Paul Celan

So I've grown really bored of this blog. Need to find ways to keep it interesting--for me, anyway.

From now I'll be writing strictly about real things. As in, not my life or personal reflections, since that sort of thing is really so unknowable and so. . . well so easily given to change. . . I'd rather focus on something slightly more concrete. Like the written word, a film, an image, maybe even another human being. . . always more compelling than self-absorption. Yes, that's what this is: my battle against self-absoprtion as I while away the hours seeking a job, alternately loving and hating my life and trying not to fret to much about what's to come, since what'll will be will be and what's the use of crying anyway.

So just to put some thoughts--about concrete things--out there.

I recently finished reading a biography of Paul Celan called Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew--by John Felstiner, a Stanford professor. Probably the most compelling biography I've read (then again I haven't read very many biographies, the only other one that comes close is Stacy Schiff's Vera, a brilliant account of the (Jewish) wife and to some degree inspiration of the novelist Vladmir Nabokov). In addition to his sensitive approach to his subject that is illuminating but never overbearing, Felstiner's translation and interpretation of the poet's work is really excellent. So much so that I couldn't resist contacting Felstiner, who was extremely generous and kind in his responses to me. Anyway, clearly I like Felstiner and, if I were a tad bit academically oriented I'd follow him to Stanford to sit in on all his classes. Alas, I lack the motivation.
But here are two of my favorite poems. . though there are more, to be sure, culled form Felstiner's translations:

I HEAR, THE AXE HAS BLOOMED,
I hear, the place is not nameable. . .
I hear, they call life
the only refuge.

Felstiner skips two or three lines of the original here. Still, I think it's such a potent poem. It moved me so.

And the other, which was particularly interesting with Felstiner's interpretation:

Aschrei,
a word without meaning,
transtibetan,
squirted into
the Jewess
Pallas
Athena's
helmeted ovaries.

Aschrei, as Felstiner writes, has several meanings here. . . the hebrew--happy, blessed (praised?); the yiddish -- a schrei: a scream; and the german--Heil
wow.