Mostly His Apocalyptic Star Glitters Wondrously

Paul Celan is diving into the Seine. Arms toward an elsewhere, he is a dark bird, his body narrowing into the murk of the Parisian midnight. In drowning, breath-taking becomes an act of drinking. Paul Celan is full of the Seine. The river crowds into his lungs, his stomach. In death, it bloats him. Eleven days later a fisherman finds his body seven miles away from the Pont Mirabeau.

___

I read Under the Dome, a book by the French poet Jean Daive, who walked through Paris with Celan in the years leading up to his suicide, as I snake my way by Metro across the city, from the cemetery in Thiais where Celan is buried to the fifteenth arrondissement where he died. My intention is to follow what might have been his route that night, an exercise of imagination that troubled Daive in the weeks following his friend’s death:

I no longer sleep. I am haunted by the reality, more and more likely, of his death. The blue sky of April days, then of May days makes memory volatile. Gisèle [Lestrange, Celan’s wife] investigates day and night: nothing escapes her, every detail is taken into account, and told in almost epic manner [...] She anticipates drama, that is, suicide. She sets the scene and above all states her deductions: he enters his bedroom, goes to bed, he puts down his watch, he gets up, goes down the stairs, crosses the avenue, climbs over the railing of  Pont Mirabeau, throws himself into the Seine.
—Tr. by Rosmarie Waldrop

Daive’s account serves as my roadmap and itinerary. I get off the Metro at Javel–André Citroën and cross the street to 6 Avenue Émile Zola, Celan’s last home, a tan brick building on the corner near a busy intersection. I sit on a bench, staring at it, overwhelmed. I watch an extremely stylish teenager chat aggressively on her cell phone as she enters through the front door. I feel a tensing thrill, like the moment before you tell someone you love them for the first time.

I walk across the street over to the bridge, slowly, trying to hold each second close to my breast. The wind is soft. I watch small boats pass underneath. I can see the Eiffel Tower not too far off. Despite my fear of heights, I lean slightly over the railing and look down. The distance from the bridge to the river, terrible. I step away from the edge. Under the bridge flows the Seine. I stay.

When I first encountered the poetry of  Paul Celan, I felt like a fish in a crystalline lake spotted from above—immaculately seen. My sophomore year of college, I visited New York City for the first time as an adult with my then-girlfriend. We fought frequently, and many of our arguments seemed to involve an underlying plea: be a man. But I was not a man. I was a young woman for whom womanhood seemed so distant I didn’t know it already resided in me, and this distance, much later, I learned to name as poison. I had a body in crisis with itself, and I had no language for it. There was something inexpressible that nonetheless needed to be expressed. I’d only ever heard the word “transgender” in high school contorted into a pejorative.

In the middle of this short trip, aimlessly browsing the stacks at McNally Jackson, I made a discovery. I paused on a copy of John Felstiner’s Selected Poems and Prose of  Paul Celan, seduced by the image of the poet on the cover: hands clasped together, leaning forward on a chair, staring earnestly at the camera. That night, on the pullout couch in my girlfriend’s family friends’ Park Slope brownstone, I began to read, and as she slept, I read and read, and wept silently over the pages.

In his essay “Of Strangeness That Wakes Us,” Ilya Kaminsky writes that

German, for Celan, was the language that had to “pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.”

Why break a language? To wake it up.

In poems, I discovered the possibilities offered by fracture. The constraints legislating the language with which I was able to express myself were unacceptable. Poetry is where the terms could be reconfigured. Given my lived experience of being relineated and reinterpreted, this felt like a kind of agency.

Because I do not pass, and because I am not concerned with passing as an end-goal of transition, I am misgendered by strangers, acquaintances, and loved ones, met with stares and pointing fingers and, occasionally, physical violence. I needed a different language to envision what transition was or could look like. Reading Celan and walking alongside Celan provided a new opening onto how I was able to understand and discuss my transgender body and identity. I learned that breaking language was not only an option, but an urgency.

For most of my twenties I let myself refuse the question of womanhood by drinking until I couldn’t hear it anymore. Failing at suicide, I built walls bottle-by-bottle between myself and the work I knew I needed to do. Eventually, though, I lifted the hammer. I began the destructive task—the only forward left to me. I woke up.

