Review

Reviewed Work(s): Snow Part / Schneepart by Paul Celan and Ian Fairley; Partie de neige
by Paul Celan and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre
Review by: Charlie Louth
Source: Translation and Literature, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Autumn, 2008), pp. 261-267
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40340109
Accessed: 15-01-2020 23:53 UTC

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Translation and Literature 17 (2008)

Guermantes and the family servant, Franchise. He demonstrates how,

despite the palpable nostalgia the narrator expresses for both the pure
language and the racial purity and lineage associated with it, Proust the
novelist and essayist also makes it clear, against Gourmont, that such
purity is ultimately sterile, and cannot be that of the creator. Praise
of purity was not innocent at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, when the
anti-semitic press regarded Jews (as M. de Charlus does) as 'foreigners'
bringing undesirable elements into France. A further comparison with
Mallarme's Les Mots anglais enables Karlin to point out that although
there is no evidence that Proust read this book, his aesthetic project fits
remarkably well with Mallarme's views about the necessary hybridity of
language. He draws attention to the striking consonance between the
final pages of Le Temps retrouve and the last sentence of this work: If
one recalls one's memories as well as a thousand thoughts which were
waiting, to converge in one's mind, for everything to be said, this reply
presents itself as the most general in scope: English is a composite
idiom.' Proust's novel too is 'composite', like Framboise's boeuf mode,
made up of many cuts of meat - and yet a very French dish.
On an apparently slight subject, and approached with much humour,
this book is one to be relished in detail, but it takes the reader deep
into questions of Proust's social and aesthetic preoccupations. As he
dictated parts of his novel to his English stenographer in Cabourg
(Balbec) in the summer of 1911, he joked to a friend that it would
be written in 'une langue intermediate'. A final irresistible example of
this intermediate language is his description of Giotto's flying angels
in Padua as executant des loopings . Sian Reynolds
University of Stirling
DOI: 10.3366/E0968136108000319

Snow Part I Schneepart. By Paul Celan. Translated by Ian Fairley.

Pp xxvi + 195. Manchester: Carcanet, 2007. Pb. £14.95.
Fartie de neige. By Paul Celan. Translated and annotated by Jean-Pierre
Lefebvre. Pp. 173. Paris: Seuil, 2007. Pb. €20.
Schneepart was the first publication from P&ul Celan's literary remains.
It came out in 1971. But it wasn't his first posthumous collection:
Lichtzwang, the previous one, appeared not long after his death in
April 1970, though every aspect of it apart from the final checking
of proofs was attended to by Celan himself. Nearly the same is true of
Schneepart - though he didn't send it to his publishers, he completed
a fair copy for Gisele Celan-Lestrange, his wife, in September 1969,

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 Reviews

just before his only visit to Israel, and there is also a contemporary and
near-identical typescript. This resembles the orderly care he dispensed
on his other collections, and it had become his custom to prepare his
volumes well in advance of sending them to press, but traces in these
copies and elsewhere suggest some uncertainty or hesitation on Celan's
part as to whether the fifth and last cycle of poems belonged with
the others. A notebook shows he at least considered putting some of
them together with other poems which overlap chronologically with
the latter phases of the composition of Schneepart as we have it, which
was written between 16 December 1967 and 18 October 1968. They
included poems marked 'not to be published'; but they have been, and
Ian Fairley translates some of them as a supplement in his book.
Now we have, appearing almost simultaneously, two translations
of Schneepart entire, both with facing (or in the case of the French
edition skulking-at-the-bottom-of-the-page-in-small-print) German.
Ian Fairley is following up his complete version of Fadensonnen (as
Fathomsuns, 2001), and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre his of Atemwende (as
Renverse du souffle, 2003). To have the two side by side permits a double
focus on the strangeness of Celan's German, creating two different
refractions of a language that is already in itself troubled and inflected
by other tongues, and, spinning out a characteristic of language in
general, intrinsically involved in acts of translation.
This begins with the title, Schneepart. Like the titles of all Celan's
collections from Die Niemandsrose onwards, it is a composite neologism
in which concrete and abstract, a natural element and a human one,
are put together to forge a largely poetological image (Sprachgitter,
the name of the collection before Die Niemandsrose, provided the
prototype, but was still an accepted word and lacked the natural
element). Schneepart is made up of a German word and another
originally borrowed from the French, not Celan's borrowing only, but
not one, either, that has quite established itself as a native in German,
despite having been around since at least Luther's time. Fart, as both
Lefebvre and Fairley tell us, means in modern German primarily the
part played by an actor, or taken by a musician, and Fairley insists that
its meaning is not 'portion' or 'piece'. Schneepart goes uncomplicatedly
and necessarily into Snow Part (into two words however, as Fairley notes,
perhaps as a form of resistance against the inevitability - Fadensonnen
remained one word, Fathomsuns, but could and probably should have
been Threadsuns), and so this stricture needn't matter, but Lefebvre, at
the fork of part and partie, is forced to make a choice, and he implicitly
concurs with Fairley by going for Partie de neige. This seems problematic
not just because Partie de neige summons up a snowball fight or a skiing

