POETS’ CORNER

POEMS OF PAUL CELAN

Translated from the

German by Michael Hamburger

Persea Books: 350 pp.,

$16.95 paper

*

Paul Celan’s extraordinary “Death Fugue” is often thought of as the most essential and devastating poem of the 20th century.

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night ...

This new edition of Michael Hamburger’s remarkable translations (including “Death Fugue”) of Celan’s poems provides not only a revised and expanded selection of this difficult poet’s work but an introduction, postscript and notes that illuminate the arduous and exhilarating task of rendering Celan into English from the German.

We dig a grave in the breezes ...

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel (changed to Ancel then Celan, a name-anagram that he adopted in 1947 when he first published his work) in Romania in 1920. In 1941, German forces occupied Romania and, in 1942, Celan’s parents were deported to a camp, where they died: his father of typhus, his mother of a bullet in the neck. Celan escaped arrest but was later sent to a hard labor camp.

he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair

Margarete

In 1944, Celan returned to what remained of his life in Romania. He worked as a translator and eventually became a lecturer in German literature, and began writing his indescribable, anomalous poems--quasi-surreal, expressionist, lyrical. He married and moved to Paris, where, haunted by his parents’ deaths and the Holocaust, he drowned himself in the Seine in 1970.

he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he

whistles his pack out

he whistles his Jews out in the earth has them dig for a grave

he commands us strike up for the dance

Hamburger implies that biographical ruminations about Celan will go on attempting to illuminate “the anomaly and extremity of his passion as a poet.” If the “black milk” is ash from the crematoria, then the “extremity” of Celan’s passion as a poet is powerfully felt in this reference to his own life--but also in the very pronouns in the poem that change from “we drink it” to “we drink you,” at the lyric’s end--as the black milk changes from an “impersonal” pronoun to a “you,” a “person”--as the ash becomes human remains.

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany

he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke

you will rise into the air

Celan’s poems defy description. They require a searching translator to find, in English, the words that are nearly “equivalent” to those of his haunted poems. Hamburger is that translator.

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

We drink you at noon

*

NOW THE GREEN BLADE RISES

by Elizabeth Spires

W.W. Norton: 82 pp., $21.95

*

“Now the Green Blade Rises” by Elizabeth Spires echoes not only Dylan Thomas but an English carol--”Now the green blade rises from the buried grain / Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain”--and locates these shattering lyrics (a sequence of poems connected to the poet’s mother’s death) in the elegiac tradition, but with an ambivalent turning toward renewal.

Spires’ sense of renewal is never predictable. At times, the inexorable ongoingness of life seems monstrous and her grief the only articulation of hopelessness.

Sometimes, when the phone

rings, I think it is you.

Three months, and I still believe

I’ll hear your voice at the other end

of the line. But you’re dead,

and the world is ash. Your body.

Words that used to live.

Still, the canvas enlarges:

Though all had vanished, I felt strange joy.

Above, gulls circled and laughed, circled and laughed,

the waves a series of small endless events, lapping

at thousands of smooth white stones on the shore,

the shining grey years of our lives before us.

Spires, with characteristic precision, pinpoints the “small endless events” that make up our lives. What she offers in these poems, instead of hope, is a (at times buoyed-up) resignation, an acceptance of all that is disappearing before us. “And I thought, never will I see this happen again.”

Spires is a jewel of a poet, never self-conscious or self-indulgent, yet her poems glow with the intensity of closely-observed intimate detail. These grieving poems challenge our fragile “selves”--yet, like Celan’s, they reassert the dignity of the self in every line.