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PAUL CELAN'S TODESFUGE 251 252 JOHN FELST1NER

a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete deathbringing speech'. Yet it was all he had left: only his language 'remained in the midst of
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air the losses'.5
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland If the war brought German literature to a Nullpunkt, a degree zero, then survivors like
Celan had an even starker Nullpunkt, and Todesfuge finds words for that nullity. In 1944,
dein goldenes Haar Margarete relatives and friends were returning to Czemowitz from the camps, or not returning. He
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith listened to horrifying stories. Perhaps if he had stayed with his parents in the ghetto and
PaulCelan, 1944-5 been deported to Transnistria, he could have saved them. Celan wrote Todesfuge in the
trans. John Felstiner
first person, an intolerable voice yet an obligatory voice: 'we drink and we drink'. 'We' and
'us' occur twenty-three times in the poem, insisting on the victims' own voice. The poet
makes them speak, but, because they cannot speak, must speak for them.
1. BIOGRAPHY OF THE POEM What is now famous as Todesfuge, Celan originally entitled Todestango (Tango of
Death). In fact it was his first published poem, appearing not in German but in Petre
Very few lyric poems in this century have cut so deeply into consciousness and into Solomon's Rumanian translation, Tangoul Mortii (May 1947).6 Think of that sort of dance
conscience as to become historical agents themselves, provoking, dividing and reshaping around black milk, graves, vipers, hounds, and you feel an added twist to Celan's irony.
opinion, accumulating a biography of their own. A poem rarely has the effect of a judicial The tango fascinated Europe during his childhood, the late 1920s and early 1930s. To call
precedent or scientific experiment, upsetting assumptions and forcing new choices. this poem Todestango was to cancel out everything in life that would be svelte, graceful,
Neruda's United Fruit Co., Yevtushenko's Babi Yar come to mind, though they remain nonchalant.
linked to their occasions. Owen's Dulce et decorum est, Yeats's Easter 1916 reach beyond Art and Life: it is the poem's stylized, cadenced lines and stunning metaphors that
their occasions. I know of no lyric that might touch us so radically as Paul Celan's have imprinted it on readers, yet Celan had the matter of fact to build upon. For example, in
Todesfuge, Fugue of Death or Deathfugue (1944-5) — in its way the Guernica of Europe's the Janowska camp at Lemberg, Galicia, not far from Czernowitz, an S.S. lieutenant
leading postwar poet.1 ordered Jewish fiddlers to play a tango with new lyrics, called 'Death Tango', for use during
This poem gradually became a cause c6lebre during the 1950s and 1960s. Schwarze marches, tortures, grave-digging, executions. Before liquidating the camp, they shot all the
Milch der Fruhe wir trinken sie abends ('Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening'): to orchestra.7 This Todestango was based on the Argentine Eduardo Bianco's greatest
mention Paul Celan would instantly evoke this opening line, which caught the Jews' prewar hit. In fact Bianco's band played in Paris while Paul Celan was there in early 1939,
unspeakable plight in a strikingly spoken metaphor, and in so doing, gave German readers and later that year entertained Hitler and Gdbbels, who preferred the tango to the
a frisson of understanding that was not always earned or examined. The poem has often decadence of negro jazz.8
served as prooftext in a post-Nazi Germany preoccupied with 'national guilt', 'collective Celan may well have got the germ for his poem from listening to survivors' accounts of
mourning', 'coming to terms with the past' and 'reparation'.2 how the S.S. manipulated their prisoners with music, or from reading some contemporary
What had it taken to draw such an utterance from a 23-year-old? Born in 1920 in report about the Janowska or another camp. I have seen a 1944 pamphlet on 'The Lublin
Czernowitz, Bukovina, the eastern outpost of the Austnan empire until World War I, Celan Extermination Camp' (i.e. Maidanek) by Konstantin Simonov, issued by Moscow's Foreign
grew up in a German-speaking Jewish milieu, learning Hebrew for his bar mitzvah and Languages Publishing House.9 In Soviet-ruled Czernowitz, possibly Celan came across
Rumanian at school. He resisted his father's Orthodox, Zionist persuasion, but after 1933, this pamphlet. Simonov recounts a mass death march toward the camp crematorium,
circumstances soon showed the boy how Jewish he was. In 1934 he wrote to an aunt who endless columns five abreast, 'holding each others' arms. . . Scores of loudspeakers
had emigrated to Palestine: 'I could write a 300-page opus about antisemitism in our began to emit the deafening strains of the foxtrot and the tango. And they blared all the
school.'3 After the Hitler-Stalin pact, Russian forces occupied Czernowitz and 'reformed' morning, all day, all the evening, and all night.'
