Beech Forest

At eighteen, I visited the labor camp where my great-grandfather was interned. The camp was named Buchenwald, a compound noun meaning “beech forest.” I was struck by the softness of the translated phrase besides the hardness, the brutal elegance, of Buchenwald in the German accent. As my family took a bus through the nearby town of Weimar, we folded our hands and looked out the window at the abundant beech trees. We knew that my father’s grandfather had been in the labor camp and that he had later lived and died in the States. We had no idea how he escaped or left the camp or how he left Germany behind, the only life his family had ever known.

After the end of the Holocaust, the poet Paul Celan wrote to family members, “Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe.” One spring 20 years later, he flung himself into the Seine and drowned.

In looking at translated poetry, unless you are a translator yourself, it is difficult to recognize a good or right translation—more often, translations are judged by their elegance, beauty, and benefaction to the source material. Translating poetry is inherently awkward, poetry being to writing as jazz is to music, created out of itself, possible only through its exact creator. Since a “correct” poem translation is consequently unlikely, translators are met with an impossible task and boundless opportunity.

The following is Michael Hamburger’s translation of Paul Celan’s early poem “Nachtstrahl”:

“Nightray”

Most brightly of all burned the hair of my evening loved one:

to her I send the coffin of lightest wood.

Waves billow round it as round the bed of our dream in Rome;

it wears a white wig as I do and speaks hoarsely:

it talks as I do when I grant admittance to hearts.

It knows a French song about love, I sang it in autumn

when I stopped as a tourist in Lateland and wrote my letters

to morning.

A fine boat is that coffin carved in the coppice of feelings.

I too drift in it downbloodstream, younger still than your eye.

Now you are young as a bird dropped dead in March snow,

now it comes to you, sings you its love song from France.

You are light: you will sleep through my spring till it’s over.

I am lighter:

in front of strangers I sing.

"Language implies transcendence, radical separation, the strangeness of the interlocutors, the revelation of the other to me." – Levinas

With poets like Celan, the translator’s task is especially difficult and potent. Celan, a translator and a German poet, was constantly aware of language—its potential and pitfalls. While all poets must attend to linguistics, Celan’s relationship with the German language acknowledged a tradition of linguistic hegemony and the worlds that lay beyond his mother tongue. Anne Carson wrote that Celan “uses language as if he were always translating.” A polyglot who spoke and wrote in German, Romanian, Ukrainian, Russian, and French, Celan knew the mechanisms within language that allowed it to function and used this knowledge to evoke a strangeness in his poetry. Much is to be said about Paul Celan’s relationship to German, and most of it has been said already. To frame my writing, I will offer one insight Celan provided when asked how he could write in German in the wake of the Holocaust: “Only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s truth… in a foreign tongue, the poet lies.”

This would certainly be a difficult quote for Celan’s translators to read. Celan’s writing is full of neologisms created from German words. German uses language differently than English, with sentences often ending in verbs, capitalized nouns, and compound words created out of the grammatically sanctioned fusion of nouns. These facets complicate the translation of German into English, and Celan’s experimentation within these conventions is a signature of his poetry. Because Paul Celan’s writing cannot be delivered directly to English audiences as it was originally written, effective translations of Celan’s work communicate not only the content and lyrics of his poems but also elucidate to audiences the niche that Celan occupies in the world. The raw emotional effect of Celan’s writing, the poem's journey between Celan and the reader (a journey created by the sociohistorical moment Celan wrote from), and the synchronicities of the original language should all be evident in his translated work.

Traveling Light

One synchronicity requiring resolution is the “Nachtstrahl” translator’s first question: Night Beam or Nightray? Hamburger maintains the spirit of the German compound noun, choosing “Nightray.” Joris chooses beam, shirking the compound, and Google Translate translates strahl as beam. However, perusing through an English-German dictionary translates both words to the German strahl. Neither is a “wrong” translation; the question becomes, which is most beautiful?

I am partial to “Nightray.” Ray is sonically and physically open, starting with the tongue curled towards the throat, unfurling out of the mouth, and ending softly on an open vowel sound. Beam is a sound that swallows, beginning on the lips, pushed to the back of the throat on the long e, and ending again with lips, their closure. The spirit of Celan’s original compound title is eradicated by “Night Beam,” the voice forced to rest between the open-and-close sounds of night and the similar open-and-close beam. Each word's slight difference in connotation matches their physical presentations: when I hear beam, I think of a flashlight, car headlights, or stadium LEDs. It is bright, artificial, and narrow. It derives from an authority. It has a totality that seems to contradict the line of the following poem, where the lover’s hair burns most brightly.

