Previously in this thesis we have encountered a survivor-writer who has composed poetry and prose works in a language other than her mother tongue (see section 1.2). Edith Bruck adopted Italian as her literary language, and indeed her everyday language after her move to Rome in the 1950s. For Bruck, her native language of Hungarian is inextricably tied up with her Holocaust suffering, and traumatically recalls the family and friends she lost during the Nazi brutalities. The painful recollections which the use of Hungarian called to mind for Bruck led her to reject her native tongue and adopt Italian. Celan, conversely, staunchly refused to abandon the German language in his writing, even after he had lived in France for many years. Celan’s resolution to continue to write in German after the Holocaust is all the more striking because he was a polyglot and a translator, who was adept in a number of languages, including Romanian, French and Russian.
The decision of whether to write and/or speak in one’s original language or adopt a new language after the Holocaust was intensely personal and varied from survivor to survivor. It is clear that whichever mode of communication allows the individual to feel most able to express their experiences is of the most value to us as recipients and readers of testimony, in all its various permutations. As Dorota Glowacka writes:
Some scholars who have interviewed survivors claim that the truth of the traumatic experience can only be expressed in the language in which it
happened. Others report that, exactly because the “truth” of the experience is so strongly associated with one’s native tongue, a neutral, distant language can act as a protective shield, thus enabling the survivor to break the silence.30
Celan actively wished to avoid the use of a ‘neutral, distant language’, and as Felstiner comments, he became ‘an exemplary postwar poet because he insistently registered in German the catastrophe made in Germany.’ 31 Celan confronted Germany and the world with the German-ness of the Nazi regime, and this unflinching linguistic directness simultaneously points the finger of accusation at the complicit German
30 Dorota Glowacka, ‘The Trace of the Untranslatable: Emmanuel Levinas and the Ethics of Translation’, PhaenEx, 7:1 (2012), 1-29 (pp. 10-11).
people, while demonstrating how convincing, hypnotic and powerful the language can be.
In his acceptance speech for the Bremen Literature Prize, Celan discusses language and poetry at length, and his discussion is worth quoting at length:
Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses one thing: language.
It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again “enriched” by all this.
In this language I have sought, during those years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself. 32
Language, as Celan makes clear, acts as an anchor in his postwar life and writing. German has emerged from the Holocaust imbued, “enriched”, with all that was suffered in its name, as well as all that survived in spite of it. German is essential to Celan’s postwar remaking of himself, a literary-based rehabilitation process which we have already discussed with regards to fellow survivors Edith Bruck and Primo Levi (see Chapter 1). It was an essential part of himself he could not and would not give up, and which he considered imperative for successful testimony: ‘[a]sked how he could still write in German after the war, he replied: “Only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s own truth. In a foreign tongue the poet lies.”’33 His priority in his writing was evidently to present the world with the unflinching truth, which he felt best equipped to deliver in German.
German also represents a link to the mother who features so abundantly in Celan’s poetry, and whose loss was clearly felt profoundly. While Celan was brought up in the multilingual Czernowitz, his mother insisted on the importance of using correct German and was a diligent instructor.34 By writing in the German his mother had
32 Paul Celan, ‘Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen’, in Paul Celan, trans. by Hamburger, pp. 395-6.
33 Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 46. 34 Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 6.
favoured, as opposed to the other languages in which he was conversant, Celan is not only paying tribute to his mother, but communicating in a language which she would have understood and of which she would have approved. In ‘Nearness of graves’, Celan concludes by referring to his use of the language his mother had promoted, writing: ‘And can you bear, Mother, as once on a time,/ the gentle, the German, the pain-laden rhyme?’ (ll. 9-10).35 Through these lines Celan’s poetry addresses his mother, using the language she herself used, though making reference to the painful new legacy of the language.
As we shall see in section 3.8, Celan in fact goes a step beyond simply using German: in his poems, including notably in the very title ‘Todesfuge’, Celan creates many neologisms, thereby enriching and expanding the high German language his mother revered, and in this way forcing the language to find new means of expressing the realities of the Holocaust.
