Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Author of over fifteen collections of poetry and seven volumes of fiction, Jean Daive has been an important voice in French letters for over 35 years. His first book of poetry, Décimale blanche, published in 1967, received much attention; his subsequent volumes have often been ongoing, serial volumes—Narration d'équilibre, Trilogie du Temps, La Condition d'infini—each exploring a specific concept and/or formal question across three or more volumes. Daive's work has received extensive critical attention both in full-length volumes and numerous articles. Also a translator, he has published translations of the poetry of Paul Celan, Robert Creeley, Norma Cole, and others. Daive has also exerted great influence: during his decades of work in radio, as a producer at France Culture; as president of the Centre International de Poésieà Marseille (CiPM); and as the founder and editor of four successive poetry journals: Fragment in 1969, fig. in 1989, Fin in 1999, and K.O.S.H.K.O.N.O.N.G. in 2013. He lives and works in Paris.

Poet, translator, and editor Rosmarie Waldrop has been a forceful presence in American and international poetry for over forty years. Born in Germany in 1935, Waldrop studied literature and musicology before immigrating to the United States in the late 1950s. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1966. While at the University of Michigan, Waldrop married poet and translator Keith Waldrop. In 1961 the Waldrops began Burning Deck Magazine. The magazine evolved into Burning Deck Press, one of the most influential publishers for innovative poetry in the United States. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since 1968 and she has taught at Wesleyan University, Tufts, and Brown. She has become the leading English translator of Edmond Jabès’s writing, translating over a dozen volumes of his work. In 1993 she was awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for her translation of Jabès’s The Book of Margins, and was named “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres” by the French government. Waldrop has authored over 20 books of her own writing, including poetry, fiction, and essays. In 2006 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Robert Kaufman is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also teaches in, and is past co-director of, the interdisciplinary Program in Critical Theory.  Kaufman is the author of Negative Romanticism: Adornian Aesthetics in Keats, Shelley, and Modern Poetry (forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2021), and is at work on two related books, Why Poetry Should Matter—to the Left: Frankfurt Constellations of Democracy   and  Modernism after Postmodernism? Robert Duncan and the Future-Present of American Poetry.  His essays on modern poetry, aesthetics, and critical theory have been published in numerous journals and edited volumes.

Philip Gerard received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019; he is currently a research fellow at the Centre interdisciplinaire d’étude des littératures at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Gerard's article "Pound Notes in German Markets: Paul Celan, Usury, and the Postwar Currency of Ezra Pound" appeared in the January 2020 issue of Modernism/modernity, and he is completing a book manuscript on poetic transmission and ruptured history with the provisional title Speaking After: Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, and the Modernist Task of the Translation

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INTRODUCTION

"With Paul Celan"

In this centenary year of his birth—lamentably also the fiftieth anniversary of his suicide—City Lights makes a special contribution to the ongoing international commemorations of Celan with a new edition of Jean Daive’s Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, luminously translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop.  City Lights’ re-publication of Daive’s superb book, whose point of departure is the experience of two poets translating one another, stands as a kind of recursive poetic justice, for City Lights was the first press here in our Americas to issue a book of poetry featuring translations of Celan.  Recounting the earlier history that brought this poetry to Western-Hemisphere audiences allows us to appreciate how Daive’s work likewise helped foster engagements with Celan’s art that mattered—that continue to matter—on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

In Winter 1957–58, The Hudson Review published Jerome Rothenberg’s translations of seven poems by the German-Jewish poet Erich Kästner, who had somehow survived the Third Reich while remaining in Germany throughout the Hitler period.  Alongside his translations, The Hudson Review also published Rothenberg’s commentary about the poems’ dissident, biting, cabaret-satire form. City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, seeing the work in The Hudson Review, quickly proposed that Rothenberg edit a volume of contemporary German poetry for the press.  New Young German Poets—translated, edited, and introduced by Rothenberg—appeared in 1959 as Pocket Poets Series Number Eleven.  Shortly before the volume issued, Robert Bly’s magazine The Fifties ran three selections from a larger set of Rothenberg translations: renderings into English of an astonishing German-language poet named Paul Celan, one of the “new young German poets” about to receive wider American attention via City Lights (though it should be observed that, at 39, Celan didn’t deem himself young, nor had the Rumanian-born, now-French-citizen Celan ever been German).  Among the 10 artists Rothenberg presented in New Young German Poets were the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann; Günter Grass; Hans Magnus Enzensberger; and Celan, “regarded by many,” Rothenberg noted, “as the greatest of the post-war poets in Germany, perhaps in Europe.”  Celan had the most poems in the volume, including “Corona,” “Shibboleth,” and of course, “Death Fugue” (which had appeared, as translated by the art critic Clement Greenberg, in the March 1955 issue of the then-still-progressive Commentary).  Rothenberg’s prefatory remarks to New Young German Poets stressed the importance of the poetry’s emergence from fascism, the national-socialist genocide, and their Cold-War aftermaths.

