Robert Kelly, Earish

 

In Echsen-
häute, Fall-
süchtige,
bett ich dich, auf den Simsen,
die Giebel-
löcher
shütten uns zu, mit Lichtdung.

* * *

Him asking
hide a fall
seek to go
bet each dish off dense incense
they give al-
legiance
shadowing us to myth-leaked tongue

With a title reminiscent of George Bowering’s Ear Reach (1982), American poet Robert Kelly’s latest full-length title is Earish (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw, 2022), a German-English “translation” of “Thirty Poems of Paul Celan.” As Kelly writes to offer in his opening “Translator’s Note”:

In 2002 I was asked to contribute to Alex Finlay’s edition of translations by several hands of Paul Celan’s poem “Irisch.” While working on my translation (which duly appeared in the second volume, Irish (2), Edinburgh 2002), I began to work on other dimensions of the poem, then of other Celan poems. The present homeophonic translations are one result. By homeophonic translation I mean: listening to the sound of the (in this case, German) poem until you can hear it as English – the result, the poem heard, no doubt ‘says’ a ‘different’ thing from the ‘original.’ Those quoted words are all questionable, more question than answer, I mean. So here are some of my hearings of Celan poems. They are, in effect, translations into Earish.

There is a certain kind of poet-translator that attends to the work of Paul Celan, seeking out salve or salvage in Celan’s particular combination of intellectual heft, large themes, dark subject matter and a sense of dismantling and reassembling language and meaning in a way simultaneously playful and potentially devastating. Beautiful Outlaw editor/publisher Mark Goldstein, for example, has worked with and through Celan’s work via his own repeatedly, and even curated a selection of pieces for Celan’s centenary in November 2020 for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, a curation that included some of Kelly’s pieces from this current collection.

Set with the original German on the left, with Kelly’s translation on the right, there are five extended sequences of short poem-fragments—‘Fadensonnen,” “Atemwende,” “Schneepart,” “Zeitgehöft” and “Lichtzwang”—thirty poems set within five compositional groupings by the late Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). In certain ways, Kelly’s homolinguistic translations—following sound over meaning—echo what Canadian poet Hugh Thomas has been working on for some time as well, his “defective translations” or “fake translations” of poems originally composed in languages that he can’t actually read (nor does he look up), working through the words themselves to see what they might suggest to his imagination. Unlike Thomas’ deliberate unawareness of the source material (whether language or meaning), Kelly works through Celan as a life-long reader of a variety of translations of Celan’s work into English. These “translations” that Robert Kelly offers work through sound, adding and offering an element of what Celan worked on through his original German, marking an importance on how sound impacted meaning, from the collision of words and meanings to the very nature of the utterance. Through these short responses, sound overtakes meaning, offering a new strain of possibility, and a perspective, shared. In a certain way, Kelly works at the point where his work and Celan’s might otherwise meet, writing: “Noon you, wearish / the – woeing a blowgunner? – / ash it rousing, / ease vista thick tube gliding, / like tender growing rich meat / deem thick doors waxen tensile / her under suit virgin build / under men / gone soggy and flaccid and / dank rice unlike / bite her.”