The poetry of Paul Celan offers a site in which these two issues coincide. Hence to attempt to answer the question “what makes poetry survive?” one must confront at some stage the inevitable question of a language that has survived. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive 2Ī language that has remained is also in some ways a language that has survived. Poets- witnesses- found language as what remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or impossibility, of speaking. Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (1958)” 1
It, the language remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. By drawing attention to the French thinker Jacques Derrida’s several influential studies of Celan’s poetry on the problems of “witnessing”, “testimony” and the “idiomatic” this paper finally examines the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “remnant” to understand a poetics of survival. This paper is an attempt to explore the relation between poetry and survival taking as a point of focus the poetry of the post-war European poet Paul Celan. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, "through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech.Dipanjan Maitra, Jadavpur University, Kolkata To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, Apollinaire. At the same time, Felstiner finds fresh insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges through readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix. The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle.ĭrawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems-including a chapter on Celan's famous "Deathfugue"-plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew.
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