A person can’t leave their own body. A writer can’t leave language behind. We have to move within our confines, even though it’s intolerable—impossible, sometimes—to inhabit them. What does it look like to stage that impossibility in a lifetime of work? A fracturing. Language crumbles and reconstitutes itself. A glass pane is filmed shattering, then the recording is played in reverse: but what is intact in the film’s final frame is, somehow, something quite unlike its original shape.

___

Paul Celan is decidedly anti-cliché. Cliché is not simply boring to Celan: having lived through a nightmare perpetuated by Nazi slogans and propaganda, he was intimately familiar with the power of thought-terminating platitudes.

As a writer and a reader, cliché embarrasses me, too. Since the impulse to bring a new, unique thing into the world is in many ways what drives an artist’s work, cliché seems like a creative failure—a falling back on what already exists. Anne Carson writes in her essay “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent”: “We resort to cliché because it’s easier than trying to make up something new. Implicit in it is the question, Don’t we already know what we think about this? Don’t we have a formula we use for this?” Celan witnessed the Nazis mobilize cliché to empty out language and obfuscate the machinations of power. From a perspective of craft, Carson derides cliché because it sidesteps originality. Both, then, share a suspicion of the prepackaged forms of sociality that cliché offers. But sometimes, when a connection to the social is precisely what is needed to keep one alive, clichés can enable dialogue, open up the possibility of a solution.

As an alcoholic, aphorisms rescued me. When the ship had sunk, I needed a life raft. Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Times that resisting cliché’s violence “doesn’t resist cliché so much as it resists a certain relationship to cliché: clichés as substitutes for exploration, or clichés as final verdicts [...]  It comes back to whether you think of clichés as portals or conclusions.” In order to reach each other, alcoholics tell the same stories over and over—different details, different circumstances, but essentially the same narratives. Clichés link our once-disparate stories and facilitate a togetherness to combat the desperate solitude experienced in addiction. The clichés passed back and forth between addicts may not look or sound like a Celan poem, but they share a common impulse. In a recovery meeting, a cliché can be a handshake in the way Celan posits a poem can—a connective thing, a way of reaching toward that can only be accomplished alongside other human beings.

___

A polyglottal Romanian who could have written well in a number of  languages, Celan chose to publish the majority of  his poems in German. It was his mother’s tongue: she insisted that her son learn and speak “a correct literary German,” John Felstiner notes in his biography, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor,  Jew. In June of 1942, Celan tried and failed to convince his parents to flee from Nazi roundups. He argued with his father, stormed out, spent the night at a friend’s, and returned the next morning to an empty house. Over the next few years, as he shoveled rocks in labor camps, news of their fates trickled back to him—his father dead from typhus; his mother, declared unfit for work, shot in the snow. He bore a guilt over their deaths for the rest of his life, Felstiner writes, quoting Alfred Kittner, “the thought that maybe he could have prevented his parents’ murder in the camp, if  he had gone with them.”

Writing in German may have been atonement, a way of honoring the beloved he believed he had betrayed. In continuing to work in his mother’s language, he expressed his dedication to her, even at great psychic and spiritual cost to himself. “There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German,” Celan writes in a letter in 1948 (all translations by John Felstiner, except where other translators are noted). Because he could not desert his mother tongue, he had to try to rework the unacceptable terms and constraints of  the language itself.

In an uncollected poem, “Wolfsbean,” excised from a draft manuscript of Die Niemandsrose, Celan speaks directly to his agonized relationship to the mother tongue and his history, rarely addressed so explicitly in his published work. Addressing his mother, Celan recognizes her presence in his poetry: “Mother, whose / hand did I shake / when I went with / your words to / Germany.” Even the words themselves belong to her. His anguish over her death permeates the poem, a loss that changed, for him, an entire language’s significance. A recurrent pain—“Yesterday / one of them came and / killed you / a second time in / my poem”—certainly not lessened by his decision to stay faithful to German, which was, perhaps, all he felt he had to remember her by.

