David Ting

on translating Paul Celan

As a translator and a learned polyglot, Paul Celan’s boggling German title, “Ein Leseast,” combines two unlikely words: Lese + Ast. Lese-: related to reading. Leser: reader. Lesen: to read. Lese: selection; grape harvest. Ast: a branch, a bough; a branch of nerves in the brain. Together, these resonances evoke the way a text branches, grows into your mental space, although in English this portmanteau appears ungainly: “a reading-branch,” or “a reading-bough.” To pun on the idea of a Leseast, of consuming a poet who eats into you, I retitled this: “A bookworm.”

For those approaching his deep psychological pain, Celan makes an astonishing confession. In 1967, he attempted suicide, stabbing his lung with a letter opener, narrowly missing his heart. His wound is a thick, three-worded Blutklumpenort, a “bloodclumpsite.” Yet, transforming German into English is a healing process: those words need not remain coagulated to keep their meaning. They separate — “blood-clump site” — in the same way a large, healing scab breaks into smaller pieces over time.

Other important references are technical and autobiographical. To explore what one’s eyes truly “see” as one reads, Celan couples the motifs of space travel and eye. As the socket of the eye is an “orbit,” the reader’s eyes are where the cosmic journey occurs. Our irises, their pocks and craters under the cornea, become the basalt surface of the moon. To dwell in the act of reading, that mental in-between space, is to colonize it. But like programmed rovers, one’s attentiveness can become rote. A metaphor for the Holocaust is concealed here: the moon’s silent, ashen surface is the dwelling for a people whose bodies were turned to ash. As their diaspora did not jettison them beyond Earth’s gravity, they inhabit not the earth (T, Terrestrial), but are still earthly (t, terrestrial). Leaving this sterile lunar environment, Celan voyages inward, finding his people not by reading but through the act of writing, inspired by a postcard sent by the operator of a now silenced political radio station.

But he must cross through death. The adverb hinüber (“over across”) is an idiom for both “to pass away” and “beyond repair.” Celan parts hin and über, joining them with Jahr (“year”), for jahrhin and jahrüber, to suggest the torturous duration that such crossing takes. I pair “year” with “shutdown.”