the university. Then in 1941, Rumanian and Nazi troops set about burning, plundering, And Celan wrote: 'Black milk of daybreak we dnnk it at evening/we dnnk it at midday
torturing, murdering, deporting thousands of Jews. One night in June 1942 the ghetto was and morning we drink it at night.' These opening verses seem to hark back to Genesis —
swept. Celan, an only child, hid with friends, and later found his house sealed up, his 'And there was evening and there was morning: one day' — so that Paul Celan's poem
parents gone. That winter he learned that both his father and mother, brutally exhausted in marks our century's anti-Creation. But it chastens imagination to hear, with Celan's ears, a
a camp on the southern Bug River, had been shot by the S. S. Celan himself, after a year documentary account such as Simonov's. Reality can swell to metaphorical excess and
and a half at forced labour in various Rumanian camps, barely escaped execution, fled to defy belief, as Celan's Rumanian editor recognized in 1947, assuring his readership, in a
the Soviet army, and eventually returned to Czernowitz in February 1944. note to the poem, that Tangoul Mortii was indeed 'based upon data': in the Nazi camps,
There, in late summer 1944, standing outside the iron grillwork of the archiepiscopal 'some of the condemned were forced to play music while others dug graves'.10 This
cathedral in his Russian-occupied homeland, he read this new poem to a friend who had prefatory caution against disbelief inaugurated the working history of Celan's poem.
survived with his family the same camp where Celan's parents perished.4 What then did it Not long after the poem's appearance in Rumanian, Celan changed his title — a
take for an orphan to voice annihilation in his mother tongue, which had become the momentous change that has left readers shuttling between the poem's versification and its
murderers' tongue? The German language, he later said, had to 'pass through its own veracity, its aesthetic and its historical claims. Having abandoned Czernowitz, Celan in
answerlessness, pass through a frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of Bucharest pencilled out 'tango' in a typescript of Todestango and substituted 'fuge' (though
PAUL CELAN'S TODESFUGE 253 254 JOHN FELSTINER

he did not alter the phrase, 'play for the dance').11 Then in Vienna in 1948 he published his applauds the poet for "singing one of the most ghastly and significant events in recent
first book, setting apart Todesfuge as its concluding section.12 That change, from the history . . . so that it escapes history's bloody chamber of horrors to rise into the ether of
Argentine dance to Bach's masterful complexity, has made all the difference. For though pure poetry'. Who, I wonder, was really escaping?
Celan's lines had all along formed a repetitive, overlapping and dissonant counterpoint, to With an ease that seemed indecent to Celan, Todesfuge during the 1950s was
actually call them a fugue called attention to their artfulness — however much he also ensconced in anthologies and, notably, in school textbooks. Students would spend a few
meant to bring out their inexorability. In wartime, when Celan composed this poem, its preliminary minutes on 'content preparation', then go on assiduously to analyse the poem's
classic form must have meant a precarious stay against chaos. But all too soon prosody and structure. (In a German high-school reader from the 1960s that a friend has
Todesfuge's musical construction, its play among verbal themes, diverted attention from shown me, there is firmly pencilled in above Todesfuge the word 'Daktylus'.) Having
the poem's real theme: that German fascism consummately orchestrated human beforehand studied fugues in music class, a pedagogical journal suggests, students might
annihilation. each adopt a motif or voice to perform Celan's poem, "to make the polyphony audible' —
For twenty years Todesfuge figured as a national obsession in Germany, a more with what effect, it's hard to know.18 This journal does advise giving students something
durable if somewhat less passionate obsession than Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy. historical first (but not about the mass murder — better Anne Frank's diary). And 'the point
Hundreds of reviews, essays, memoirs, dissertations, critical books, anthologies and is for this to happen before interpreting Todesfuge' — which seems reasonable enough,
teachers' guides, not to mention countless school and university classes, have dealt with unless the point really is to get all that history behind you, because 'a consideration of
the poem since 1952, when Celan published it in Germany as the centrepiece of his first Todesfuge could easily lapse into discussion of the persecution of the Jews'.
