Paul Celan, _Threadsuns_, trans. Pierre Joris

THE ONLY CELAN I have read is the selected poems volume translated by Michael Hamburger, and that was years ago--mid-nineties, I think. Reading Yoko Tawada's novel (see yesterday's post) inspired me to seek out Threadsuns (in the original German, Fadensonnen), the volume that is the subject of the paper Patrik is planning to deliver at the Paris Celan conference. I was in luck--a handy library had Joris's Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan.

Joris's commentary includes the observation that "Threadsuns may well be the least commented on and most critically neglected volume of Celan's oeuvre." That made a neat additional datum on Tawada's character; he does seem like a reader who would gravitate to the less-populated precincts of reading. Not only is he drawn to the famously difficult Celan, but also to Celan's least read book. According to Kai Fischer, whom Joris goes on to quote, Threadsuns "is not only the gateway into  the late work but also introduces and performs a new way of saying that will be characteristic for the following volumes." In other words, this is when things get really challenging.

I cannot shed much light on the poems, I'm afraid. I found them baffling, though baffling in a compelling and arresting way. Sorry about the self-contradiction--that is, saying the poems both compelled me, which suggests they pushed me along, and arrested me, which suggests they brought me to a stop--but there you go. I was, indeed, compelled and arrested.

The poems are full of abrupt turns, opaque allusions, and newly-coined words. For instance:

THE HEARTSCRIPTCRUMBLED vision-isle

at midnight, in feeble 

ignition key glimmer.

"Vision-isle" conjures up something without much readerly effort...but "heartscriptcrumbled"? The effect is a little like the coinages of Finnegans Wake, but only a little--somehow they land differently, less playfully than Joyce's compounds, seem more effortful, harder-won. I always felt like something was at stake that could be said no other way,, even without knowing what the something was.

The word "Trans-Tibetan," as used in Tawada's title, shows up in one of the poems: "Ashrei, // a word without meaning, / trans-Tibetan, / injected into the / Jewess / Pallas / Athene's / helmeted ovaries, // and when he, // he, // fetally, // harps Carpathian nono, // then the Allemande / bobbins her lace for / the vomiting im- / mortal / song." There's a Thomas Mann  novella in there somewhere.

I recently learned that Celan, a Holocaust survivor, on one occasion met Heidegger, a former member of the Nazi party. What was that like? There is at least one book about it, apparently.