Breathturn

by Paul Celan, Pierre Joris (Translator)

Translated from the German by Pierre Joris—winner of the 2004 PEN Translation Award for Celan’s Lightduress—the is the first of Celan’s three major books of poetry before his death by suicide. Considered by many to be one of Celan’s major writings, Breathturn brilliant reveals the “Wende” or turn of writing.

Genres: Poetry, German Literature, Fiction, Jewish, Romania

279 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Poet, translator, essayist, and lecturer, influenced by French Surrealism and Symbolism. Celan was born in Cernăuţi, at the time Romania, now Ukraine, he lived in France, and wrote in German. His parents were killed in the Holocaust; the author himself escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. "Death is a Master from Germany", Celan's most quoted words, translated into English in different ways, are from the poem 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue). Celan's body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Black
like memory's wound,
the eyes grub towards you
in a Crownland bitten
bright by heart's teeth —
it remains our bed:

through this shaft you must come —
you come.

In the seed's
sense
the sea stars you out, innermost, for ever.

An end to the granting of names,
over you I cast my fate.

[John Darnielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was introduced to Paul Celan by my girlfriend in high school, whose intelligence and knowledge I worshipped & coveted -- the final poem in this volume, "EINMAL," was one she used to illustrate Celan's compound neologisms -- to show me their density. That was in 1984 at latest -- and yet, when I read that poem as I finished this book, I remembered it well, forty-one years later. That is how richly these poems reward the reader willing to devote the needed attention, and to defer the satisfaction of reading at a normal pace. So condensed are these poems, and so free of the need to communicate save within the poem itself -- the poem speaking to & of itself, becoming, one word at at time -- that reading them demands an adjustment of pace, and of strategy. Most books don't ask of me what these poems do: rigorous attention, constant vigilance. Even as the eye, ear, and mind adjust, even as one develops the reading style needed for the task of giving some interpretation to the deeply condensed lines and phrases, there's no easing of the task; either you remain diligent or you get nothing, or nearly nothing. And if you do bring your best to it? You are still up against a very hard surface, discerning the grain. It is a self-illuminating process, and more rewarding than most else in my day. Few authors write in a way that makes me think: "I could give my life to this, and it would be enough"; but Celan does.

[Eadweard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before your late face,
a loner
wandering between
nights that change me too,
something came to stand,
which was with us once already, un
touched by thoughts.
----




Paths in the shadow-break
of your hand

from the four-finger-furrow
I root up the
petrified blessing.
----



To stand, in the shadow
of the stigma in the air.

Standing for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.

With all that has room in it
even without
language.
----



Threadsuns
above the gray black wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone:
there still songs to sing
beyond mankind.
----



(I know you, you are the deeply bowed,
I, the transpierced, am subject to you.
Where flames a word, would testify for us both?
You—all, all real. I—all delusion.)
----



Tell your fingers
accompanying you far in
side the crevasses, how
I knew you, how far
I pushed you into the deep,
where my most bitter dream
slept with you heart-fro, in the bed
of my inextinguishable name.
----



A roar: it is
truth itself
stepped among mankind,
right into the
metaphor-flurry.

[Yiannis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Εξαιρετική μετάφραση των ποιημάτων ενός σπουδαίου ποιητή.

[Adriana Scarpin · Rating 4 out of 5]

UNA VEZ
le oí,
lavaba el mundo,
sin ser visto, toda la noche,
realmente.
Uno e Infinito,
se destruyeron,
yoieron.
Luz fue. Salvación.

[Δημοσθένης Χατζηθεοδώρου · Rating 4 out of 5]

Πολύ ιδιαίτερη η ποίηση του Celan (και δύσκολη στη μετάφραση επίσης).
Η συγκεκριμένη έκδοση είναι πολύ προσεγμένη απο όλες τις απόψεις (δίγλωσση εννοείται) και η μετάφραση είναι τουλάχιστον αξιόλογη.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh Rosa, oh Esther——where does the slate dark silence lead us, when our clipped speech forgets its prophecy ? I did enjoy reading each translation and then reading the German, allowing the sounds to vibrate across my own winter solitude.

Celan gingerly places totems lengthwise, only to smelt and reconfigure, a stitching of concepts and sonorous incantations. Memory flickers. Spent.

[Petros Piskopos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Σε μια ιδιαίτερα φροντισμένη έκδοση τα τελευταία ποιήματά του !

