Translating in a 'Wholly Other' German.

The paper starts by observing the translational roots of Paul Antschel’s works and life: from his origins in a distant and obliterated land where cultural translation and the management of conflicts were part of the individual and collective experience. A ‘minor’ and hybrid language was endowed with a political, identity-defining value that differed completely from the ‘Gesamtdeutsch’ which was also part of the public and cultural sphere of his exile. From his ‘parallel’ position, through his translations and also through most of his poetry (which often dealt with translation, either implicitly or explicitly), Celan configured an interior space linking the Russian, Slavic, Yiddish, Rumanian, Oriental and Cyrillic worlds together with the Western-Romance, Germanic, Anglophone, Hebrew worlds. He created a linguistic space for everyday French together with the French of contemporary poets whom he translated (Char, Dupin, Michaux, Desnos); Italian, introduced to him by Mandelstam and by Bachmann (Ungaretti); the Portuguese of Pessoa; the Hebrew of Rokeah and Amichai; the English of Shakespeare; and the Anglo-American of Frost and Dickinson; and, finally, his deterritorialized German, ‘wholly other’ from ‘Gesamtdeutsch’. Thus, Celan places the reader in the position of being attentive, of ‘écouter ce qu’un texte fait à sa langue’¹⁰³ [listening to what a text does to his language]. Celan took on the uncomfortable role as a speaker of German as a ‘minor’ language, forged in the translational zone (Cernowitz-Cernăuţi-Černivci) and put across, transferred and ‘enriched’ across the Seine. His translational oeuvre, though very different in its phases and irreducible to a coherent ‘poetics of translation’, discloses a greater echoing space in which a net of voices, times and places may resonate. The translations with their parallel text(s) and author(s) extend towards future readers, translators and voices. Thus, in a ‘ricercar’ of words and discourses, Celan’s translations ‘do’ the following ‘to’ their language: they ‘re-member’ (in Assmann’s sense of putting the disiecta membra of the dead together)¹⁰⁴ a different, porous German, again and again reverberant in the dialogic spaces opened up in exchange with their readers, in different places, time frames and languages.