The Holocaust left Celan parentless and homeless. After the war, he left Czernowitz, first for Bucharest and then Vienna, landing finally in Paris, where he lived the rest of his life. Speaking with Yves Bonnefoy, a French gentile poet, Celan remarked, “You are at home within your language, your reference points, among the books, the works you love. As for me, I am on the outside.” Still, after such trauma, as he said in a speech for the Bremen Literature Prize, “only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language” (tr. by Waldrop). For twenty-five years after the end of the war, displaced from tongue and country, he chose to make German work for him—remolding it by necessity from the inside out. In a letter to Gisèle Lestrange, Celan, visiting Dusseldorf in 1955, wrote: “The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with the one spoken here or elsewhere.” German, his last connection to the mother he was convinced he abandoned, made him twice an exile.

His early poems earned him critical praise, collegial admiration, even awards and invitations to read for German audiences—but Celan received this acclaim ambivalently. The popularity of his devastating poem “Todesfuge” brought opportunity, but also engendered a lingering resentment, as interpretations contradictory to his intention deeply wounded him. He struggled with misreadings that framed his work as a poetry interested in healing. One occasion, in particular, solidified an already growing desire to renounce the poem:

A German journal of  socially conscious pedagogy published in 1957 an account of  teaching “Todesfuge” to high school seniors [...] When, finally, [the teacher] asked them, “Do you feel the poem to be an accusation?,” in “unanimous protest” they replied: “just the opposite—forgiveness and reconciliation.”
—From Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner

Reconciliation sutures a wound, attempts to set to rest the past. But for Celan, the wound still festers beneath the stitches. “I am not looking for a way out,” he said in his speech “The Meridian,” as translated by Pierre Joris. Nor does he offer one. “I am only pushing the question further.”

At other times, Celan was received with overt hostility. An accusation of plagiarism, rooted in anti-Semitism and widely spread by the German press, dogged him for years, destabilizing an already fragile psyche. Heroes and idols showed their true colors. In 1967, he visited Martin Heidegger in Todtnauberg. Walking in the Black Forest with the famous philosopher who embraced the Nazi takeover of German academia, Celan’s “hope, today, / for a thinker’s / word / to come,” (tr. by Joris) proved to be an optimistic delusion—he detected no remorse or change of heart over the course of their conversation. Often in letters he complained of  being discriminated against or sidelined. Shortly before his death, he was invited to give a reading in Stuttgart for the Hölderlin Society, and was bothered (though by then unsurprised) by his reception—telling his friend and lover Ilana Shmueli that he “was ignored or dismissed as incomprehensible. Oh well” (tr. by Susan Gillespie).

The sum of all this history, this wrestling, and betrayal: a realization that the German he wrote was incompatible with the German literary establishment who sought to scrub from memory a violent recent past. His disastrous visit to a gathering of the famous German literary organization Gruppe 47 is a prime example of his disinclination to navigate the social and political miasma of the literary world. Invited by Ingeborg Bachmann to attend a reading in Germany in 1952, the recitation of his poems clashed with the “pure poetry” sensibilities of the group; the director told him he delivered his work “in a singsong straight out of a synagogue.” Celan was later ousted from the group, after they decided to excise references to the Holocaust from a publication entirely. The German preoccupation with “moving on” forced this Jewish poet still reeling from the violence of WWII into an impossible position.

___

Celan’s poems refuse consolation, flatly rejecting the notion that pretty words can heal a trauma as vast as the Shoah. Neither the sense nor the music of  language is a panacea. Coincidental with torture, music is inaudible at best—at worst, a conspirator. In “Todesfuge,” music is a sinister tool of the “master from Deutschland,” who forces his captives to fiddle and distract as their fellows are made to dig their own graves, but Celan won’t let brutality be drowned out by strings.

In Celan’s audio recording of “Todesfuge” from the late fifties, the pain in his voice is excruciatingly intelligible. As he nears the end, he grows quiet. Lines earlier delivered as an accusatory incantation now are repeated in a low, almost pleading tone, the final word whispered. The rhythm of his reading haunts the mind well after listening. Celan repurposes the musicality of German to indict music itself of collusion. He calls the poem a “fugue of death”: in a concentration camp, murder is embellished with orchestral accompaniment, and music itself becomes monstrous. After “Todesfuge” became the poem he was best known for, and he grew disaffected by the way his German readership dissected it, he explained in a letter to Hugo Huppert: “I don’t musicalize anymore, as at the time of the much-touted ‘Todesfuge,’ which by now has been threshed over in many a textbook.”

