The Challenges of Translating Jean Daive’s Memoir 
on Paul Celan

Midway through the decade when New Young German Poets first circulates across the Americas—as the world itself convulses in what becomes known as “the ’60s”—Celan, home in Paris, meets the young, unpublished French poet and translator of German-language poetry, Jean Daive. Celan asks Daive to translate some of his poetry; Daive agrees.

Composed about 20 years later and published in 1996—as the fifth volume in Daive’s continuing series-project La Condition d’infini (The Infinite Condition)—Sous la coupole hauntingly traces in elliptical concentric circles the two poet-translators’ working relationship and friendship that lasted from 1965 until Celan’s April 20, 1970 suicide. In the mode or form of temporal recurrence and echo, musical theme and variation; in movements that seem never to have started from any single defined point of origin but that course like memory waves: we read and hear, once and again—yet differently, even when incidents and occasions might appear the same—of their innumerable work sessions, often a return in remembered-time to the same session.

The echoes are not only of what’s already come, in Under the Dome, but also of many of the Celan poems necessarily folded into the book’s music-like memory-structure. Indeed, the connections between this iterative movement and translation itself are enacted as, into, Daive’s poetics. We read of work sessions that are followed by… walks and talks; coffees followed or preceded by… walks and talks; dinners that come after yet still precede more… walks and talks; and—sometimes, just simply—walks and talks. With silence a crucial component of what it means to walk, to talk, to put the two into relation. World and poetry too are distinct, with the how? of their mutual engagement an ever-present question. “His silence is an electric switch,” Daive writes of Celan, a “commutateur,” because it redirects the flow of current, translating speech, changing the direction (sens)—and the sense (sens)—of communication.

The “dome” of the book’s title refers in the first place to the shade-shelter formed by the trees’ foliage, the “foliage” that, in French and German, among other languages, yields terms that can signify “leaf” or “page”: feuille; Blatt. The trees—primarily chestnut and paulownia—that populate the Place de la Contrescarpe in Paris’ Fifth Arrondissement where Celan lives, and in whose streets and cafés Celan and Daive delight to stroll, to think aloud, to work: these trees and their leaves generate—and in turn offer the poet-translators a generative—dome. The leafy dome of the Contrescarpe becomes one of those particularized “somewheres” that together make up the collective yet differentiated “everywhere” Rothenberg refers to above.

The Contrescarpe is somewhere for these two poets and their two-and-more languages to meet, but its dome is not a container. It is fitting that the feuilles and Blätter are now, via the inevitable Whitmanian pun, projecting their shadows in English. “The secret is in these leaves,” Waldrop translates, echoing in a minor key the opening of Leaves of Grass: “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” Daive and Celan’s walks are quite different from Whitman’s loafing; the American poet’s confidence that the pages of the poem might adequately gloss the leaves of the world has notably withered. And yet, Celan himself recognized how his own view that there is “no basic difference between a poem and a handshake” resonated with Whitman’s assertion, “Camerado, this is no book,/who touches this touches a man”—a transatlantic solidarity that runs all the deeper for the spectral quality of these person-to-person contacts.

Another of those lines from Leaves of Grass: “Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?” Our experience, of reading—and reading the “reading-matter” of all kinds in the somewheres that make up everywhere—announces itself as our co-participation in Under the Dome’s initial moment when we read (in our first encounter with this book, and with Celan) about Celan reading in order to engage what’s known—or not known, or not yet known—of the world:

No matter whom, no matter what, Paul Celan
reads no matter where because the word drives him
to memory and is the imaginary space where the
legibility of the world is acted out. . .

The world is illegible and the matter of words
engenders a structure: the poem. Vibration of
sense used as energy. . .

He reads the newspapers, all of them. . . posters,
catalogues, dictionaries and philosophy. . .

He reads Rilke, Trakl, Kafka, Heidegger. Listens
to conversations, notes a word heard in a store, in
the street. . .

The matter of words. Words as matter. . .

*

Reading Daive or Celan could never be described as “a walk in the park”—not for readers of French and German, and not even for the two poets themselves, who read each other between such strolls. English-reading audiences have had access, periodically, to parts of Daive’s oeuvre; a good deal more of it has appeared as the result of a number of co-translations he and the Canadian-U.S. poet Norma Cole have done of one another’s work during the last decade. Celan’s presence in English goes further back but the trials of his translators have not ceased to be daunting.