In this chapter, however, we are primarily concerned with ‘Todesfuge’ in Italian. Despite Celan’s firm decision to compose his poetry in German, his work inevitably did find its way into many different languages. We might therefore ask if our encountering of the poem in Italian alters its core substance irreconcilably from the Celan’s original ‘Todesfuge’. John Felstiner, himself a translator of Celan’s works, discusses the dangers and the importance of translating this survivor-writer’s work:
To uproot and rewrite Celan in translation runs the risk of alienating an already alien voice. Yet this voice needs translating because of its very obscurity. Often his lines seem only half emerged from shadow, as if recovered from some lost tongue and needing further translation even for native speakers. New or odd or archaic words, ruptured syntax, ellipses, buried allusion, and contradiction fill the poet’s “true-stammered mouth”36
Though the translator faces an unenviable task when approaching Celan’s work, translation is an essential part of ‘Todesfuge’’s history, since the poem was first published in Romanian translation before the German original appeared in print (see
35 Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. by Felstiner, p. 11. 36 Felstiner, Paul Celan, xvii.
section 3.2). Indeed ‘Todesfuge’ is not unique in this sense, as Naomi Seidman observes:
The polyglot nature of Jewish discourse and the displacements of postwar life affected the vagaries of Holocaust literature: Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge,” for instance, was composed in the writer’s native German, but first appeared in Romanian translation. Anne Frank’s Dutch writings were translated into German by Otto Frank for his German-speaking mother to read before he attempted to find a publisher in the Netherlands for them. And a longer Yiddish version of Elie Wiesel’s Night was published in Buenos Aires as Un di
velt hot geshvign in 1956, two years before Wiesel’s appearance on the French
literary scene.37
Other survivor-writers discuss the imperative of communicating across linguistic barriers. In Se questo è un uomo Primo Levi presents an episode in the camps in which he attempts to translate the words of Dante for fellow inmate Pikolo. The chapter, called ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, is a tense, desperate search for comprehension across languages, with Levi writing: ‘Trattengo Pikolo, è assolutamente necessario e urgente che ascolti, che comprenda questo “come altrui piacque”, prima che sia troppo tardi’.38 While there are many reasons for Levi’s urgency and his selection of this particular passage of Inferno (nostalgia, exile, the layering of knowledge giving – Levi to Pikolo; Dante to reader; Ulysses to Dante), the episode is ultimately a reflection on translation and the need to communicate something important to others, in spite of linguistic differences, and how this human impulse is exacerbated in extreme situations, such as the Holocaust. If the communication of knowledge was pivotal to Levi within the camps, the communication of knowledge about the camps is essential to humanity, after the Holocaust.
For readers, translations of Holocaust works offer fundamental insight and access to a wider range of works. Jean Boase-Beier has written extensively on translation and, in particular, Holocaust translation, and she highlights the disjunction between the reality of translation, which ‘is one of the ways – indeed, the main way – in which the
37 Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 201.
words of a Holocaust poet can be spoken for the poet after the poet has gone’;39 and the predominantly negative perception of the translation of Holocaust works:
If translation is considered at all, it appears to be assumed that poetry arises in a particular, singular language and culture, and that it can therefore only be made available through translation to those of another language and culture partially and imperfectly. This assumption leads critics to speak of translation ‘loss’, to view translation as a necessary evil performed upon poetry that is by nature resistant […]. Such a view represents a serious misunderstanding of both poetry and translation, and especially of poetry that arises from a communicative situation that already incorporates the idea of translation to such a large extent.40
Towards the end of this quotation, Boase-Beier touches on a recurring topic in Holocaust literature studies, discussed in section 1.3: the writing of Holocaust survivors inherently entails a translation of sorts before the words even reach the page, since the writer is transforming the unspeakable reality of the camps into language which the reader can access and understand. Some critics go a step further, arguing that ‘every writer is in fact a translator, since his occupation is to transfer facts, experiences, thoughts into another reality – that of language.’41 However, as humans we are able to co-exist and communicate within our language cultures due to the dense web of words and acknowledged meanings. Where Holocaust expression differs from the gulf between facts, experiences and thoughts on the one hand, and language on the other, is in the fact that the realities of the Holocaust went beyond the web of words in existence, demanding either new language, or a necessary acceptance of approximation. Boase-Beier also discusses the trend among critics to associate translation with a ‘loss’, rather than considering it invaluable to society and our understanding of the world, as well as offering the potential for new and even enhanced forms of expressing an original work.
The sections below will explore the phenomenon of translation, and especially poetry and Holocaust translation, and will aim to justify the assertion that translation is not
39 Boase-Beier, Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust, p. 143.
40 Boase-Beier, ‘Holocaust Poetry and Translation’, in Translating Holocaust Lives, ed. by Davies, Hammel and Winters, p. 155.
41 Hans Erich Nossack, ‘Translating and Being Translated’, trans. by Sharon Sloan, in Theories of Translation, ed. by Schulte and Biguenet, pp. 228-238 (p. 228).
simply ‘an integral system within any literary polysystem, but […] a most active system within it.’42 The translation of Holocaust works offers invaluable access to works from different languages and cultures, providing the potential for innovative, expressive and profound additions to the corpus of testimonial works.