As misinterpretation, willful or otherwise, began to make his earlier work alien to him, Celan took his language elsewhere. “Engführung” (“Stretto”)—which takes as its title a term referencing an increase in intensity at the end of the fugue—was a response to or rewriting of “Todesfuge.” In more fragmented, spare, and oblique language than its predecessor, “Stretto” exemplifies the contrast between two eras of his poetry. In the poem, dialogue becomes obstructed, voices are heard and ignored, questions go unanswered, answers arrive without the questions that prompted them. “Stop reading—look! / Stop looking—go!” (tr. by Joris) Celan demands, interrupting the description of a natural landscape with desperate imperatives. The poem’s I is unintelligible to the You: “Something / lay between them. They / didn’t see through it.” Sleep silences the conversation.

I lay between you, I was
open, was
audible, I ticked toward you, your breath
obeyed, I
am still the one, as
you’re asleep.

The potential for mutual recognition keeps getting thwarted. Werner Hamacher writes: “[In ‘Stretto,’] the absence of the you suspends the I, that of the I suspends the you, and along with it discourse itself is suspended.” These voices cannot reach each other, unable to sound simultaneously or exist in the same space. Celan sets pain out on display, revealing one by one the scars and open sores. The surviving members of the grim orchestra of “Todesfuge” now gasp for breath in a terrain hostile to meaning:

Seams, palpable, here
they gape wide open, here
it grew together again—who
covered it up?
                                                                             Covered it
                                                                                       up—who?

“Stretto” spurns the enclosure of meaning his German readership imposed on “Todesfuge.” In this poem Celan develops a language of agitation and outcry, rousing meaning from its comfortable bed. A question and an accusation—“who?”—perennially indicts the self, the reader, and the violent impulse to bury the past. As the world cowers under desks, perched at the ledge of nuclear war, he tries to enter the idea of impossibility, himself a survivor—whose death has been suspended, delayed—an impossible thing. Celan yearned to bridge the cavity between the You and the I—between himself and his dead. A state of exile, of otherness, experiences of rejection and abuse from his readers and his peers, made the task of reaching across to the living even more difficult and traumatic.

___

I was sixteen years old, celebrating my brother’s birthday with a party at the drive-on beach at Crowes Pasture in Dennis, Massachusetts—the weather overcast and hot. Bored of the festivities, and fascinated by the fog melting the horizon in the distance, I walked across the remarkable width of sand at low tide toward the impossible edge. It wasn’t until the rising tide was past my shin that I turned around and realized I couldn’t see the shore. I waited for fifteen minutes until a Coast Guard officer spotted me from atop his all-terrain vehicle, helplessly waving, the water lapping at my hips. I nearly drowned, nearly wanted to.

Less a concrete intention to die, more a willingness to be removed from life, this event set a standard for the ideation and the few attempts that followed later. Swallowing just enough ibuprofen to maybe overdose, getting blackout drunk in an unfamiliar neighborhood with my phone battery at zero, crossing the busy street with a whole bottle of whiskey in my belly, humming incoherently, eyes closed. I think about Celan, by all accounts a strong swimmer. I wonder if after his dive he changed his mind, if he swam back up for air, if he tried to deny the current. Or if he simply let whatever was to happen, happen.

___

Before Celan’s body has been discovered, Daive writes in Under the Dome, he and Lestrange anxiously await any news, but grow more hopeless as each day passes. The two have this conversation:

—Paul left his watch on his night table. So Paul is dead.
—Ah? Why?
—Paul always kept his watch on his wrist. He told me: the day I take off my watch I’ll have decided to die.

So Gisèle knew.

___

Trauma’s accumulation pushed the poet toward a new reckoning. Recognizing the ineluctable divide between himself, his dead, and the language of  his poems, Celan moved in the direction of rupture. A translator of myriad languages, his late poems are themselves a kind of translation, a remix of his mother’s tongue into a new dialect, a Celanian German—following in the footsteps of Friedrich Hölderlin, one of his favorite poets. In his last years, secluded inside a tower in Tübingen, Hölderlin obsessively revised earlier work, retranslating his poems from German into an entirely unique, invented mix of German and classical Greek, resulting in fragmentary and layered poems of inspired intensity. This frenzied revision of language from the inside out is a definitive feature of Celan’s poems—at times desperate, at times intoxicated by the divine.

