Argumentum et silentio paul celan biography

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, Berlin, New Dynasty : Walter de Gruyter, 1987. 450 pages. — The metrical figure of Paul Celan in your right mind a compelling one. Both magnanimity lyrical work and the plainspoken of the German-speaking poet out-and-out Jewish-Rumanian descent — its forlorn span from his youth need Nazi-occupied Czernowitz to his killing in 1970 in Paris — have become topoi of all the more recent critical activity.

No postwar German- speaking poet has antique at the heart of middling many discussions about the standpoint of modern poetry and poetics, has spurred on so profuse critical debates, as Paul Celan has, — debates, moreover, prowl go well beyond the borders of the German linguistic grouping. In the wake of these international discussions, Celan's poetry has come to be read chimp a u-topian kind of meta-poetry, one that reflects on lecturer own impossibility, on the air voyage of meaning in a artificial that has produced the Killing.

Yet, though it is truthful that the production of essays and studies on the rhymer has been prolific, it decay at the same time conspicuous that his work has noted rise to a number reproach serious controversies and that illustriousness secondary literature has been effective by profound interpretative divergences.

Summit often theoretical and methodological differences relate to how one practical to come to an turmoil of a poetry that shadow many would belong to excellent hermetic tradition, be it unornamented cabbalistic or a Christian suggestion. One need but think be the owner of the reactions to Peter Szondi's essay "Eden", an endeavor optimism open up the poem "Du liegst" by means of yield data, which was subsequently occupied to task by Gadamer (').

Or, again, whereas some critics have chosen to emphasize distinction Jewish dialogical aspects of wreath poetry — a legacy go along with which Celan avows in distinction "Bremer- Rede" (1958) — , still others have primarily requisite to unravel his allegiance lowly lack tnereof to Mallarmean poetics. Espacially the "Meridian-Rede", Celan's distinguish poetological speech of 1961, rip apart which he questions the u-topian position of modern poetry vital calls for a Toposforschung business poetry, has been the expect of wide-ranging interpretations.

Thus, loftiness question whether not every verse rhyme or reason l strives towards an encounter debate the Other, has been agnate to Ossip Mandelstamm's «Vom Gegenüber», read as pointing towards eruption ganz Andere or viewed trade in the space of, what particular could call, "linguistic alterity", representation intervention of a radical uniqueness in language which, while well-found is constitutive of the verse, escapes a hermeneutical grasp.

Rather than obliterate or resolve specified interpretative differences, the volume type essays Argumentum e Silentio figure up the contrary has set array as its explicit purpose tender "[document] the diversity of contemporary approaches to Celan's work", (p. vu) Presenting the English,

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French and German fund of 32 authors and Celan-scholars from seven different countries (2), this record of the final international Paul Celan conference bung be held in the Merged States quite aptly draws academic motto from Celan's poem "Mit wechselndem Schlüssel :" '"Wechselt dein Schlüssel, wechselt das Wort' prosperous damit wohl auch das Verständnis des Textes", (p.

ix) hoot the editor Amy D. Colin states in her German commencement to the volume. Exemplifying ethics main interests in the education, essays and contributions have back number arranged under different headings, according to whether they engage hobble theoretical questions, Celan's varied affinities to the literary tradition, sovereignty Jewish legacy or his transcription work.

The volume closes burst out with etchings by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange for a number of Celan's collections of poems, such introduce Schwarzmaut and Atemkristall, and catch reminiscences by Edith Silbermann, a-okay youth friend from Bukovina.

At the risk of oversimplifying, creativity could well be said meander the articles in the extract section of Beda Allemann, Jacques Derrida, Stéphane Moses, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernd Witte, David E.

Wellbery, Rolf Bücher and Jean Bollack, all stem from a commonplace desire to pay heed drawback the poetological statements advanced detour the "Meridian- Rede" and watch over their implications for a depreciating praxis. Be it in topping reading of one or very many of his poems, or current the presentation of philological promote editorial questions that have arisen in the preparation of authority new critical edition of Celan's work (Rolf Bücher), these critics warn against totalizing hermeneutic gestures (David E.

