About difficult poems

http://www.arduity.com/

Extract from Arduity website post

Paul Celan’s Todtnauberg.

Many, many people think of this as the most important poem of the 20th century, it records the meeting between Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger in 1966. Heidegger is becoming an increasingly villified figure as the depths of his anti-Semitism become more apparent but he was certainly the most influential European philosopher of his time. Celan, the finest poet anywhere in 1966, was an admirer of Heidegger’s work but remained angry and disappointed about the philosopher’s silence about his membership of the Nazi party prior to and during WWII. Celan visited Heidegger at his cabin in Todtnauberg and they spent the day together. The critical debate that has simmered away ever since centres on whether the poem records a reconciliation or further estrangement between the two. Of course this isn’t helped by Celan’s use of ambiguity:

    Arnica, eyebright, the
    draft from the well with the
    star-die on top,

    in the 
    Hütte

    written in the book
    -whose name did it record
    before mine?-
    in this book
    the line about
    a hope, today,
    for a thinker's 
    word

    to come
    in the heart

    forest sward, unleveled
    orchis and orchis, singly

    crudeness, later, while driving,
    clearly,

    he who drives us, the man
    he who also hears it,

    the half-
    trod log-
    trails on the highmoor.

    humidity,
    much.

Given the complexity of the above, the best response is to acknowledge that we will never (ever) know with confidence what happened when these two met and walk away. This is the default arduity position but in this instance I feel forced to side with Pierre Joris (whose translation this is) and others in ‘reading’ this meeting as a complete failure. Being unable to read German, I can’t comment on the accuracy of the translation but I am aware of the work and views of both men and cannot imagine how any kind of reconciliation could take place primarily because Heidegger was incapable of acknowledging his personal guilt.

Joris has written a fascinating description of the work that this translation entailed. He draws attention to Celan’s use of the word ‘waldwasen’ which he translates as ‘forest sward’ but ‘wasen’ also means the land where the knacker guts and buries livestock. These two men would therefore be walking over the bodies of the dead victims of the Holocaust. The rest of the Joris thesis is too complex to describe in detail but has persudaded me. In all fairness, I don’t want the meeting to have been successful primarily because Celan had dedicated his life to bearing witness to/for the victims of the Holocaust but also because I don’t trust anything that James K Lyons, the main proponent of reconciliation, puts forward.

In summary, it is important that we should know more about this meeting but also acknowledge that we never will. This shouldn’t however stop us from paying attention to the poem.