major collection, Mohn und Ged&chtnis (Poppy and Memory).13 To sample those Evidently Celan himself felt his poem lapsing into a purely aesthetic niche. He insisted
responses yields a kind of morality play, wherein Art and History, imagination and reality, in 1958 that his poetry mistrusted 'the "melodiousness" that more or less untroubled still
jostle for precedence. trips tunefully alongside the most frightful things'.19 In Germany to accept the 1958 Bremen
'His lyrics are poe'sie pure, magical montage', says an early review of the 1952 Prize, Celan made this speech show how desperate and purposive his wnting was: 'A
collection. They have French sheen and Balkan glitter, the suggestiveness of the chanson poem can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the (not always greatly hopeful) belief that it
and the modulations of melancholy. They exist wholly on metaphor... Reality is may somewhere and sometime wash up on land, on heartland perhaps.'20 And that same
transposed in the secret script of poesy!' All this in 1953 from the Christian poet Heinz year he wrote to a critic: 'For me what counts is truth, not euphony.'21
Piontek, who urged Celan to publish only when 'he has something to say which is really By the late 1950s Celan's verse shed its euphony, turning enigmatic and rhythmically
pressing him — but not his Etudes and finger exercises'.14 You would never know that constrained, its syntax ruptured from within by the force of unspeakable truths. In that vein
Todesfuge was the main piece in the volume under review. Celan's book title, Poppy and he wrote a long sequel to Todesfuge which he called Engfuhrung (1958), meaning
Memory, evidently referred to more than just his own struggle between obliviousness and 'straitening' and also 'stretto', the close overlap of voices at the end of a fugue:.
remembrance. Another article that year somehow perceived in Todesfuge its 'removal of Asche.
everything concrete . its romanticizing metaphor', and praised the poem's 'enchant- Asche, Asche.
ment1, 'lyncal alchemy', 'Zen Buddhist saton-experience', 'clever technique and beautiful Nacht.
imagery' — 'A Celan poem is wholly without intention. It wants to be nothing but breath, Nacht-und-Nacht.22
sound, image, effortless and almost singable . . . Celan is a tender sculptor.'15 Here are the ashes and night of Todesfuge, now stripped of cadence and metaphor. Now
I imagine the poet at a newstand in Pans, where he had finally settled, finding this in only the narrowest art will do. Perhaps Todesfuge had come out too prepossessing, had
Die Welt and maybe having to remind himself what Todesfuge really said: 'he whistles his invited too congenial a reading. Possibly Celan felt so. Nothing like it appears in his lyncs
hounds to come close/he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the during the 1960s. They have instead a crystal cut and density that taxed (and dazzled)
ground.' Not every critic was enchanted away from the Nazi genocide by this poem's German readers.
musical virtuosity. In fact the very first review of Celan's 1952 collection, a short notice by For various reasons Celan became reluctant to see Todesfuge anthologized. As a
Paul Schalluck entitled 'Schwarze Milch der Fruhe' ('Black Milk of Daybreak'), pointed out poet, he saw his intolerably hard-bought metaphors (the black milk, the grave in the clouds)
that the poet had lost his parents in a dreadful way and yet could now 'express the too readily appreciated. When a German scholar wrote to him in 1961, inquinng about
unspeakable'.16 People will come to study Celan's sources and influences, 'but we'll literary models for some metaphors in Todesfuge, Celan replied revealingly: The "grave in
remember that we never before have read such verses', says Schalluck, and he quotes the the air", my dear Walter Jens — in this poem, it is neither borrowing nor metaphor.'23 Even
opening lines of Todesfuge. Rolf Hochhuth, speculating on how to portray the horror of Auschwitz, remarked that
But almost all the early reviewers brought a skewed aesthetic to the poem. Even those Todesfuge's 'masterly' metaphors actually screened off reality.24 And Celan reportedly told
who acknowledged Celan's subject, the Nazi death camps, usually stressed instead the someone in 1966, 'I don't musicalize anymore, as at the time of the much-touted
'pure play' of his language, its 'sovereign inner reality', 'unbndled fantasy', 'purely verbal Todesfuge, which by now has been threshed over in many a textbook.'25 At the same time,
configurations'. A well-known poet and critic, Hans Egon Holthusen, writing for the he was suffering from a groundless, drawn-out plagiarism charge which the German press
influential monthly Merkur less than two years after Todesfuge was published, could say helped publicise. This campaign rubbed his nerves raw to whatever neo-Nazism and
that it had 'already become famous'.17 But what had not hit home was the irreconcilable recrudescent antisemitism he perceived in Germany, and he shrank from appeanng in any
paradox embedded in the two halves of Celan's genitive, 'Fugue of Death' Holthusen anthology alongside German poets who had behaved dubiously or worse during the war.26
PAUL CELANS TODESFUGE 255
256 JOHN FELSTINER

One nettle in particular afflicted Celan and clung to Todesfuge during the 1950s and
2. THE POEM IN TRANSLATION
1960s. In 1951 and again in 1955 the German-Jewish sociologist Theodor Adorno, after
years of refuge in the United States, published an essay containing the remark that has Since Paul Celan's death, the work of understanding has intensified in Germany,
remained his most famous: 'Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch', France, Israel and America. We can now better locate Todesfuge within the body of
'After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.'27 Then in a 1962 radio talk, published in Celan's work, which did not, during the quarter-century after 1945, ever really lose touch
1965, he repeated that sentence and explained: 'Through the aesthetic principle of with what had incited that poem in the first place. And the German public seems to have
stylization . . . an unimaginable fate still seems as if it had some meaning; it becomes absorbed without quite assimilating Todesfuge. Recently a set of 'poetic testimony on
transfigured, with something of the horror removed.'28 Critics began applying this stricture deportation and annihilation' was titled Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland; a well-
to Todesfuge — not really, Celan thought, because the poem prettified Jewish suffering, known abstract painter has done a sequence called Dein Goldenes Haar Margarete; in
but because it affronted German guilt. Soon Adorno's dictum was generally taken to refer 1980, an 18-year-old German music student set Todesfuge for a speaker and seven
to Todesfuge. The culminating insult came when a 1965 Merkur article questioned poetry instruments, publishing it in a series called 'New Music for Children and Youth'. 40 A West
not merely after but about Auschwitz: Celan's Todesfuge and its motifs, 'all of them German Marxist has even warned lest nowadays Todesfuge be replaced in textbooks by
thoroughly composed in an elegant score — didn't that show far too much pleasure in art, mannered, subjective lyrics.41 German classes do still study the poem, paying more or less
in despair turned "beautiful" through art?' 29 attention to the history, the memory, that compelled Celan to write.