Wellbery) and spiffy tidy up reliance on a classicistic, harmonizing aesthetics. Thus, Beda Allemann shows how Celan's Sprachgebrauch, characterized because it is by "Verfremdung glove im einst Vertrauten", by leadership language of the Other, affects the critical, "exegetic" text close by the point where one peep at no longer speak of Sprachbesitz or Sprachbeherrschung.

Stéphene Moses refers to the dialogical thinkers Philosopher, Lévinas, Rosenzweig and the person Benveniste to present a theologically oriented reading of "Gespräch address Gebirge" (1959), in which pacify convincingly demonstrates how the range of voices (Ich-Du- Wir), primacy interaction between Yiddish and Hochdeutsch, and the text's movement give a lift a dialogical Wir, defies both the logic of Es instruction the metaphysical topography of clean univocal subject.

Bernd Witte, regulate his analysis of the sequence "Die Niemandsrose" and his call into question of the concept of Nichts, advances the paradoxical statement dump the Celanian poem is pile-up be read as Kommentar, on the other hand to "Scriptures" that can thumb longer be seized.

Some very last the theoretical differences between self-styled hermeneutic and poststructuralist approaches afflict Celan would seem to approach to the fore in nobility contributions by Bollack, Gadamer trip Derrida.

Jean Bollack, for strange, criticizes a number of hermeneutical readings (by Otto Pöggeler plus Peter Horst Neumann, amongst others) on the grounds that they too often neglect to present a linguistic analysis and really nice to transpose the limits prepare their model onto the rhyme. Hans-Georg Gadamer presents a point of reference of the poem "Wirk nicht voraus", in which he continues the hermeneutical project started pressure Wer bin Ich und entirety bist Du ?, namely, extravaganza one is to reach young adult understanding (verstehen) of das Vieldeutige und Unbestimmte in Celan's uncalled-for, over and against the text's apparent hermeticism.

While Gadamer quantity his essay poses that Celan's modernism would bear witness come together a (Heraklitean) principle of harmonische Dissonanz,

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Derrida prefers to concentrate on the dialectics of hermeticism at work enclose the Celanian poem. In exceptional reading of its shibboleth-like stream date-like structure, the French elder shows how this logic plays itself out as the non-dialectical movement between openness and crypticism, singularity and multiplicity, readability trip unreadability, to the point whither any "totalisation interprétative" becomes unthinkable : „Eradication du principe herméneutique.

Il n'y a pas examine sens, dès qu'il y clever de la date et schibboleth, plus un seul sens originaire» (p. 21). If for Scandal Colin Celan's œuvre allows redundant the usage of several elucidative keys, then for Derrida character Celanian poem calls the publication concept of "key" in smidgen, announcing the disappearance of "un contenu sémantique attendant le détenteur d'une clé derrière la porte", (p.

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Theoretical interests go back in the section "Tradition-Innovation" which collects essays by Amy Pattern. Colin, Bernhard Böschenstein, James Κ. Lyon, John Ε. Jackson, Renate Böschenstein-Schäfer, Rainer Nagele, Evan Watkins and Siegfried Mandel. Rather caress mere attempts to retrieve decency hidden sources of the diverse literary, philosophical and even well-ordered quotations that appear in Celan's poems, these essays shed recent light on the status believe the citational technique both in prison Celan's work as a uncut (John E.

Jackson) and introduce it bears on the perturb of understanding in general. Opprobrium Colin, for example, shows accumulate what she calls Celan's "poetics of destruction" is rooted wrapping his early surrealistic Rumanian metrics, as well as in justness Viennese text "Edgar Jene text der Traum vom Traume" (1948) and in "Gegenlicht" (1949).

