Collected Prose

graciously to Mr Conaire, I think of everything. For the one I eat here will give me the strength to get back with the four others.
    Sophistry, said Mr Conaire. You set off with your five, wrapped, feel faint, open up, take one out, eat, recuperate, push on with the others.
    For all response Camier began to eat.
    You’ll spoil him, said Mr Conaire. Yesterday cakes, today sandwiches, tomorrow crusts, and Thursday stones.
    Mustard, said Camier.

    There is a crispness to this that outdoes the French. “Sophistry” for “raisonnement du clerc,” “crusts” for “pain sec,” and the assonance with ‘mustard’ in the next sentence give a neatness and economy to the exchange that is even more satisfying than the original. Everything has been pared down to a minimum; not a syllable is out of place.
    We move from cakes to stones, and from page to page Beckett builds a world out of almost nothing. Mercier and Camier set out on a journey and do not go anywhere. But at each step of the way, we want to be exactly where they are. How Beckett manages this is something of a mystery. But as in all his work, less is more.

    1975

The Poetry of Exile

    A Jew, born in Romania, who wrote in German and lived in France. Victim of the Second World War, survivor of the death camps, suicide before he was fifty. Paul Celan was a poet of exile, an outsider even to the language of his own poems, and if his life was exemplary in its pain, a paradigm of the destruction and dislocation of midcentury Europe, his poetry is defiantly idiosyncratic, always and absolutely his own. In Germany, he is considered the equal of Rilke and Trakl, the heir to Hölderlin’s metaphysical lyricism, and elsewhere his work is held in similar esteem, prompting statements such as George Steiner’s recent remark that Celan is “almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945.” At the same time, Celan is an exceedingly difficult poet, both dense and obscure. He demands so much of a reader, and in his later work his utterances are so gnomic, that it is nearly impossible to make full sense of him, even after many readings. Fiercely intelligent, propelled by a dizzying linguistic force, Celan’s poems seem to explode on the page, and encountering them for the first time is a memorable event. It is to feel the same strangeness and excitement that one feels in discovering the work of Hopkins, or Emily Dickinson.
    Czernovitz, Bukovina, where Celan was born as Paul Anczel in 1920, was a multilingual area that had once been part of the Habsburg Empire. In 1940, after the Hitler-Stalin pact, it was annexed by the Soviet Union, in the following year occupied by Nazi troops, and in 1943 retaken by the Russians. Celan’s parents were deported to a concentration camp in 1942 and did not return; Celan, who managed to escape, was put in a labor camp until December 1943. In 1945 he went to Bucharest, where he worked as a translator and publisher’s reader, then moved to Vienna in 1947, and finally, in 1948, settled permanently in Paris, where he married and became a teacher of German literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His output comprises seven books of poetry and translations of more than two dozen foreign poets, including Mandelstam, Ungaretti, Pessoa, Rimbaud, Valéry, Char, du Bouchet, and Dupin.
    Celan came to poetry rather late, and his first poems were not published until he was almost thirty. All his work, therefore, was written after the Holocaust, and his poems are everywhere informed by its memory. The unspeakable yields a poetry that continually threatens to overwhelm the limits of what can be spoken. For Celan forgot nothing, forgave nothing. The death of his parents and his own experiences during the war are recurrent and obsessive themes that run through all his work.
With names, watered
by every exile.
With names and seeds,
with names dipped
into all
the calyxes that are full of your
regal blood, man, — into all
the calyxes of the great
ghetto-rose, from which
you look at us, immortal with so many
deaths died on morning errands.

(from “Crowned Out …”, 1963, trans. by Michael Hamburger)

    Even after the war, Celan’s life remained an unstable one. He suffered acutely from feelings of persecution, which led to repeated breakdowns in his later years — and eventually to his suicide in 1970, when he drowned himself in the Seine. An incessant writer who produced hundreds of poems during his relatively short writing