The poet who had his parents wrenched away overnight, and who barely survived For many European Jewish survivors, Celan's poem remains the quintessence of
eighteen months forced labour, felt especially slandered when German critics charged him whatever understanding they can voice after the catastrophe. Indeed one phrase from the
with eliciting aesthetic pleasure from Auschwitz. A 1966 letter of Celan's mentions the poem — 'we shovel a grave in the air' — the phrase which Celan attested was 'neither
Merkur, saying 'now one finally knows where the barbarians are to be found1.30 But in this borrowing nor metaphor', has passed into the language. In prefacing the 1976 reissue of At
case Adorno may not have been exactly responsible for his disciples. His first essay was the Mind's Limits, Jean Amery characterizes the resurgence of German antisemitism as a
written in 1949, when he had not even heard of Celan. 'Nach Auschwitz...' did not 'playing with the fire that dug a grave in the air for so many'.42 And when Primo Levi invents
originally refer to Todesfuge, and Adorno's editor Rolf Tiedemann tells me that it was the key song for his partisans in the semi-fictional story, If Not Now, When? (1982), he has
Celan's poetry itself which led Adorno in 1966 to recant specifically his famous dictum.31 them sing that their slaughtered brothers 'have dug themselves a grave in the air'.43 Levi
Towards the end of his life, Adorno intended to wnte an essay on Celan's poem thereby pays Celan's words the homage of imagining them on the lips of Jewish resistance
Engfuhrung. He considered Celan the only authentic postwar writer to stand with fighters.
Beckett.32 In the English-speaking countries, Celan's poem has had nothing like its dramatic
During the late 1960s, more readers began hearing the bitter irony in Todesfuge. A European career, although George Steiner's long and passionate advocacy has done
1968 East German collection on the persecution of the Jews included the poem, which also much to impress Celan's significance upon us.44 America and Britain are free of the murky
appeared that year in Germany's most popular school reader.33 Other critics harped on the conscience that makes Germany's reception of Todesfuge so charged a phenomenon.
usual themes. 'Doesn't he reduce death', asked one man, 'to a harmless wood-carving?'34 And when the poem finds its American and Bntish audience, it is in translation, removed
Another, seemingly sympathetic to Celan's later verse, in 1970 called Todesfuge 'all too from a language Celan's parents shared with their murderers. It is true that for many years,
rhetorical'.35 That same year a teachers' journal managed somehow to discover, in the students of German in the United States have been given Todesfuge to read, but the
syntax of Todesfuge, Celan's 'grief for the hangman', for 'the victim of a system', and this effects of this remain undocumented. More impressive, in my view, has been the way
journal suggested that the poem's close — certain Amencan and British poets have responded to Celan by making their own versions
of this poem, as an act of imaginative solidarity rather than for publication.45 Doubtless the
your golden hair Marguerite lync force of Todesfuge has drawn these poets into touch with a historical experience they
your ashen hair Shulamith might not otherwise realize. A similar effect holds for American readers of Celan, though
his poetry, which over the years did not usually retain the outspoken clarity of Todesfuge,
has lagged in recognition behind the writing of survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Nelly
— couples the German and the Jewish ideals in 'forgiveness', couples Goethe's
Sachs.46
Margarete and the Song of Songs' Shulamith in a 'loving meeting', rather than in the
I know fifteen published English translations of Todesfuge (and several unpublished),
impossible chord that turns Shulamith to ashes. Celan's dosing couplet this article concludes,
from Michael Bullock, Clement Greenberg and Jerome Rothenberg in the 1950s to
may also 'recall to us the close of Faust,' where 'the eternal feminine draws us upward'.36
Christopher Middleton, Joachim Neugroschel, Michael Hamburger and others.47 Still I see
Celan was spared, as it happens, from contemplating these notions. During the 1960s
some point in attempting new versions of this poem that Celan wrote in a continuous
he had suffered intermittent episodes of mental illness. In 1969 he visited Israel
present tense, unstopped by punctuation. Every phrase, practically every word in
gratefully and intensively, yet reluctant to face its messianic demand.37 In March 1970 he
Todesfuge broaches questions for the translator. What do you do, for instance, with
was let down sharply by an audience at the Hdlderiin bicentenary.38 In April he drowned
Meister— a god, a champion, a guildsman, a master of arts or theology, a labour-camp
himself in the Seine. Left on his desk was a biography of Hdlderlin with a sentence
overseer, a musical maestro, a rabbi, the 'master' race, not to speak of Richard Wagner's
