Digging a Grave in the Air: Paul Celan as Translator and Translatee

• In Event: Translation and the Problem of Preservation of Cultural Memory

Abstract

Paul Celan (1920-1970, born Paul Antschel in what is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), while known as a great German poet, also grew up learning Russian and Yiddish. His “discovery” of Osip Mandelshtam in the original Russian in the late 1950s, and subsequent translations of his poetry into German, attest to the power and significance of memory under totalitarianism. First, as we know well, the Russian poet’s legacy would have been lost without his widow’s efforts to preserve his works in her memory. Second, the German poet arguably brought Mandelshtam to life a second time by entering into dialogue with him through translation (Glazova 2008). This dialogue was spurred not only by thematic affinity but biographical parallels: both Celan and Mandelshtam were Jews from the pale of settlement who suffered under totalitarian regimes. By contrast, the first Russian translations of Celan, published in a Soviet anthology of German and Austrian poets (Stroki vremeni, Molodaya gvardiya, 1967), presented him, both textually and paratextually, as a figure from another world. Subsequent translators in the late Soviet and post–Soviet periods (Olga Sedakova, Mark Belorusets, and others) would remedy these misrepresentations to a degree. This paper will rely on close readings of original poems and translations to illuminate how memory can be preserved, enhanced, and reinterpreted through translation.

Author

• Laurence H Bogoslaw, East View Information Services