Breathturn into Timestead Read Online Free Page B

WORD-CAVES”
    The Meridian speech thus points the way, with many “perhaps”es to the late work, but how to read these obviously difficult poems remains a problem. Happily, besides the Widerrufe poems, Celan has written a number of programmatic metapoems, showing how the poet envisaged the act of writing, thus how he would have liked his work to be read and understood. Let me give a somewhat detailed reading of one such poem from Fadensonnen | Threadsuns .
    K LEIDE DIE W ORTHÖHLEN AUS
    mit Pantherhäuten,
    erweitere sie, fellhin und fellher,
    sinnhin und sinnher,
    gib ihnen Vorhöfe, Kammern, Klappen
    und Wildnisse, parietal,
    und lausch ihrem zweiten
    und jeweils zweiten und zweiten
    Ton.
    In my translation:
    L INE THE WORDCAVES
    with panther skins,
    widen them, hide-to and hide-fro,
    sense-hither and sense-thither,
    give them courtyards, chambers, drop doors
    and wildnesses, parietal,
    and listen for their second
    and each time second and second
    tone.
    Following Celan’s own suggestions, I have already insisted on the importance of the word in the late poetry. This poem thematically foregrounds the point, yielding insights not only into Celan’s writing process, but also into the reading process. The work of poetry is to be done on the word itself, the word that is presented here as hollow, as a cave—an image that suggests immediately a range of connections with similar topoi throughout the oeuvre, from prehistoric caves to Etruscan tombs. The word is nothing solid, diorite, or opaque, but a formation with its own internal complexities and crevasses—closer to a geode, to extend the petrological imagery so predominant in the work from Breathturn on. In the context of this first stanza, however, the “panther skins” seem to point more toward the image of a prehistoric cave, at least temporarily, for the later stanzas retroactively change this reading, giving it the multiperspectivity so pervasive throughout the late work.
    These words need to be worked, transformed, enriched, in order to become meaningful. In this case the poem commands the poet to “line” them with animal skins, suggesting that something usually considered as an external covering is brought inside and turned inside out. The geometry of this inversion makes for an ambiguous space, like that of a Klein bottle, where inside and outside become indeterminable or interchangeable. These skins, pelts, hides, or furs also seem to be situated between something, to constitute a border of some sort, for the next stanza asks for the caves to be enlarged in at least two, if not four, directions: “hide-to and hide-fro, / sense-hither and sense-thither.” This condition of being between is indeed inscribed in the animal chosen by Celan, via a multilingual pun (though he wrote in German, Celan lived in a French-speaking environment, while translating from half a dozen languages he mastered perfectly): “between” is entre in French, while the homophonic rhyme-word antre refers to a cave; this antre , or cave, is inscribed and can be heard in the animal name “Panther.” (One could of course pursue the panther image in other directions, for example, into Rilke’s poem—and Celan’s close involvement with Rilke’s work is well documented.) Unhappily, the English verb “line” is not able to render the further play on words rooted in the ambiguity of the German auskleiden , which means to line, to drape, to dress with, and to undress.
    These “Worthöhlen,” in a further echo of inversion, call to mind the expression hohle Worte —“empty words.” (The general plural for Wort is Wörter , but in reference to specific words you use the plural Worte .) Words, and language as such, have been debased, emptied of meaning—a topos that can be found throughout Celan’s work—and in order to be made useful again the poet has to transform and