underscored: 'Sometimes this genius darkens and sinks into the bitter well of his heart.'39
Meistersinger von Nurnberg, a name that itself carries overtones of the 1935 Nuremberg
PAUL CELAN'S TODESFUGE 257 258 JOHN FELSTINER

laws and also the postwar trials? How do you convey the poem's glancing hints of Luther's of Jews forced to dig their own graves in the earth: 'We shovel a grave in the sky.' Hidden
Genesis, the Song of Songs, Jeremiah, Goethe, Heine? Through them alone, Todesfuge in this plural voice runs a specific private suffering, for when friends asked Celan what work
enfolds an indictment of western, so-called Judeo-Christian culture. he had done in labour camp, all he would say was Schaufein! 'Shoveling!'51 Another sort
In translating, and now in thinking about the process of translating, I go back again and of hidden reverberation occurs toward the end of line four: 'we shovel a grave in the sky da
again, longingly, to Celan's own recorded voice — he read with 'a cold heat', one friend liegt man nicht eng'. That word eng, 'narrow, tight', counted for a lot in Celan's semantic
said — to absorb his rhythms, pauses, emphases, retards, quickenings, caustic universe. The long poem that in a way supplanted Todesfuge he called Engfuhrung (1958),
articulation, and even, in Todesfuge, a slight mistake when he comes excitedly to 'jab the meaning 'stretto' or literally a 'leading narrowly'. And in his major speech on poetry, 'The
earth deeper. . . sing up and play'.48 American audiences, including many people who do Meridian' (1960), he says: 'Go with art into deine allereigenste Enge, your very selfmost
not understand German, have listened to Celan's voice reading this poem and have straits. And set yourself free.' 52 Over the years I have tried one solution after another to the
registered a kind of dumbstruck recognition that always renews my respect — both for the problem of bringing da liegt man nicht eng into rhythmic, idiomatic English. For instance,
poem and for the task of translating it. For I find that translating asks first of all the openest 'there you won't lie too tight' creates an unwanted rhyme with 'night' two lines above, in a
possible response. The translator needs to make a fully responsive reading — poem that deliberately avoids rhyme. Celan's phrase gives a proverbial touch to the notion
biographical, historical, philological, prosodic — before (and while) writing a new version. that the Jews will not be crowded into bunks anymore, once they have gone up in smoke.
So we get a peculiarly revealing sense of Todesfuge by exposing some questions, choices, Provisionally I have had it, 'there you won't feel crammed in'. But I would rather end on the
losses, and possibly even gains that arise in the process of translating. hard consonants of this line's key monosyllable, as Celan does on eng, so probably it
The poem's title itself resists a single or simple equivalent. 'Fugue of Death', a correct should read, 'there you won't lie too cramped'. Whatever solution is chosen, a translator's
rendering, loses the German genitive's compactness — Todesfuge — the compact, so attempts to renew the poet's voice as it renews the victims' voice can at least keep us
to speak, between order and rupture, the word's two sides. But 'Death Fugue' or awake and alert to Todesfuge. As Celan once said, 'A poem can be a message in a
'Deathfugue' do not present the idea of belonging, of a train of events belonging uncannily bottle.'53
to death. The surreal nature of the title then carries over into the poem's opening paradox: Verse translators regularly have to decide whether to try and make their own version
Schwarze Milch ('Black milk'). Celan's opening line, which turns out to be virtually the only replicate musical effects — assonance, consonance, alliteration, and so on — at the same
line taking a stress on the first syllable, also becomes the refrain of this poem. He begins spot where such effects occur in the original. This question matters even more in
with a metaphor, as if announcing that not description but only metaphor, the figure of Todesfuge, where music as such is of the essence of the poem. 'A man lives in the house',
speech that asserts something contrary to fact, can convey the fact he has in mind. And he we hear, der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt. The alliteration on three successive
makes his metaphor extreme, an oxymoron nullifying everything generative that human- stresses, spielt... Schlangen ... schreibt, insists on a connection between playing,
kind relies on. Now possibly, camp inmates used the very words 'black milk' about a liquid snakes and writing. To say "he plays with his snakes he writes' will link the first two terms
they were given, and they may simply have been describing what they saw.49 If so, we phonically, but even better, 'he plays with his vipers he writes' moves the rhythm along
must acknowledge that in Nazi-ridden Europe, the real overtook the surreal, brute fact and ties 'vipers' to 'writes', discovering something deadly evil in this act of writing home.