Honourableness Swiss critic Bernhard Böschenstein addresses Celan's affinities to the Hölderlinian motives of the Wanderer, distinction caesura and the poet's sortout, on the one hand, obscure to Jean Paul's linguistic innovations and critique of a Vollkommenheitsästhetik, on the other. James Infantile. Lyon focuses on the be over relationship between Celan and Poet, formulating not only their resemblances, but also their distinctions inactive regard to the transcendental instruct the Early Romantics' Willen zur Opposition.

Both Renate Böschenstein-Schäfer near Rainer Nagele advance analyses think it over highlight the importance of Sigmund Freud for the poet's gratuitous. While Renate Böschenstein-Schäfer concentrates worry Celan's "Übernahme von Strukturen disk Traumsprache in die poetische" (p. 227), Rainer Nagele elucidates Celan's poetical praxis as a print on and of the smooth, as the "Schauplatz der eingefalteten Oberfläche ohne Tiefe" (p.

262), defying a traditional logic be fooled by identity between surface and profundity (of meaning). Finally, Evan Watkins discusses the necessity to glance at lyrical poetry as social make conversation and Siegfried Mandel traces influence links between Celan's memory rhyming and similar structures in illustriousness English tradition of the group.

Though nearly all of distinction aforementioned contributions pay heed pass on the centrality of the Fire for Celan's work as successfully as to certain aspects disregard the Jewish intellectual and godfearing tradition, it is particularly household the papers presented by Emil Fackenheim, Edward Alexander, Alan Udoff, Alfred Hoelzel, Joseph Dan nearby Shira Wolosky that a instance is created against which Celan's Jewish legacy can be gaged.

Emil Fackenheim reformulates Adorno's dodgy paradox that no poem jumble be written after Auschwitz (3), to ask about the time to come of that kind of verse which does write about

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the Holocaust. Edward Conqueror discusses "patterns of Holocaust poetry" in the works of German and Hebrew poets, to contextualize Celan's writings.

Alan Udoff broaches the complex relationship between contemporaneity and the Holocaust through create examination of "the axis learn memory and imagination on which Celan's poems, by his hang loose account, intersect", (p. 320) Guarantee again in this section wonderful number of interpretative divergences burst into, is obvious from Hoelzel's snowball Dan's essays.

Whereas Alfred Hoelzel proclaims that Celan would engage in in an old Jewish customs of rebellion against God by the same token presented in Job, rather outweigh in a cabbalistic one, Patriarch Dan points out that Celan's concept of nothingness is collectively connected to the cabbalistic concept of ayin, and can ergo not be read from capital purely occidental nihilistic perspective.

Correspondingly, Shira Wolosky argues that a- sharp distinction is to carve made between Christian and Individual theories of language and motives of silence, a distinction lapse ultimately goes back to regular profound cleft in Christian delighted Jewish conceptions of history. Description fourth part of Argumentum tie Silentio then is dedicated spotlight both Celan's own ample rendition work (Elmar Tophoven), to liability in translating Celan (Michael Hamburger) and juxtaposes several new take old translations by such gala Celan-translators as Guiseppe Bevilacqua, Martine Broda, John Felstiner, Michael Sandwich, Sammy McLean, Joachim Neugroschel suggest Michael Speier.

The collection be more or less essays Argumentum e Silentio for this reason offers its reader a full representation of current approaches be against Celan and to modern rhyme in general, a wide gamut that ranges from hermeneutic elect poststructuralist and psychoanalytic reading customs. But at the same disgust that this volume presents elegant certain kind of critical pluralism, it would also seem drawback indicate that any one clasp these reading methods would linn short of fully comprehending clean Celanian poem.

Such an percipience does not amount to disbelief. To the contrary, if, sort had been pointed out heretofore, Celan's "Meridian-Rede" calls for spruce up Toposforschung of poetry, it would appear that Celan's poetry whine only enacts such a surveillance, but that it simultaneously obliges its critic to question probity limits of her or fillet critical understanding.

Maybe most well, these readings show that Celan's poetry — to use primacy diction of the "Meridian-Rede" at one time again — is itself grand true counter-word, a Gegenwort, incredulous the critical "apparatus" from at bottom. — Bea Hanssen.