Russian, English, American, Italian, Rumanian, Portuguese and Hebrew poets.


Bibliography:

Celan, Paul, Die Gedichte: Kommentierte gesamtausgabe in einem Band, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003)

Celan, Paul, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, herausgegeben von Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert, 1983 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986)

Celan, Paul, Selected Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger, 1988 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990)

Chalfen, Israel, Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth, trans. Maximilian Bleyleben (New York: Persea Books, 1991)

Felstiner, John, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995)

Felstiner, John, trans., Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2001)

Ross, Jack, The Britney Suite (Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2001)


Wednesday, March 21, 2007

The Britney Suite




Все поэты жиди
– Marina Tsvetayeva, “Poem of the End” (1924)

[All poets – yids]


For Dieter Riemenschneider & Jan Kemp


CONTENTS:

Both-handed




You can be a good person and still be sexy
– Britney Spears


Beidhändige Frühe
holt sich mein Aug,
dann erscheinst du –

wieviel Möwengefolge
hat deine Stirn?

Seegängerisch knattert das Wort,
dem ich absagte, an dir
vorbei,

ein von Steinwut schwingendes Tor noch,
gesteh’s der
notreifen Nacht zu.

[29/9/69]



when is it not a question of last things?
– Paul Celan


BOTH-HANDED dawn
hold up my eye
till you appear

how many seagulls stall
above your forehead?

The word rattles like surf
my negative by
you

a stone-mad swinging door
give up
too earlynight

It's always too late





About 20 April 1970, around Passover, Celan went from the bridge into the Seine and, though a strong swimmer, drowned unobserved. ... Mail piled up under the door of his barely furnished flat. Gisèle called a friend to see if perhaps her husband had at last gone to Prague. On 1 May a fisherman came on his body seven miles downstream. …

People have said that Celan took his own life at forty-nine because valid speech in German was impossible after or about Auschwitz. Yet this was the impossibility that incited him … And he did speak – more validly than could ever have been imagined.

Maybe he felt too alone: “no one / witnesses for the / witness.”
– John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995)




It’s always too late
when you got nothing

– Nine Days


it’s always too late
when you got
nothing
walking in the rain
or under girders

seeing in a special way
the light from
buses, passing
did I ask you?
what?

too soon, no doubt
my friend is
Wendy
Wendy Nushe’s trying to
climb out

Dark




Poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself
– Paul Celan


DAS GEDUNKELTE Splitterecho
hirnstrom-
hin,

Die Bühne über der Windung,
auf die es zu stehn kommt,

soviel
Unverfenstertes dort,
sieh nur,

die Schütte
müssiger Andacht,
einen
Kolbenschlag von
den Gebetssilos weg,

einen und keinen.

[5/9/68]



La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose
26.3.69


DARK splinter echo
nerve im
pulse

the groyne above the turn
where it ends up

panopticon
it’s not
just look

the worship
chute
one
riflebutt away
from prayer silos

one none

mr darling writes to penthouse forum





Isn’t this ‘Britney Spears’ some sort of sixteen-year-old pop idol with a pretty face and plastic voice? I think I noticed a lot of 9-year-old girls on a documentary going on about how she was their heroine and ultimate symbol of everything good in life. Oh yeah, more’s beginning to come back to me ... she’s impertinently sexy, licks her lips and looks like she’s just come in from an all-night party at the local brothel, and proclaims she’s a virgin and gives lectures about traditional family values. She the one?
– Letter to the author (29 October, 2000)



mr darling writes to penthouse forum

dear forum

i think my secretary likes me the other day she was slurping my footlong yes I know it sounds a lot but she works out every morning and is now accustomed to it when i nearly came out and asked her do you like me id have preferred to use her christian name though for such a declaration and i dont know what it is take some dicktation instead ms smith i said and sodomised her on the desk
its preying on my mind
is it just my imagination sometimes when im deep inside i see the faintest glimmer in her eyes as if there was something there some kind of feeling love tenderness call it what you will then she orgasms instead
ive tried buying her things not just the usual g strings baby dolls vibrators but romantic things a bunch of flowers liqueur chocolates she takes the lot the loot beautiful booty

i dont know what to do talking to her seems such an extreme step to take and yet i fear i may be driven to it i cannot work or sleep or even masturbate to climax what would you suggest im really desperate

– Wendy Nu


Chalk-crocus




My main focus are my fans. Not some 40-year-old fart
– Britney Spears


KALK-KROKUS, im
Hellwerden: dein
steckbriefgereiftes
Von-dort-und-auch-dort-her,
unspaltbar,

Sprengstoffe
lächeln dir zu,
die Delle Dasein
hilft einer Flocke
aus sich heraus,

in den Fundgruben
staut sich die Moldau.


[24/8/68]



Poems are sketches for existence: the poet lives up to them
– Paul Celan


CHALK-CROCUSat
daybreakyour
multidimension/locational WANTED
poster vital statistics
stop

bombs
smile at you
the dent of Dasein
helps the radar
out

the Manukau
silts up the vaults

Nouvelle vague





Who is Wendy Nu?

Wendy Nu is a dreamgirl. Literally. She came to me in a dream, up near Spirits’ Bay.

Or rather, in the dream I heard other people talking about her – she never actually appeared.

That morning, when I woke up, I got two poems: not in my manner, I thought, but hers.

Later, I began to get some images of her: dark, perhaps Chinese? – serious, successful, driven – an artist drawn to extremities, and kitsch. Her obsession with pop-cult campiness (The Partridge Family, Peter Pan) is a bit out of my vein, though I can see where she’s coming from.