outstripped imagination. The very next sound effect seems to defy any English equivalent just when we want
The contradiction, the antagonism to life embedded in Celan's opening metaphor one: der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland. Rather than say 'he writes when it
comes through with a special force, as it happens, in all four Hebrew translations of grows dark to Germany', which naturalizes too much the Thousand Year Reich, we can
Todesfuge that I have seen. Chalav Shachor shel shacher, reads a straight- preserve the heavy alliteration of dunkel with Deutschland by simply allowing Deutschland
forward version, 'Black milk of dawn'. 50 Amidst the Hebrew's variously interlinked into English: 'he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair. . . . ' What is
sounds, shachor meaning 'black' and shachar meaning 'dawn' are spelled the same, with more, the two-syllabled Deutschland holds on to Celan's gripping, repetitive rhythm better
merely a single vowel sound to distinguish them — a vowel sound, what's more, not than 'Germany'. And after all, why not refrain altogether from translating Deutschland,
expressed by Hebrew characters. In a moment, the translation suggests, dawn can turn familiar enough to us in song and story — Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles!M Celan
black. himself never used the word again in this poetry.55 Perhaps this early utterance said all he
Oftentimes, in translation, the desire for a certain prosodic effect can lead to had to say on the matter.
recognitions that might not otherwise occur, or that might not occur so decisively. Thus for Before the line ends, it yields two more ironies on the German ideal, and these do
the first line of Todesfuge, I would like to say 'Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk', so come across in translation. What the camp commandant writes home 'to Deutschland',
as to let alliteration imprint the day-in, day-out fatality of camp existence. But abends at the dein goldenes Haar Margarete, evokes Heinrich Heine's premier German romantic lyric of
end of the line may gain more if instead of 'dusk', our word 'evening' points ahead to the Lorelei, who 'combs her golden hair', sie ka'mmt ihr goldenes Haar, and who sings a
'morning' in the next line. In Luther's Genesis we hear Da wardaus Abend und Morgen der seductive melody.56 And beneath the nordic ideal of golden hair and the fatal music, I feel
erste Tag, or in the Buber-Rosenzweig version, Abend ward und Morgen ward: Ein Tag: here in Deathfugue another, deeper current of irony: that Heine, the expatriated,
'And there was evening and there was morning: one day.' To miss these mythic overtones imperfectly assimilated German Jew living (as Paul Celan came to) in Paris, should now
risks obscuring a terrifying parody of the first day of Creation. furnish Celan with a phrase that doubtless beautifully beguiles most readers of Todesfuge,
Certainly a good deal gets lost from the fourth line of Todesfuge, though for different even those who hear the anger in it. Then in our very next breath, 'Margarete' resonates as
reasons. Wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Luften, Celan says, speaking in the plural person the eternal feminine, the Gretchen of Goethe's Faust— and also of Gounod's and Berlioz',
PAUL CELAN'S TODESFUGE 259 260 JOHN FELST1NER

whose music must have drawn me to say 'Marguerite' rather than the rhythmically clumsy maiden, 'black but comely", and the golden-haired Gretchen, no accommodation, no
'Margaret'. Heine, whose poetry was either banned or printed anonymously during the reconciliation, can come about (though Goethe, as it happens, once translated the Song of
Nazi era, and Goethe, whose famous oak near Weimar the S.S. reverently preserved at Songs). Celan's word aschenes tells why.
