Paul Celan and what is accessibility for?

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The debate about “accessibility” is still raging over on the message board. You know, I’m sorry. Nothing was ever achieved, no art ever grew, by someone’s effort to be more readily understood by all and sundry.

Having said which, there are different kinds of “understood.” Picasso used simple lines, in a way people couldn’t relate to – of course, we’re used to it now. The farm hand John Clare wrote from his own experience, using colloquial language, but the publishers tried to pretty him up. You see, it wasn’t what people were used to reading.

And of course Paul Celan, a Jewish poet writing in German, uses the German language as both tool – or medium – and his own salvation. Though in the end it couldn’t save him. But of his experiences he said:

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.”

Really! Language itself: the thing that is part of us, literally the air we breathe.

There’s a lot to say about the role of language itself in the camps, which must be a paradigm for something – some sort of extreme of experience or consciousness – and in the whole surrounding culture of the war: language in its various guises, as propaganda, etc. Primo Levi described vividly the way the camps had to absorb people from all over Europe, and the polyglot patois that developed as a result, with camp-specific slang and jargon. He also, I think it was him, describes the way the Nazis brutalised German itself. So after the war Celan wrote in German, the language his mother had insisted they use at home, producing ever more fractured poetry in it, reinventing it as a specifically post-Shoah language, as if in direct refutation of the maxim that there could be no poetry after the camps. Indeed, for many the response was silence.

Now, is this an “inclusive” way of thinking about language? Dear God. Anyway. Browsing on The Elegant Variation, I found the above recording – something I’d never heard before – of Paul Celan reading his great poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue) and it struck me as having a connection to this train of thought.

For one thing, just listen to it. Even if you don’t know the poem (and you should), even if you have no German, you’ll pick up the repetitions; and the sounds, as in consonants, vowels and tones, are persuasive and wonderful. He has a beautiful reading voice. “Accessible” in that universal sense, and in the sense of being amazingly available on YouTube, but certainly not in the others – his use of language too strange for most people (it got more fractured in his later poems, as if it literally disintegrated under use), his message unsavoury, his experience unimaginably terrible.

In 1970, having gained French citizenship, having borne witness and then, if I remember correctly, lapsed into silence, Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

* from “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen”, p.34, in Celan’s Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986

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Filed under Living With Words, poetry, the past