From threshold to threshold, by Paul Celan

Original language: German

Original title: From threshold to threshold

Year of publication: 1955

Translation: Jesus Munarriz

Valuation: Highly recommended / Essential

It is not easy for a book of poems to reach you and dazzle you; more if you read it translated; and even more so if the original is written in a language as different from Spanish as German. Those of us who, with some frequency, read Poetry know that sensation, that internal conviction of knowing that the suggestion, the mystery is inseparable from language; that, in short, there is something in there that you do not grasp, that escapes no matter how careful the translation work is. In our case, as stated in the Notes to the Poems, the translation “has been thoroughly refined, corrected and revised, in search of that fidelity to the original that, if it is never possible in poetry, in the case of Celan it is especially impossible.” .” I don’t know how much Munárriz has respected the original diction or how much he has sacrificed in pursuit of rhythm, but the result of the text is pleasantly surprising.

The life of Paul Celan (anagram of Antschel – Ancel, his real surname) takes place between 1920, the year he was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz – Rumamia (today Chernivsti, Ukraine) and Paris, the city where his life ended. before turning 50, when he jumped into the Seine from the Mirabeau bridge, the same one to which Gillaume Apollinaire dedicated a famous poem.

De umbral en umbral It is the author’s second work and is simply full of beauty. The verses are harmonious, although they seem to come pregnant with snares: “In the blue / pronounce a tree word promising shadow / and the name of your love / add its syllables.” There are no long poems. Each text is a stitch of harmony raised to a peak: “This is a word that walked alongside words / a word in the image of silence, / a bower of lemon verbena and sorrow.”

The tragedy marked – in the end, surely irrevocably – the author’s youth, forced to abandon his university studies and losing his parents in German concentration camps. In Paris he also loses a son shortly after birth.

However, the book does not present – ​​at least in appearance – desperate poems, nor does it reveal the sonorous unrest or the visible imbalance that the milestones of an unhappy past could suggest. Celan’s verses, although not exempt from controlled tension, are first and foremost beautiful, and the images follow one another in an orderly and sensitive ensemble, although not oblivious to pain. The poet seeks, beyond anything, to create beauty, and he succeeds.

Some verses border on perfection and warn that Celan is a mandatory stop on the itinerary of the reader of Modern Poetry: “In the name of the first of the three, / who shouted / when he had to live there where his word was already before him, / In the name of the second, who looked and cried, / in the name of the third, who white / stones he piled in the center / I absolve you / of the amen that stuns us (…) / You continue to be, you continue to be / the daughter of a dead woman / consecrated to the no of my longing…!”

What can we add after these verses, so that they do not blur them? Paul Celan: don’t miss it.

Signed: Francisco Marin