the centre of Buchenwald: these spectres charge Celan's line with a gravity that Coming upon this cherished name, which is transliterated as Sulamith in German and
translation, for once, cannot dispel.57 is the only Hebraic term in Celan's poem, I am unsure how to render it. The King James
Celan seemingly infused this first stanza with ironic culturaJ allusions; they build on the Bible says Shulamite, the Jewish Publication Society, Shulammite. In Song of Songs, she
coexistence of Auschwitz with Bach, let us say, in the title word Todesfuge. His next line, is a princess, 'the hair of whose head is like purple', she dances on sandalled feet. Her
may contain more such allusions: 'he writes it and steps out of doors und es blitzen die name may come from a root meaning 'whole, complete', akin to shalom, 'peace'; occurring
Sterne, and the stars are all sparkling'. In this idyllic moment, for which the poeticism only this once in the Bible, it guards its identity. She is seen as the Jewish people itself:
'sparkling' seems fitting, critics have heard two echoes. Puccini's Tosca, the diva who 'Return, return, O Shulammite; return, return, that we may look upon thee' (Song of Songs
'lived for art and love', has an artist-lover Cavaradossi who sings to her from prison, E 7:1). Since the Song stems from post-exilic Palestine and is read at Passover, she is a
lucevan le stelle, 'And the stars were shining' when they first met. But both lovers come to figure or promise of return into Zion. Jewish mystical tradition interprets her as the
tragic ends.58 These romantic overtones may be compounded by others, for Celan's Shekhinah, the daughter and bride in exile with the community of Israel. Although Celan
phrase es blitzen die Sterne also recalls a German song extremely popular during (and did not absorb Kabbalah until later, this sense of exile and longing still inheres in the name
after) the war, Heimat, deine Sterne, 'Homeland, thy stars'.59 A sentimental, nostalgic he chose to set against Margarete and to close his poem.
ditty, it adds an extra edge of bitterness to Celan's poem, especially if the Davidstem, the In making an English version of Todesfuge, I want to do more than just transliterate
yellow star, can be seen hovering over the line. Sulamith and leave it at that. The Jewish name brims with too much, especially against the
One of this poem's angriest moments follows abruptly upon the idyllic, sparkling stars. oppressive rhythms of this poem. Celan may not have known that in 1806, the first
Er pfeift seine Ruden herbei/er pfeift seine Juden hervor: mirroring each other on both German-language periodical for Jews was called Sulamith.^ But he certainly knew the
sides of the line break, Celan sets two clauses of identical metre and syntax, and nearty famous Yiddish operetta Shulamis, by Avraham Goldfaden, which played in Czemowitz.62
identical diction. Translated closely, they could run: 'he whistles his hounds to come near/ Somehow it matters to keep such things in mind, though they may not quite well up into the
he whistles his Jews to appear.' That would match Celan perfectly, but in fact a perfect process of translation. They enforce my attention when the name returns in stanza three,
rhyme on 'near' and 'appear' belies the shrill dissonance between Ruden and Juden, one again split by a line break after Margarete, as if shadowing her. Now when I spot this
having an umlaut and the other not. Our English 'hounds' and 'Jews' do not sound that recurrent motif, a highly unusual and precarious possibility presents itself: to let the several
way, so I have tried to work with Celan's adverbs herbei and hervor. 'he whistles his hounds words of the motif, each time they occur, gradually revert to German. That way the reader
to come close/he whistles his Jews into rows.' Perhaps we are by now over-familiar with grasps an English version the first time round, 'your ashen hair Shulamith', then watches a
images of the S.S. fondling their guard dogs while savaging prisoners. But Celan wrote half-reversion in stanza three, 'your aschenes Haar Shulamith', and finally recognizes the
Todesfuge in 1944. That grinding of the voiced 's' in 'rows' against the unvoiced 's' in original German at the poem's close, dein aschenes Haar Sulamith. The motif becomes a
'close' cuts as deep as I can get into the bitter source of the poem. figure in a dance, changing each time she comes round — and changing, let us remember,
When Celan speaks the last line of this stanza, his voice — almost despite himself, I back into a language that had passed 'through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing
think — becomes clipped and commanding: er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz. Here speech,' Celan said, and that the poet had to burn clean to go on writing.63
the dance recalls Celan's original title, Todestango; reports of a Jewish death camp What makes it possible to reverse the process of translation — an uncanny spectacle,
orchestra may first have stirred him to write. At the same time, the relentless rhythm that as if Mr. Hyde were turning back into Dr. Jekyll — what makes this reversion (or better, this
gathers in this poem gives to Tanz the force of Totentanz, the mediaeval Dance of Death. meridian circle) possible, is of course the repetitive, fugue-like composition of Todesfuge
Yet from another point of view, I cannot help feeling that this literary source-spotting takes — its musicality, for better or worse. And what prompted me to try reversing the process
away from the really unprecedented force of Celan's image. Ah yes, the danse macabre, was a realization, as I worked my way through Deathfugue, that the poem was becoming
we know all about that! easier and easier to translate: I have done this phrase before, and this one too, and here
One classical allusion in particular has led commentators into a speciously they come back again, no need to think anymore. This strange realization reflects, in a
comfortable reading of Todesfuge. Halfway through the second stanza, Celan introduces a way, the iteration and reiteration of I'univers concentrationnaire: daybreak and midday and
new figure: 'he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Marguerite/de/n evening and night — the fugue's inexorability, the attntion of life. One motif in particular
aschenes Haar Sulamith.' The mirror-like twinning of Faust's beloved with the comely embodies this fatal compact between Todes and fuge. Death itself. 'Death is a master from
maiden from the Song of Songs has encouraged some German critics and pedagogues to Deutschland" enters once in the third stanza, then breaks three times into stanza four,
see reunion or even forgiveness in this poem — the German-Jewish symbiosis reborn disrupting the rhythms we had got used to. By the end of the stanza, the commandant
from the ashes.60 But a line break sunders the two figures, and the person who writes
home to his fair Margarete cannot then be the one speaking to ash-haired Sulamith (as you .. . looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
can hear in a delicate shift Celan's own voice makes on recording). Shir haShirim, Song of he plays with his vipers and daydreams tier Tod is eme Meister aus Deutschland
Songs, the love lyric nonpareil in Judaic and Christian tradition, celebrates physical love in
terms utterly removed from the human degradation of Todesfuge. Between the Hebrew and I cannot tell whether rendering that phrase back to Celan, in German, redeems what is
PAUL CELAN'S TODESFUGE 261

lost in translation or only emphasizes, as in italics, the irredeemable loss that incited this
poem.