To paraphrase Giorgio Agamben, magic is speech liberated from language, and the later poems of Celan swim in that realm of magic. In these poems, Celan bucks against the way that descriptive language can collude with power to elide the ways that language itself  transforms experience, replicating current orders while wearing a mask of neutrality. Instead, he engages in a kind of description: an unwriting of the world, in pursuit of an elsewhere. This elsewhere is not ahistorical. As Celan says in “The Meridian,” discussing how each poem springs from and is indebted to the moment that produced it: “[The poem is] language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation that at the same time, however, remains mindful of the borders language draws and of the possibilities language opens up” (tr. by Joris). Indeed, the magic of the poem offers a way to speak and reach another in a manner quite unlike any other kind of writing.

In 1958, Celan wrote that his poetry was changing, “its language has grown more sober, more factual, it mistrusts ‘Beauty,’ [...] it is ... a ‘grayer’ language.” He is not interested in “musicaliz[ing]” a language that imposes the lyric in order to drown out the memory of the past, but in music. Music refuses semantic enclosure, allowing us to hold open the space of horror so we have to dwell inside of it and contend with it. Instead of a mollifying lyric German, Celan chooses to forge “a language which wants to locate even its ‘musicality’ in such a way that it has nothing in common with the ‘euphony’ which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors” (tr. by Waldrop).

Against the sterilization of language integral to Germany’s systematic apparatus of forgetting, Celan delves into the music and the magic of his mother’s tongue. In “Tübingen, January,” thinking of Hölderlin, who wears “the lightbeard of / the patriarchs,” shut away high in his wizard’s tower, casting spells of madness to transform his poems, Celan suggests that in the wake of  impossible violence, language fails us, and speech becomes a kind of babbling, outside of the known.

If,
if a man,
if a man was born, today,
[...] he could,
speaking of these
days, he
could
but babble and babble.
—Tr. by Joris

Pushing the bounds of the German language through permutation and reinvention, Celan rebuilds a new, “to-be-restuttered world” (tr. by Joris), as he writes in a poem in Snowpart, in which the alchemical tools of lacuna, caesura, rupture, and mixture are used to bring the reader into the space of the incommunicable, but deeply felt.

Celan accomplishes this movement into the realm of speech separated from the sense-making of language most fully in the moment of the “breathturn.” He discusses it at length in “The Meridian”:

Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route—also the route of art—for the sake of such a breathturn? [...] perhaps it will succeed here to differentiate between strange and strange, perhaps it is [...] here, with the I—with the estranged I set free here and in this manner—perhaps here a further Other is set free?

Perhaps the poem is itself because of this ... and can now, in this art-less, art-free manner, walk its other routes [...]

Perhaps.
—Tr. by Joris

He is careful to make room for questions, offering the word “perhaps” twenty-seven times throughout the speech. He resists unequivocal definition, makes no claim of clarity on the subjects about which he speaks. He prefaces often, foregrounding the process of inquiry: “I am only asking,” “I am only speculating,” “I am only pushing the question further.” The enduring question-space—unconcerned with answer—is a fundamental feature of the breathturn, the gift it provides. Questions enable genuine encounter, make possible the poem’s promise of a handshake. They allow the “estranged I” and “a further other” the opportunity to touch.

Between strange and strange, the breathturn stages an active freedom, a setting-free, where the ouroboros of reality reveals itself. Edmund de Waal defines the breathturn as the “moment of pause between breathing in and breathing out, when your sense of self is suspended and you are open to everything.” Pendent between death and life, the breathturn creates a break in time and knowledge. It occurs when the uncertain is allowed to flourish on its own terms. In this moment, all possibility exists.

In “Speak, You Too,” Celan makes room for liberatory uncertainty. “Speak — / But do not split the No from the Yes. / Give your saying also meaning: / give it its shadow” (tr. by Joris). Nodding to Hölderlin’s neologism “Pallaksch”—a word expressing yes or no depending on whim and context—Celan reaches for a language of dissonance that turns away from a culturally determined and sanitized consensus about what “truth” is.