So there’s an almost perfect bookending—though happily, not an ending—to what’s constructed in 1959 by New Young German Poets: that since at least the early 1990s, Rothenberg’s collaborator on the ongoing anthology series Poems for the Millennium has been the French-born, Luxembourg-raised poet and translator Pierre Joris, who’s moved among Europe, North Africa, and the U.S. for the better part of six decades, prolifically translating among French, German, English, Arabic, and other languages. A crucial portion of Joris’ work has involved bringing more and more of Celan’s poetry and critical writing closer to the kind of English translations they demand. No one’s expressed the judgment better than Mary Ann Caws: “Without simplifying, aiming at anything elegantly ‘poetic,’ or condensing Celan’s anxiously layered otherness, Joris has gotten right to its grayness, what Celan calls ‘the darkness of the poem today… a language fragment… freighted with world.’”

That the fragments of language themselves—the splintered syntax and fractured words—bear the world as their freight is a lesson that Rosmarie Waldrop’s own attentive effort to transport Daive’s words into English helps us understand. When the text turns to Daive’s own experience translating Celan’s German into French, Waldrop has the unenviable job of translating the translation, with all the possible losses such a layering implies. In such a situation, does the translator return to “the original,” working from the German verse that Daive had himself translated into French? Or is the origin no longer unambiguously Celan, such that the English translation should heed the diction and syntax of Daive’s French, irrespective of its German precedent? And, whatever she decides, how might the translator signal the difference, her choice and its alternative?

Waldrop faces such hard decisions several times in Under the Dome, and the variety in her choice of solutions illuminates the world with which this poetry is freighted. Thus, when reckoning with Daive’s translation of the 1959 poem “Engführung,” Waldrop replaces the title of Daive’s translation with Celan’s original German. However, when Daive quotes from his own translation, reprinting its opening verses “Dé–porté dans l’étendue,” Waldrop does not return to the German text from which Daive is translating, nor does she translate Daive’s French into English. Daive’s translation is left untranslated. If Under the Dome is indeed “translated from the French,” then “Dé–porté dans l’étendue” is either untranslatable, or it isn’t French.

A “language fragment. . . freighted with world”: Mary Ann Caws’ praise for Pierre Joris’ translation work cites a note Celan made about how the poem comes to us today. It comes “freighted” (“befrachtet”): loaded, as one loads a train car with merchandise. “Freighted with world” is ironic, dark, and less metaphorical than one would think, since, although en route, the merchandise’s eventual exchangeability is in question, the translatability of the world uncertain. “Dé–porté” is already one of these language fragments, a word that Daive splits in two and disposes like the linked wagons of a freight train. As the translation of the lines “Verbracht ins/Gelande”—which Pierre Joris renders as “Brought into/the terrain”—Daive’s “Dé–porté dans l’étendue” was subjected to fierce critique when it was first published in the Mercure de France in 1971 because of its violent treatment of the word “verbracht,” a participle that usually denotes a passage of time and that commands the sense of “déport.” (deported) only in the reports of a bureaucrat. Technically, “verbracht” does not count among the many “Komposita” that Celan threads through his poetry, and yet Daive’s translation reads it as such a composite, breaking it down and translating the fragments piecemeal: “ver-” (dé-), “-bracht” (-porté). Of course, parsing “ver-bracht” as “dé-port.” makes plain the history which Celan’s poem leaves implicit: in French, “la déportation” refers explicitly to the German-operated network of freight trains that carried Jews like Celan’s parents to their deaths in concentration camps. As Waldrop translates, “my parents died deported.”

How, then, to translate Daive’s “Dé–porté”? Certainly, the cognate “deported” or “de–ported” offers itself. Less historically specific than “déporté” “deported” expands the range of reference, opening the poem onto a longer, ongoing history of state violence. But it forgoes the gamble of Daive’s direct invocation of the genocide, a roll of the “die” (dé) which risks losing the German so that it may name the vanished world with which that language is nonetheless freighted. Violently glossing the historical rupture by which the euphemistic, Eichmannian “verbracht” became, in effect, an other German—a lexeme in what Victor Klemperer called the Lingua Tertii Imperii—Daive’s French bears witness to the loss of Celan’s mother tongue, pointing to the unsayable difference that distinguishes the language he shared with his mother (verbracht) from the language in which her murder was commissioned (ver-bracht).