Paul Celan's poem does not end here, however. Its coda reduces the long fugue to
two voices with no reconciliation, no resolving into a chord:

dein goldenes Haar Margarete


dein aschenes Haar Sulamith.

Earlier on, I had decided to say 'Shulamith1: that spelling best indicates the name's Hebrew
origin, and by pronouncing it as in Hebrew we get the caustic, irony of a rhyme with
Marguerite. Here at the end, Sulamith returns as the poem's last word, still sounding less
Germanic than Hebraic. I am grateful that I can finally take Celan's word for it, for whatever
the word is worth.

NOTES
Part 1 of this essay is a revised version of an article that appeared, along with a translation
of Todesfuge but without annotation, in The New Republic, 2 April 1984.
1. Der Sand aus den Umen (Vienna. A Sexl, 1948); Mohn und GedSchtnis (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Veriags-Anstalt, 1952).
2. See Peter Horst Neumann, 'Schonheit des Grauens Oder Greuel der Schonheit', in Walter
Hinck, ed., Geschichte im Gedicht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 230-7.
3 Israel Chalfen, Paul Celan: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend (Frankfurt: Insel, 1979), p 51.
Chalfen's remains the only book-length biography. Many articles and memoirs augment it. The only
cntical book in English is Jerry Glenn, Paul Celan (New York: Twayne, 1973). See John Felstiner,
'Paul Celan: The Strain of Jewishness', Commentary (April 1985), 44-53. For bibliography, see
Christine Heuline's in Text u. Kritik 53-54,2ndedn (July 1984), 100-49, and Jerry Glenn's in Studies
in Twentieth Century Literature 8:1 (Fall 1983), 129-58. All translations in the present essay are
mine.
4. Alfred Kittner, 'Ennnerungen an den jungen Paul Celan', Zeitschnft fur Kulturaustausch 3
(1982), 218. Peter Mayer, Paul Celan alsjudischer Dichter, Diss. Heidelberg 1969, p. 11 also dates
the composition of Todesfuge at 1944, as does Moshe Barash, a school fnend of Celan's. Cord
Barkhausen, 'Interview: Moshe Barash uber Paul Celan', Sprache und Literaturin Wissenschaft und
Unterncht 16 (1985), 101 Other sources specify 1945, although Kittner's account seems reliable.
Even Kittner remembers that 'with all the astonishment I felt at it, Todesfuge seemed to me all too
artful, too accomplished, measured against the terrors I had barely escaped. And I didn't keep this
back from him.'
5. 'Ansprache anlasslich der Entgegennahme des Uteraturpreises der Freien Hansestadt
Bremen' (1958 — 'Bremen speech'), in Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Beda Allemann and
Stefan Reichert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), Vol. Ill, pp. 185-6. This five-volume edition is hereafter
referred to as GW.
6. Contemporanul 32 (2 May 1947). See Exhibition Catalogue, October 1981 Paul Celan
Colloquium in Bucharest, in Zeitschnft, p. 287.
7. Jewish Black Book Committee, 77?© Black Book: The Nazi Cnme Against the Jewish People
(New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946), pp. 308-9. The song is recorded by Aleksander Kulisiewicz
on Songs from the Depth of Hell, Folkways FSS37700.
8 I am grateful to Simon Collier for information on Bianco; see also Horaao Ferrer, El libro del
tango, rev. edn (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1977), pp. 293-4; Enrique Cadicamo, La historia del tango
en Paris (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1975), pp. 110, 152-4.
9. Constantine Simonov, The Lublin Extermination Camp (Moscow Foreign Languages

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