Give it enough shadow,
give it as much
as you know to be parceled out between your
midnight and midday and midnight.

Look around:
see how it all comes alive—
At death! Alive!
Speaks true, who speaks shadows.

Shadow-speech—like Lorca’s duende—exists in the in-between—between letters, between sleeping and waking, between life and death. In the poem’s realm of the maybe, Celan offers possibility, a lightness, a future in which expression more closely reflects the real in all its strangeness: “Climb. Grope your way up. / You’ll grow thinner, more unrecognizable, finer!” In his imperatives, Celan compels both himself and his reader to reify a commitment to the truth, its ghastliness and glory.

Indeed, an indelible real persists. Breathturn (tr. by Joris) is a book of sometimes brutal topographies, where nature and the body fuse together like something out of a David Cronenberg film, where feeling is mixed up with the physical world. “Moment[s] of pause” are found throughout the poems—ecstatic, transformative exhalations:

Eroded by
the beamwind of your speech
the gaudy chatter of the pseudo-
experienced—
[...]
Deep
in the timecrevasse,
in the
honeycomb-ice
waits, a breathcrystal,
your unalterable
testimony.

In the moment of breathturn, a truth prevails, an “unalterable testimony” free from the distractions of “the beamwind of your speech / the gaudy chatter,” and outside ordinary time. “Nobody can tell how long the pause for breath—hope and thought—will last,” Celan says in “The Meridian.”

Another untitled poem from Breathturn moves further into this space of the possible:

Threadsuns
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.

This poem (whose first word Celan takes as the title of his next book), scavenges for hope, far from the tangled roots of violence, depression, and pain. Crepuscular rays of sunlight streaming from behind the clouds, a lifeline extended. And questions, always questions, follow: from there, a future.

___

The morning after my last drink, I awoke to God’s voice. A bell tenderly aggravating my hangover, the clearest thought I have ever had: This must change. I felt the breath of my life shift definably. Suspended between life and death, the breathturn is not a space devoid of risk. Celan exits on one side, and I the other. And so I find myself saved by poems that could not save their author.

In the drafts and materials of “The Meridian,” Celan writes: “I had survived some things,—but survival hopefully isn’t ‘everything.’” When I got sober, I quickly realized that the process of recovery was something beyond survival. I had lived a life designed to lead back perpetually to the same place: whether in celebration or mourning, there was always an occasion to drink. Where no turn or growth was possible. In sobriety, I needed to develop a new orientation to life’s unpredictability, new responses to the condition of living.

___

As I exit the tramcar and approach the large gate to the Cimetière Parisien de Thiais, I grow tense, alight with something akin to panic. I feel in my stomach the distances I traveled to be here, in Paris, visiting the grave of Paul Celan, sober and alive. I walk under an archway and mutter a low bonjour as I pass a bored guard in a small guardhouse.

The cemetery is wide and impressive before me, with long hallways of trees, planted in a vast grid. The second-largest Parisian cemetery, it’s home to roughly 150,000 graves. François, Celan’s son, was buried here following his death only a few days after his birth in 1953. His father joined him in 1970, and, later, his mother, Gisèle Lestrange-Celan, in 1991. I’m overwhelmed by how quietly everything is pretty. A lizard climbs onto my shoe. The birdsong, unfamiliar.

Two women are walking arm-in-arm in the same direction as I am, and I worry that they too are heading to Celan’s grave. They are joking with each other, and I feel grateful that they have that to carry them wherever they are going—but I am selfish, craving privacy. My petty paranoia is defused when they turn toward a different section of the cemetery.

I know roughly where the grave is, and start toward the thirty-first division. After ten minutes of searching, I begin to feel frustrated. I suddenly notice the sky turning gray. I spot a grasshopper impaled on a thorn of a small shrub, left behind by a hoarding shrike. I am out of place, in a strange country, with a weak French vocabulary, spinning awkwardly in my black dress. There is no one as far as I can see, and the only sounds belong to trees and wind and birds. Anxiety begins its familiar creep upward from the toes.