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hamburger's volume may still be the best place to start with Celan, as it gives a decent overview of the arc of his career, but Joris' work here and in the other books following the "breathturn" is unparalleled. Celan's later work is highly serial in nature, and selecting certain poems for translation and omitting others--the practice of most other translators of Celan--causes inevitable distortions. Fortunately, this volume presents the entirely of Celan's Atemwende (1967). Joris' translations are very literal, but to simply call them "literal" is a disservice, as his English versions are precisely calibrated to reproduce the force and movement of the poems in German. Celan's later work performs its thematic emphases of loss and the emptiness of memory as much it expresses them, and Joris is the only translator willing to follow Celan into the densely polysemous constructions of these remarkable, harrowing works. This approach--which represents the apex of a literary translator's aspirations--can cause consternation among those who don't understand it or insist that poetry of other cultures and generations slot easily into their preconceptions of what a "lyric" should do. If you want to read relatively easy, emotive English-language poetry that's loosely based on Celan's work, other volumes exist. If you want to read English versions that reproduce the vertiginous and sometimes defiantly compressed involutions Celan constructs to push his work farther and farther from the types of poetics that could be recuperated by the German establishment, read this volume. Not only are the translations fantastic, but Joris' introduction offers a fine overview of the significance of the poet's late work.

[Nemanja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Целанова поезија као концептуалну и емотивну основу садржи холокауст, јеврејску културу, кривицу због тога што је преживео рат, несреће из приватног живота (живот без родитеља, лоша ситуација у родној земљи...)... Иако су то неке од основних и препознатљивих тема из његових песама, Целан себе не везује за прошлост, већ трага за новим, јединственим стилом у поезији.
Један од главних концепата којима се бавио је језик, стварао је свој језик. И сам полиглота, добро је познавао и комбиновао постојеће и застареле речи дајући им нови живот и значење, стварајући тако сложенице који су се задржале у немачком језику. Трансформисао је речи дајући им потпуно ново значење, које се могло претпоставити само на основу звучне везе са основном речју. Често та значења остају херметична, јер се Целан поред немачког, служио и француским, румунским, енглеским и другим језицима те је често и преводио речи с тих језика покушавајући да нађе везу у звучности, сликама и асоцијацијама које стварају код читалаца. Целан нам преко својих речи нуди слике које нас могу одвести у различитим правцима, некада су те метафоре апсурдне, некада брутално реалистичне, а изражене су једним тмурним, отрежњујућим језиком, јер таква је за њега била и реалност.
Избор песама: Mit erdwärts gesungenen Masten, Weggebeizt, Am weissen Gebetriemen
Todesfuge

[Lucca · Rating 5 out of 5]

"FIOSSÓIS
sobre o ermo grisnegro.
Um alto-
arbóreo pensar
capta o som ótico: há
mais canções por cantar além
dos homens."
(p. 55)

Leitura em cotejo com a tradução de Pierre Joris, em inglês.

[Élyzabeth Cossette · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 ; la traduction française n'est malheureusement pas aussi évocatrice qu'en anglais. Dommage! Plusieurs passages qui m'ont laissée de glace en FR se sont révélés très beaux en ENG.

[Kevin Price]

Intense, harrowing and often incomprehensible (for now). I’m sure I’ll be reading much more Celan

[Anca starts too many books at once & finishes too few]

I’ve been reading poems from this collection and its “sequel” Threadsuns off and on for more than a year, dipping into them and savoring the poems one or two at a time. The poems are too affecting to read more of them at once.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Celan's poetry after Breathturn is best summarized by translator Pierre Joris in his Introduction to Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry ...

In the early sixties, that is, midway through Paul Celan's writing career, a radical change, a poetic Wende, or turn, occurred, later inscribed in the title of the volume Atemwende | Breathturn, heralding the poetic he was to explore for the rest of his life. His poems, which had always been highly complex but rather lush, with an abundance of near-surrealistic imagery and sometimes labyrinthine metaphorically - though he vehemently denied critics' suggestion that his was a "hermetic" poetry - were pared down, the syntax grew tighter and more spiny, and his trademark neologism and telescoping of words increased, while the overall composition of the work became much more serial in nature. That is, rather than insisting on individual, titled poems, he moved toward a method of composition by cycles and volumes.

My favourite poems:

The numbers, in league
with the images' doom
and counter-
doom.

The clapped-on
skull, at whose
sleepless temple a will-
of-the-wisping hammer
celebrates all that in
worldbeat.
- (pg. 67)


To stand, in the shadow
of the stigma in the air.

Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.

With all that has room in it,
even without
language.
- (pg. 79)


Hollow lifehomestead. In the windtrap
the long
blown empty
flowers. A handful
sleepcorn
drifts from the mouth
stammered true
out towards the snow-
conversations.
- (pg. 113)


Tell your fingers
accompanying you far in-
side the crevasses, how
I knew you, how far
I pushed you into the deep,
where my most bitter dream
slept with you heart-fro, in the bed
of my inextinguishable name.
- (pg. 119)


When they impale
the last shadow,
you burn the vowing hand free.
- (pg. 127)


Half-death,
suckled on our life,
lay ash-image-true around us -

we too
kept on drinking, soul-crossed, two swords,
stitched on heavenstones, born of wordblood,
in the nightbed,

larger and larger
we grew, intergrafted, there was
no name left for
what urged us on (one of thirty-
-and-how-many
was my living shadow,
who climbed up the delusion-stairs to you?)

a tower,
the half-one built into the Whither,
a Hradčany
all of goldmaker's No,
bone-Hebrew,
ground to sperm,
ran through the hourglass,
through which we swam, two dreams now, tolling
against time, on the squares.
- (pg. 159)


You, the hair taken from
the lip with the bright-
seeing highsleep:
threaded through the goldeye
of the sun-alright ash-
needle.

You, the knot torn out
of the throat with
the One Light:
run through by needle and hair,
underway, underway.

Your reversals, incessantly, round
the seven-
fingered kisshand behind
happiness.
- (pg. 239)

My favourite passages:

An ear, severed, listens.

An eye, cut in strips,
does justice to all this.
- (pg. 71)


They eat:
the bedlamite's truffle, a piece
unburied poetry,
found tongue and tooth.

A tear rolls back into its eye.
- (pg. 147)


who
is invisible enough
to see you?
- (pg. 213)


The world is gone, I have to carry you.
- (pg. 233)

[Gabrielle Danoux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un des derniers recueils publiés du vivant de Paul Celan qui ne manque pas de cumuler un certain nombre de paradoxes. D'abord, Celan a écrit ses poèmes durant une période très difficile, marquée par des séjours en hôpital psychiatrique, mais il était très fier de l'œuvre qui avait atteint une forme de densité, d'amplitude selon lui. C'est aussi une œuvre cosmopolite où l'on croise les villes de Hambourg, Copenhague, Prague ou Mangalia où il s'est rendu avec Petre Solomon et Nina Cassian, des amis roumains. L'allemand employé par Celan, du fait de sa polysémie et de l'usage érudit extrêmement travaillé des mots composés, souples dans la langue de Goethe, est toutefois intraduisible. Jean-Pierre Lefebvre a eu recours aux notes, sans doute bien plus étendues que le texte, dont beaucoup très intéressantes (Rosa Luxemburg et les buffles de Roumanie pour le poème "Coagula" par exemple). Par-delà mes lacunes, j'ai regardé souvent l'allemand, puisque, il n'est pas inutile de le rappeler, il s'agit d'une édition bilingue. Celan avait indéniablement raison d'être fier, même si son impeccable technique le rendait plus hermétique. Il a laissé la clé de son recueil dans le poème "Un vacarme" : "C'est/la vérité même qui/est entrée/parmi les hommes/ au beau milieu/des bourrasques de métaphores". Rien que le titre, "Atemwende", "La Renverse du souffle", changement de respiration, la bourrasque du souffle métaphore, vacarme de la respiration qui renverse tout. Germanophone né roumain dans une ville aujourd'hui ukrainienne puis résident français (sa nationalité?), pour Celan le changement c'était (!) tout le temps, comme il respirait jusqu'au... dernier souffle.

[Mitchell McInnis · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's no such thing as an unexceptional Celan book. But some translate better than others. This one is much better in the original German. Each of the poems hinges--some more, some less--on a wickedly brilliant compound word. For those of you who read German, you understand how the impact of such compounds has a very different energy in German than in English. Auf Deutsch!

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sight threads sense threads, from
nightbile knitted
behind time:

who
is invisible enough
to see you?

Mantle-eye, almondeye, you came
through all the walls,
climb
on this desk,
roll, what lies there, up again—

Ten blindstaffs,
fiery, straight, free,
float from the just
born sign,

stand above it.

It is still us.

