Paul Celan, The Dark Oar, translated by Jaclyn Piudik

 

Paul Celan made Paris his home from 1948 until his death in 1970, and while his day-to-day life was conducted in French, he composed only one poem in his adopted language: “Ô les hâbleurs,” written for his son Eric in 1968. For Celan, a polyglot and prolific translator of the work of other writers – from Shakespeare to Apollinaire, Mandelstam to Char, to name but a few – there was no question that German, the Muttersprache or mother tongue, would be the language of his poems. despite his complex stance vis-à-vis the German language, his native tongue itself was, according to his biographer, John Felstiner, “the only nation he could claim.” Yet Celan had a long connection to French, having initiated his study of the language in high school in Czernowitz, later undertaking medical training in Tours between 1938 and 1939, and maintaining epistolary exchanges with friends and colleagues well before taking up residence in Paris. By the time Celan settled in France, he had already mastered the language, and his rapport with it would deepen, even though it would always be the language of his “exile.” (“FOREWORD”)

Presented as a poem in three languages is The Dark Oar (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), offering an original poem by Romanian-French poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) composed in German, alongside his own translation of the poem into French, and subsequently, the translation from French into English by Toronto poet and translator Jaclyn Piudik. As Piudik offers in her preface to the collection, she purposefully chose to translate the poems from the French, as opposed to translating directly from the German: “The Dark Oar brings Celan’s French translations of his own German poems – 26 in total – into English for the first time. Celan’s translations span some 17 years, from 1952 to 1969, through many phases of his life and his writing career.” She continues, writing: “And while there are many fine translations of the original German poems into English, the translation of Celan’s French versions of those poems open a window into the poet’s relationship both to his mother tongue and to his adopted language.” There is something I find fascinating about anyone moving to write in a language beyond their mother tongue. Samuel Beckett (1906-1979) and Milan Kundera (1929-2023), for example, who also moved into France and composed works in French, each of them situated in their own unique and very different forms of exile.

It is interesting to see Beautiful Outlaw editor/publisher, the Toronto poet, translator and critic Mark Goldstein, expand his own explorations into Paul Celan through publishing such projects, following American poet Robert Kelly’s Earish (Beautiful Outlaw, 2022), a German-English “translation” of “Thirty Poems of Paul Celan” [see my review of such here], as well as through multiple of his own projects, including Thricelandium (Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) [see my review of such here], Part Thief, Part Carpenter (Beautiful Outlaw, 2021), a book subtitled “SELECTED POETRY, ESSAYS, AND INTERVIEWS ON APPROPRIATION AND TRANSLATION” [see my review of such here] and as curator of the folio “Paul Celan/100” for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, posted November 23, 2020 to mark the centenary of Celan’s birth.

Through Piudik’s offering, it allows for the possibility of seeing further into the process of Celan the translator alongside Celan the poet, catching the differences he might have himself seen in the shifts between language, and a further project might be seeing just how different these English translations might be to others taken directly from Celan’s German. A book of companions and comparisons, especially for those able to read German and French, as Piudik writes:

Thus I stand, stony,
facing you.
High.

Eroded
by drifting sand, the two
hollows at the forehead’s edge.
Inside,
darkness glimpsed.

Pierced by the beats
of hammers brandished mutely,
the place
where the winged eye brushed me.
Behind,
in the wall,
the step where the Remembered crouches.
Facing here
animated by nights, a voice
streams,
from which you ladle the drink.