Ray is a word often associated with the sun, a luminous source that naturally emanates light. This is crucial to me: not only is it a gentler, lighter word, but it emanates from its source just as “Nightray” has emanated from “Nachtstrahl.” It pertains to the poem and its situation: a written work that has traveled far from a luminous source. A ray is neither an imitation nor a fountainhead; it is a slight instrument. It provides its own light while directing you toward where it came from. A ray of hope is not hope itself but an arm of it. Similarly, “Nightray” is not “Nachtstrahl” itself but an instrument, one bringing you closer to Paul Celan’s light.

Burning into Evening

The opening line in Michael Hamburger’s translation reads, “Most brightly of all burned the hair of my evening loved one.” The effect of the words, the order of the clauses, is strangeifying to the language: it defamiliarizes the reader, misdirecting from a more typical English sentence structure. Separating the clauses and reordering them to [the hair of my evening loved one] [burned] [most brightly of all] is a more predictable English structure with the exact same meaning, if a difference in tone. This is essentially the first line of Pierre Joris’ translation of the same poem, which reads, “The hair of my evening beloved burned most brightly.” Similarly, if I feed the original German to an online translator, the first line is “The hair of my evening lover burned brightest.” Between the Hamburger, Joris, and internet translations, I argue the opening line becomes less and less poetic. Still, Celan’s meaning is never lost or compromised. Hamburger’s “Most brightly of all” translation nods towards its own transitory quality, beginning with the image of hair burning brightly and ending with the surreal image of an “evening beloved.” In the order of Hamburger’s clauses, the sun rises and sets within his first line, in that order, setting up the following line, which is mostly uniform across the translations: “To her I send the coffin of lightest wood.” Celan is not associated with love poems, so readers of “Nightray” must expect the romantic conceit of the poem to be complicated in some way. Hamburger immediately introduces this complication in his translation: light gives way to dark and death.

The situation of lightness/love next to darkness/death results from the “beloved” Celan writes about, Ingeborg Bachmann, and the fascinating complication of her lineage. Celan was a Jewish survivor of the labor camps and lost his parents to typhoid and bullets, both the result of German violence. Bachmann was the daughter of Nazi official Mathias Bachmann, an early member of the Austrian National Socialist Party. The romantic and intellectual affair between Bachmann and Celan fizzled and ignited across decades and hundreds of poems, letters, and drafts. Eventually, the unassailable divide between the lovers proved too great. “Nachtstrahl,” like any good poem, is beautiful and textured without biographical context. But with this intricacy coloring its words, certain phrases are illuminated, like Celan’s “coffin of lightest wood” being sent to his lover. My favorite difference between the two translations is in the poem’s penultimate gesture:

Hamburger—

You are light: you will sleep through my spring till it’s over.

Joris—

You are light: you sleep my spring to its end.

With Bachmann’s influence in mind, the line is undeniably heartbreaking. Yet the translations achieve different moods and meanings. In Hamburger’s, Bachmann sleeps in a potential future, through spring, to awaken afterward. Spring passes by her, innocent as a child in slumber until she is reborn into summertime. In Joris’ translation, Bachmann has more agency. The line is not situated as a potentiality but as an immediacy. The beloved does not sleep through spring but sleeps it, acting upon the spring, putting it to sleep with her. With spring being acted upon this way, it gains a more animated quality than Hamburger’s translation. Its end, then, is more easily related to a death. Bachmann’s infliction of sleep upon the spring leads to this death, Celan implying by his next line that her “lightness” is not enough.

By the Rivers

Singing is a repeated motif throughout Celan’s work, often an image of art and impossibility through oppression, as in Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars

we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How can we sing the songs of the Lord

while in a foreign land?

Paul Celan struggles repeatedly with his relationship to the Holocaust in his art. Despite his proximity, Celan felt the guilt of having fled his country in the midst of the Holocaust all his life, the loss of his parents feeling to him like a price that he unwittingly paid. Guilt colors each of his poems; this same idea arises in his most famous poem, “Todesfugue.” In “Nachstrahl,” its two translations, our poet struggles with the same question asked in the Book of Psalms. Before he sings to strangers, Celan declares, “I am lighter.” Light like a ray of night, like a coffin of pale wood? Upon second glance, this line may be a misdirection. Celan creates an artifice throughout the poem, across his oeuvre, where lightness emerges from the dark. When he lands upon “I am lighter: in front of strangers I sing,” he is not light as in purity, but as in love after death, perhaps through death. In Judaism, believers are encouraged to question what they are taught, their beliefs, and their relationship to God. Celan’s work hews closely to this principle, as he constantly questions a world in which oblivion is generative, destiny seems fixed, and nighttime emanates brighter than the sun. With the guilt of surviving his people’s genocide, and the guilt of loving the child of a Nazi, Celan embraces the light of art within the darkness, and in the strange, foreign land of “Nightray,” he sings.