[Gabriel Vidal · Rating 4 out of 5]

É uma poética de difícil tradução por ser enigmática e pessoal. O tradutor teve uma notável sensibilidade em traduzir a obra, que reflete as memórias de Celan sobre sua vida regressa, isto é, o holocausto, as perdas etc. — como descrito no prefácio.

Confesso que tive que reler diversas vezes alguns poemas. Recomendo para desacostumar os acostumados com algo mais métrico e clássico.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

As complex and enigmatic as it is spare and gorgeous. This is one I'll return to again and again.

[İlker Şaguj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Şairi bu çevirisinden okumak iyi bir tercih olur; fakat yetmez, bu nedenle diğer çeviriler arasında yerini alması şairden yapılan diğer çevirilere önemli bir ek olur.

[Gottfrid Jansson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vad trevligt att börja året med en så koncis och målande diktsamling. Jag upplevde den mer surrealistisk/associatorisk än metaforisk, vilket tilltalar mig. Dikterna byggde snyggt vidare på varandras tematik, så att varje kapitel blev som en svit.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Beautiful, to be veiled by nothing.”

[Christina Papadopoulou]

Μια φορά,
τον άκουγα,
έπλενε τον κόσμο,
αθέατος, ολονυχτίς,
πραγματικά.

Εν και Άπειρον,
εκμηδενισμένα,
πρόφεραν Εγώ.

Φως ήταν. Σωτηρία.

[PS · Rating 3 out of 5]

O Paul Celan incendiou com poesia a língua alemã. A fez de refém, uma forma de ainda se indignar com o holocausto, com a loucura.

[june · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Quinn Monette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unsure if it's the too-literal compoundword translation or the original verse, kind of a dud

[Daniel Levine-spound]

Of the three volumes of Celan's poetry I read, "Breathturn" was undoubtedly my favourite. Seen as the turning point or "Wende" in Celan's career, the volume exists in between the language games of later works and the more lucid narratives of his early poetry. If "Threadsuns" demonstrates the non-function or limits of language, "Breathturn" looks language full in the face. It is a more lucid examination with similar topical concern. Often, the poems in "Breathturn" begin with imagery or description, frequently dealing with nature. In "In Rivers" for example, Celan begins with "In rivers north of the future," and ends with a description of "stonewritten shadows." Until writing appeared in the poem, there was no indication that it would play any role. It almost as Celan wants to demonstrate the inevitability of language, its necessary and unavoidable assertion of presence. Even the shadows are imbued with writing.

Celan enacts a similar movement in "Into the Groves,": "I pulled down the roof/ above us, slate by slate/ syllable by syllable." Again, one languages emerges from the background. More than simply a passive medium, it plays an active role. In this sense, there is a kind of permanent meta-writing in Celan's work. As the character in the poem pulls down each slate, the poet moves from syllable to syllable. One could say that in each poem, the poem itself acts as a kind of subject.

Looking at "Breathturn" as the beginning of Celan's later period, one can see the beginning of odd language games. "Etched Away" oscillates between description and non-language, imagery and pure sound. Many words are broken apart or combined, forcing us to re-evaluation (or question entirely) their intended meaning. Celan also uses line an stanza breaks to split words, making them more difficult to comprehend.

Finally, one finds a new emphasis on the concept of witness. Undoubtedly an exploration of the holocaust, and how outsiders and non-participants and interpret and explain events, witnesses appear at the ends of several poems in the collection.

[Mr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This extraordinary volume of the great Paul Celan marks his `turn,' in the final phase of his career, in which his work grew more abstracted, with more esoteric and wonderful neologisms and curiously primordial imagery.

Pierre Joris has completed a fine translation from the German; the works remain highly creative and retain Celan's remarkable play with structure and phonemes. Look at the creativity:

"Eye-
less
scooped from you, eyes:

the six-
edged, denial, white,
erratic.

A blind man's hand, it also starhard
From name-wandering,
Rests on him, as
Long as on you,
Esther." (111).

The tragic undertow of Celan's poetry will pull you in. Enjoy.

[Andy Stallings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody really needs me to say how brilliant this book is, but wow, it's brilliant.

The first poem is already a major part of my poem-consciousness -- it has been since I first picked this up in January, before Oppen swallowed poetry and caused me to set it aside -- and there are many more in here that deserve such place.

What's fascinating to me is that, even as syntactical patterns begin to seem repetitive toward the latter third of the book, I'm still blown away by them, in spite of recognition.

I'm very interested in this approach to sentence-->line-->word.