Paul Celan: le voci (d)al margine e la ferita di Giacobbe-Esaù che «non vuole rimarginare»

This essay focuses on the ‘Esau complex’ in the trans-cultural, multi- lingual poetical work of Paul Celan. Celan’s aesthetic was born in a liminal, multi-cultural place – Bukowina – in which German was a ‘minor language’ (Deleuze-Guattari). Celan developed his dialogic, polyphonic poetry in the years of the diaspora, far from his native land. In Paris – his new ‘homeland’ – Celan came to use a German permea ted by a rich variety of linguistic, literary, historical and geographical memories. This context saw the emergence of the opposition between Esau, the brother deceived and betrayed, and Jacob, who deceptively takes on the rights of primogeniture, and then struggles with the angel in his quest for redemption, and bears the signs of his struggle for ever. In the Jewish tradition, Esau, also known as Edom, is a figure, and a name, of the enemies of Israel. The strained relationship between Jews and ‘genteel’ European appears prominently in the work of a poet that Celan loved deeply: Heinrich Heine, who wrote a poem (To Edom!) quoted by Celan. The essay takes the poem Eine Gauner- und Ganoven weise gesungen zu Paris emprés Pontoise von Paul Celan aus Czernowitz bei Sadagora (1963) as a significant case study, focusing on its drafts. The poem combines quotations from Heine’s poems and from works by Kafka and Mandel’stam. It expresses the unhealing pain of a German- speaking Jew whose voice echoes the language of the other, the enemy other, and the difficult coexistence of Jacob and Esau.