In fact, these “new young” poets were not simply a next generation of German poetry; any such continuity had been broken by the war and genocide, even when the postwar “economic miracle” seemed to make the catastrophic past decades disappear. The poets Rothenberg selected had ambivalent relationships to the new West Germany, often living beyond its borders and feeling themselves, as Enzensberger wrote to Rothenberg, “fremde”—strangers, aliens, outsiders—within “the forlorn society of todays [sic] Western Germany, which lives in terms of consumption substituted for freedom, of power and defence hysteria, etc.”

New Young German Poets was well positioned to reach readers and makers of poetry in both direct and roundabout ways. Audiences (primarily in the U.S., but likewise in Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America) who made a habit of getting hold of and sharing City Lights books included poets associated with the Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, and New York School groups, as well as those connected to the Objectivist project.  The connections stretched further: by the early 1970s, for example, Savacou: A Journal of the Caribbean Artists Movement (founded and edited by the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite and colleagues) published poet and theatre director Alex Gradussov’s rendering of “Death Fugue” into an English that aimed to reach Antillean readers, in a special issue that honored one of the key figures of Caribbean writing and activism, Frank Collymore. Meanwhile, in an overlapping time-signature, through the translations in Rothenberg’s own new magazine Poems from the Floating World, as well as those published in New Young German Poets, Robert Duncan was introduced to Celan, an encounter that deepened through the years. By the mid- to late 1970s, that encounter had generated Duncan’s “A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings.”

Rothenberg’s early work on New Young German Poets led him into a special trajectory at once generous and dedicated to genuine explorations of collective human experience in its diversity; he’s often looked back on what he’s called his ever-increasing understanding of importance of meeting and talking with Celan when serving with the US Army in West Germany in 1953–54.  Rothenberg has always emphasized the significance, to any consequential poetics, of translation. This is to say that Rothenberg had imagined from the get-go a “globalism” that, far from imposing a worldwide standardizing equivalence onto all literary, aesthetic, and cultural objects, had instead would seek “not an everywhere that was nowhere but an everywhere made up of many somewheres.”

Midway through the decade when New Young German Poets first circulates across the Americas—as the world itself convulses in what becomes known as “the ’60s”—Celan, home in Paris, meets the young, unpublished French poet and translator of German-language poetry, Jean Daive.  Celan asks Daive to translate some of his poetry; Daive agrees.

Composed about 20 years later and published in 1996—as the fifth volume in Daive’s continuing series-project La Condition d’infini (The Infinite Condition)—Sous la coupole hauntingly traces in elliptical concentric circles the two poet-translators’ working relationship and friendship that lasted from 1965 until Celan’s April 20, 1970 suicide.  In the mode or form of temporal recurrence or echo, musical theme and variation; in movements that seem never to have started from any single defined point of origin but that course like memory waves: we read and and hear, once and again—yet differently, even when incidents and occasions might appear the same—of their innumerable work sessions, often a return in remembered-time to the same session.  The echoes are not only of what’s already come, in Under the Dome, but of many of the Celan poems necessarily folded into the book’s music-like memory-structure. Indeed, the connections between this very iterative movement and translation itself are enacted as, into, Daive’s poetics.  We read of work sessions that are followed by…walks and talks; coffees followed or preceded by…walks and talks; dinners that come after yet still precede more…walks and talks; and—sometimes, just simply—walks and talks.  With silence a crucial component of what it means to walk, to talk, to put the two into relation.  World and poetry too are distinct, with the how? of their mutual engagement...