I turn around and then, his grave, below a plain black slab of stone, flanked on all sides by tombstones emblazoned with crosses. Suddenly I am on my knees. I hold my hand out toward the air above the stone that bears his name. Alone, with him, I tell him: I am sorry. I feel God swim about my brain, dissolving my intellect. My wailing arrives, louder than I thought was possible. I scream, and birds burst out of the trees. Eventually, I calm into whisper. I listen to the wind. A breezemoment—a breathturn. Things have changed.

___

Enclosed in one of his last letters to his wife, a love poem, sent a month before his suicide, in which agony and optimism abound in equal measure:

There will be something, later,
that brims full with you
and lifts up
toward a mouth

Out of a shardstrewn
craze
I stand up
and look upon my hand,
how it draws the one
and only
circle

This poem grants the lifesaving gift of perspective: there will  be something other than despair, perhaps not now, but in the very real and possible later. Again and again, poetry is the grace that keeps Celan tethered to the world. In one of his last letters to Ilana Shmueli, two weeks before his death, Celan writes: “my poems allow me for moments, precisely when I am reading them, a possibility to exist—to stand” (tr. by Gillespie). Those moments became too few and far between, that tether frayed and snapped. Now, fifty years after his death, I stand in the later that Celan prophesied.

In the process of drafting this essay, I began to think seriously about what it means to be sustained by the work of Paul Celan. Celan is often referred to as a “Holocaust poet,” a wholly tragic figure. I didn’t want to perpetuate the idea that his work, and indeed his whole life, is inevitably drawn toward his drowning in the Seine. To think that I am nourished by the pain of another person threatens my sense of self. To think about my own recovery as scaffolded by Celan’s tragedy is nauseating. So I tried to deny those disconcerting possibilities by turning away from them.

I wanted to be sure to point out the joy that Celan’s poems bring me, and I began by trying to locate that joy within the work. And there is joy in the work. A tension between loss and hope vibrates throughout these poems. But my extractive search for joy was an attempt to reify my own righteous, uncomplicated self-image as a person who derives joy from the joy of others. It’s undeniable, though: his suffering is more present. And I needed it.

Trying to locate joy as the source of my sustenance is an erasure of what actually sustains me—Celan’s engagement with suffering. In writing this essay, I’ve come to realize that what animates my own relationship with Celan’s work is not, in fact, that tension between loss and hope; rather, it truly is the loss, the unique depth of Celan’s exploration of pain, that I gravitated to when I read him for the first time. Celan’s poems are life-sustaining—but it was not his life that they sustained.

Reading Celan’s poetry in and as a space of profound discomfort about my own ethical position feels more honest. The imperative not to reconcile is the project of his work. He compels the reader to remain in the between space, inside of the question. Reconciliation is what the poems are asking me not to do.

Reading and loving this work makes me indebted to the conditions under which Celan composed his poems, the nightmare of the violence produced by ascendant fascist movements—a horrifying thing to admit, and a horror Celan knew well. He writes: “Whichever word you speak— / you owe to / destruction.” Ours is a contaminated language. Writing or reading in it one cannot avoid becoming contaminated in turn.

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Four sculptures adorn the pilings of the Pont Mirabeau, representing Abundance, Commerce, the City of Paris, and Navigation, observing all that transpires beneath their gaze. Standing on the bridge, I read Apollinaire’s famous poem, “Le Pont Mirabeau,” one of Celan’s favorites. I imagine him recalling Apollinaire’s lines as he jumped into the Seine, seen only by the “eternal tired tidal eyes” (tr. by Donald Revell) of these four green statues.

Hope is violent, Apollinaire reminds us, but still it flows. Celan’s life was full of violent hope—in his theological debate with Nelly Sachs in “Zurich, at the Stork,” he admits: “I let the heart / I had / hope: / for / his highest, death-rattled, his / wrangling word.” Violent, yes, but still holding on. He ends on doubt, the most divine kind of hope: “We / really don’t know, you know, / we / really don’t know / what / counts.”

In the days after his dive into the river, Celan’s apartment is full of the stillness that his absence brings. The mail, piling up outside the door. The books and papers quiet, ready. On the nightstand, the watch, at last. And open on his desk, a biography of Hölderlin, with a passage highlighted, perhaps as a kind of suicide note: “Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart.” Neglected, however, was the sentence’s second half: “but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously.”