She came into this poem, jostling for space with Britney Spears.

Only Celan proved too tenacious to dislodge.



ISBNs should not be given to ephemeral printed materials such as diaries, theatre and concert programmes, prospectuses, etc.
– NZ Standard Book Numbering Agency Fact Sheet


Nouvelle vague





whenever &take spirite hottest
peep showeverywherebrothers and sisters
we the workersin townwe can
oobs buttsmeet ourand the poor
best friendwilld something
in betweennaturedestroy to
createnbelievabletake a
magic momentsgrip ofunlock the labs
steeringopen doorpeeps






Ah l’aThings are more alive than peoplel’Islam
rabesquesack rolling in frontn’est pas
le nuof trafficune religion
sans lasqueegee twirled aroundde doute
volupthe cassette that kept turningcomme la
till you’d had enoughnôtre

il y a
de la
certi
tude



[first published in Landfall 202 (2001): 111].

Orespark




Poems: gifts … gifts to the attentive
– Paul Celan


ERZFLITTER, tief im
Aufruhr, Erzväter.

Du behilfst dir
damit,
als sprächen, mit ihnen,
Angiospermen
ein offenes
Wort.

Kalkspur Posaune.

Verlorenes findet
in den Karstwannen
Kargheit, Klarheit.


[20/7/68]



Gedichte, das sind auch Geschenke – Geschenke an die Aufmerksamen
Mai 1960


ORESPARKdeep in the
upthrustf/orefathers

you get away
with it
like fossil
spermsaying an only
word
to them

chalkspoor megaphone

found lost
in the karst beds
spareclear

keith partridge y yo





HAIRDRESSING
It’s not just a job – it’s art!

Train with Cut Above and
join the ranks of our award
winning Graduates, who
get the best jobs!

Limited places are left in
our Govt Funded November
course

Phone NOW for a
personal interview



keith partridge y yo


that other partridge
cassidy he’s the
one things happen
to record deals money
marriages childbirth
i continue to ex
ist however in
sulated from his
whining in the
flicker of a late
night cathoid tube be
getting what?
he was always up
per but now only i re
main sweet scented
fresh of face daydream
in a mirror lake
breasts pressed against
huggy bear hand work
ing working i will always
be there leader of
the pack the bus
the buns
the

– Wendy Nu

Snowpart




I am eighteen years old and I have the whole world staring at me
– Britney Spears


SCHNEEPART, gebäumt, bis zuletzt,
im Aufwind, vor
den für immer entfensterten
Hütten:

Flachträume schirken
übers
geriffelte Eis;

die Wortschatten
heraushaun, sie klaftern
rings um den Krampen
im Kolk.

[22/1/68]



Language doesn’t just build bridges into the world, but into loneliness
– Paul Celan


SNOWPARTclose-ribbedto the last
updraftin front
always gap-windowed
huts

flat dreams shave
stiff brist
led ice

hew out word
shadowscord them
round the ringbolt
in the pit

Britney & Paul

[Daniel Edwards, "Monument to Pro-life: The Birth of Sean Preston" (2006)]


What's become of Britney?

Where's that blonde goddess, resplendent in red spandex, revealed once and for all when the pyramids of Mars split apart in the "Oops, I did it again ..." video? The plaid-skirted schoolgirl temptress of "Hit me baby one more time"? The madly metamorphosing super-spy of "Toxic"?

Pop has, alas, once more eaten itself. She's split with her hubbie, cut off her hair, gone into rehab, run away from rehab, gone back into rehab ...

I guess the whole subject was recalled to me when Gabriel White asked to post "Nouvelle Vague" on his site -- it's a soundfile taken from a sequence of poems I composed back in the palmy days of Britneymania, in 2001 ...

That sequence was called "The Britney Suite," and was based on the conceit of a kind of psychic meeting between Britney Spears and Paul Celan -- the most plastic, constructed persona imaginable, a blonde American teen-singing-sensation, juxtaposed with the very epitome of high culture cool -- the tormented archpoet Celan (for more on him, see my paper from the Auckland University Poetics of Exile Conference (2003): "Meeting Paul Celan".

I guess I thought if I just put them together, sparks would fly. I couldn't help feeling that Celan would find something attractive in the sensuous simplicity of Britney's world. By the same token, Britney seemed to me to be enacting a kind of Zen self-education in the school of hard knocks as she experienced the complete breakdown between public and private in her own life.

But as I began to write, lots of other intermediate figures startling jostling for space: a motley crew of pornographers, pop artists and dream girls.

I put out the poem as a little chapbook at the time, in 2001, and for a while Gabriel and I had a plan of making a film out of it. Funding was refused, however (I wonder why?), so it's languished on the back burner ever since. Though it did go down rather well when I read it in its entirety at Poetry Live -- less well at the Canterbury Poets' Collective.

Now I feel a bit responsible -- as if life were imitating art. The baroque excesses of the poem appear to have been uncomfortably prophetic of the real-life Britter's voyage to the end of the night. It would be megalomaniac to think I had anything to do with causing it, but that doesn't make me feel any less guilty for having discerned its rough outlines from afar.

Cassandra is never a comfortable role to play.

I'd like to share it with you now, though, in any case, and will be putting it up piecemeal on the blog over the next few days. Please note that sections of it are R18, though ... caveat lector.


[Paul Celan (Romania, 1920 -Paris, 1970)]