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Translation and Literature 17 (2008)

trip (by analogy with classe de neige), or perhaps something more like
what is evoked in Derek Mahon's poem 'The Snow Party' (by analogy
with partie de chasse), but because Celan's usage isn't confined by current
norms, and reaches down through the strata of words (where Part in
German certainly has the main French sense of a share or portion),
and, even more importantly in this case, obliquely out towards the
neighbouring deposits of other languages. Schneepart is quite possibly
intended, and can in any case be read, as the running together of
French and German (and English) into one word. The difficulty for the
translator, in this case, is that translation has already taken place. 'Faire
part' in French is to convey or communicate something (like English
'impart'); and in Austrian German 'Parte' is a death announcement.
These, and possibly even the feral presence of 'pard' (which sounds
the same as 'Part' in German, letting us glimpse a snow leopard), all
play into the meaning of Schneepart. On the other hand, partie gets
the important sense of taking sides, as in a battle or other contentious
affair, which as these poems often show is how Celan conceived of all
his writing. It was a spiked, aggressive, corrosive undertaking which
was also tender, and depended on the most hospitable of receptions
(Herzland he called it once, 'heart-land') while reckoning with the least,
with the kind of glacial, scoured, eroded landscapes that mark many
of these poems. I suppose Lefebvre trusts our sense of what Celan is
about to shut out the 'foreign' meanings in Partie de neige, but Celan
himself was fastidious in his avoidance of words with inappropriate
connotations, just as he was obsessive in his seeking out of words with
the ones he wanted. Perhaps the decision has to do with previous
translation in another sense: Part de neige is the title chosen for an
earlier version of the whole of Schneepart by Fabrice Gravereaux,
Michael Speier, and Rosella Benusiglio-Sella (published in 1982 in
Pb&sie 21).
This is not to cavil but to point out some of the differences that
emerge from looking at Celan through the twin lenses of French and
English. English can sometimes cleave closer, French is more often
compelled to make choices, or, as Lefebvre quite frequently does,
translate multiple possibilities in an explicatory way. The beginning
of the poem Erzflitter plays with the senses of Erz in German, which
means 'ore' or as a prefix corresponds to English 'arch' (it can also
mean brass or bronze, a sense perhaps also relevant as it brings poetry
in via Horace). The poem uses it twice in its opening two lines, in such a
way that the two meanings are both held apart and made to cross over:
Erzflitter, tief im
Aufruhr, Erzvater.

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 Reviews

Flitter can mean 'frippery', or, as a plural, 'sequins'. Given that Erzflitter
is pulled into parallel with Erzvdter (a plural: 'patriarchs') it is more
likely a plural itself, and so more plausible as 'sequins', which both
metaphorically and literally could readily associate with ore, though
arch- or even ore-frippery is perhaps not out of the question either.
Lefebvre, rather than choosing between the senses of the initial Erz-,
gives us both:
Archipaillettes de minerai, tout au
fond de l'effervescence, patriarches.

So, literally: 'arch-sequins of ore'. The loss of density seems quite

serious because with it goes the compaction that convinces us of the
word, which partly works because ore does contain metal. Erzvdter then,
becoming patriarches, loses any association with ore, which matters
more than it might since the rest of the poem has several geological
words. Fairley is much bolder:
Oreflashes, orefathers,
deep in the uproar.