That the repetition of this loss is what is at stake in the translation is evident from Daive’s recollection of the “violent stroke across the paper” with which Celan sanctions Daive’s solution. Under the Dome is full of such convulsive motions: lightning flashes, the gambler throws the dice, the engraver defaces the plate, and the poem, we learn, “crosses out the world.” By courting destitution, however, all of these gestures refer us back to this paradoxical movement of (self-)translation, whereby Celan “authorizes” his poem’s exile into French and thus becomes the “author” of his own linguistic dispossession. “Have you ever thought of writing in another language?… Yes, sometimes, in French… But it is not possible.” What is not possible in writing, however, may be possible in translation. Contrary to received wisdom, translation can have a generative relationship to its alleged impossibility. Here, for instance, the impossibility of writing in French opens up the singular possibility of mourning the loss of German in the translation.

And in English? It tells us a lot about the layers of language and memory that make up Under the Dome’s vault that Waldrop declines to translate “Dé–porté dans l’étendue” as she translates the rest of Daive’s French. Here, Daive does more than transmit the sense of “Verbracht ins/Gelande”; the violent dislocation of French morphology bears the trace of the crime—“das Verbrechen”—that echoes in the German. Waldrop, translating the French, is thus justified in leaving this language fragment “in the original,” since this French is not only French. It is freighted with Celan’s German, which, though deported into French, retains its “unmistakable trace.”

“With the unmistakable trace” is the third verse of “Engführung.” The fourth, “Grass written asunder,” produces another unexpected echo of Whitman’s master trope—this time turned inside out. Writing scatters the leaves. Its track winds through the mute spaces between. Such negative spaces are also suggested by the text’s titular dome. In addition to naming the luminous canopy of the Contrescarpe, Daive’s dome translates the “vault” of Celan’s 1967 poem “Grosse glühende Wolbung” (Vast, glowing vault). The vault of that poem is no sheltering sky; indeed, the abyss opened up by receding constellations seems to consume the shared world. In “Vast, glowing vault,” a form of relation persists despite this withdrawal, manifesting itself as an unworldly obligation to the other. That poem’s vision of an ethical relation that survives catastrophe helps explain why its final line, “Die Welt ist fort, ich mußdich tragen” (The world is gone, I must carry you), reverberates throughout Daive’s recollection of his friend. An early variation on the theme appears in the text’s original French edition as:

Le verbe n’est plus.
Le monde n’est plus (fort).

Il faut que je te porte.

Lines which Waldrop translates as:

The word is no more,
The world is no more (no stronger).

I have to carry you.

The withdrawal of the word and the world has obvious Biblical overtones. In this translated memoire of translation especially, the absence of “verbe” and “monde” also resonate plainly with Waldrop’s task as a translator (the connection is not incidental: in Celan’s Bible, we learn, the seventh day is set aside for translation).

Left behind in the movement from Celan’s “Welt” to Daive’s “monde” and then to Waldrop’s “world,” the word is not only literally absent; its absence seems to be compounding. The original’s disappearance in the translation had already been recalled in Daive’s “Le monde n’est plus (fort),” which appends the missing “fort” (gone) from “Die Welt ist fort” to the end of the French verse. Of course, Daive’s “fort” does not restore Celan’s word, though the mournful reminder might give French the strength to bear its absence. Translation implies loss, always; the real question is, how does the translation carry its losses? Paradoxically, a translation grows stronger as a translation for coming to terms with what cannot be retrieved.

Waldrop’s translation does just this, conjuring the strength to carry the vanished world “under the dome” out of the eclipse of that strength and the loss of that world. Her translation reads in Daive’s “(fort)” not just the German adjective predicating absence (fort) but the French adjective signifying strength (fort). The interlingual pun does not translate well in English, nor is non-translation a viable option as it had been with “Dé–porté.” “Fort” has its English meaning too, one which would draw energy from the electrical switch that toggles between Daive’s “strong” and Celan’s “gone.” Additionally, Daive’s line, although freighted with Celan’s diction, remains fluent French, its parenthesis resolvable into correct French syntax. “Le monde n’est plus fort” (The world is no longer strong.) Waldrop’s English, by contrast, possesses no such fluency. The bilingual pun translates as an English stutter. “The world is no more (no stronger).” Waldrop’s version trips over the repeated negation as over the memory of the missing French and German. No… no… No longer… no stronger… Not French… not German. The circuit is broken, but the hiatus is charged with relation. The target language quakes with the transferred load. “The stutter cuts and can reestablish the current,” Daive recalls Celan saying. “[It] is in itself an outlet of current, but also a draft of air in our current of life.”

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From Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop with an introduction by Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard. Used with the permission of City Lights Books. Copyright © 2020 Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard.