“… in der Dünung / wandernder Worte.” Paul Celan’s Poetry in the Context of Literary History

Abstract

This article discusses the context of literary history in the poetry of Paul Celan (1920–1970), a German-speaking poet of Jewish descent. It proceeds from the horizon denoted by the interpretation of the poem “Sprich auch du” from the collection Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955) and focuses on the status and role of quotation within the poet’s oeuvre. A quotation – as a reference, as an explicit or implicit sign of an intertextual linkage, as an admission of an alien text into the language of one’s own text, as an indication of the reception of the other and the different – reveals the poet’s relation towards literature, towards its traditions and its contemporaneity, towards its very historicity. Insofar as it bears witness to the secret of the encounter with the other in the chiasmus of what is one’s own and what is alien, a quotation is the metathesis of language. It is one of the forms of change, the turn of the breath of poetry. It is a figure of the “breathturn”. The confrontation with the fate and poetry of Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), a Russian poet of Jewish origin, holds a special, and even incomparable, importance within the development of Celan’s poetic oeuvre. Celan was the first to translate Mandelstam into German, and Mandelstam decisively influenced Celan’s own creativity. I interpret the poem “Nachmittag mit Zirkus und Zitadelle” from the collection Die Niemandsrose (1963) in the conclusion of the essay. This poem distinctly alludes to the secret of Celan’s encounter with Mandelstam, also quoting his name. My interpretation emphasizes that, for Celan, the dialogue with Mandelstam’s poetry and with his poetics opened up the possibility of maintaining his own origin; that is, the possibility of Jewishness as a differentiated form of human life.