This has the necessary density. 'Flashes' may be a bit loose, but it
catches at 'flashy' and so at the sense of frippery, while doing what
sequins do. With 'orefathers' Fairley seems at first to have lost the other
sense of Erz altogether, except that we can hear 'forefathers': this is the
kind of working of language that Celan himself is engaged in all the
time. Not many translators are this good.
Lefebvre's expanding technique, which perhaps begins in the
different nature of the languages and the more fluid housing of
meaning in English as against French's stricter partitioning, also has
something to do with the translators' differing conceptions of their
task and role. Fairley provides no notes, and says his versions must
'stand and fall' without them. Lefebvre gives discreet and painstaking
commentary on each poem, mostly based on the Kommentierte
Gesamtausgabe of Celan's poems by Barbara Wiedemann, but often
going further. I have every sympathy for Fairley's position, and
fundamentally he is right that the poems must be able to survive
without annotation, but given that the information Wiedemann
gathers, which is mostly dates of composition and details of relevant
underlining and other marks in Celan's library (so basically a matter
of sources), is available to readers of German, it seems questionable
not to pass it on to readers of a bilingual edition. I'm undecided on
this - notes can be a distraction, but there are certainly some cases
where knowing that a particular contemporary event is being alluded

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Translation and Literature 17 (2008)

to, or understanding the precise meaning and context of a technical

word, is practically essential for a reading of a poem. These things
could perhaps be ascertained given time, but the shortcut of a note
seems harmless enough. The danger lies in forgetting that the word
is released into a new circumstance of meaning as it passes from
handbook or newspaper to poem, and in possibly deluding ourselves
that to understand what the words mean is to understand what the
poem means.
It helps, though, to know just how closely keyed in to contemporary
events the poems are, and dates are essential. Mapesbury Road
contains no particularly difficult words, and can certainly be read
without notes. Fairley's elegant translation, which I think improves
slightly on the late Michael Hamburger's, goes:
The stillness flashed
at you from a black
woman's heel.

By her side
the
magnolia-houred halfclock
before a red that
also seeks meaning elsewhere -
or also nowhere.

The whole
court of time round
a lodged bullet, adjacent, cranial.

Sharply vaulted, curial gulps of

confluent air.

Now don't you adjourn.

The few dates and facts Lefebvre supplies in his notes seem to me
to nourish our understanding of this, and also our confidence in the
legitimacy of the information, since much of what he passes on is what
Celan himself passed on to others. It helps to know that the poem
was written on 14/15 April 1968, that 14 April was Easter Sunday,
and that Celan noted this fact himself on a manuscript of the poem.
The facts that Martin Luther King was assassinated on the fourth of
that month and that Rudi Dutschke survived an attempt on his life in
Berlin on the eleventh also help us understand the silence attaching to
the black woman and the 'lodged bullet', which translates 'SteckschuB',

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 Reviews

a word that appeared in a newspaper report on 13 April, and which

Celan confirmed when asked by a friend as a reference to Dutschke.
It is useful to be told that in a letter to his wife of 10 April Celan
mentioned the magnolias in flower (in London, where he was visiting
his aunt), which made him think of Czernowitz, his native town. It's
less important, but still interesting, to learn that Zeithof ('court of time')
is a word Celan underlined in Husserl. It is constructed on the analogy
oiMondhof, the halo of refracted light round the moon, which doesn't
mean it has to become 'halo/de temps' as it does in the French, but
probably does mean that Fairley's 'whole' (for Voile' in German) would
be better 'full', as in 'full moon'. 'CuriaF, then, in the next stanza, is
a translation of 'hofigen', linking back to 'Zeithof . Probably this word
derives most of its meaning from this connection, so that together with
'confluent air' ('Mitluft') it implies the whole cluster of memories and
historical moments surrounding and assailing the self-addressing 'you'
in a particular time and place. The poem is an injunction to stand
up to all that, to keep it all in mind without succumbing to it. Each
poem has its own Zeithof, and sometimes notes can help us perceive its
extent. They fill out our reading rather than restrict it, and can always
be ignored.
On the whole Fairley gives us a more direct and bolder, riskier
apprehension of the dark radiance that emanates from each poem,
while Lefebvre enables us to understand it better. If Fairley occasionally
gets things wrong, or at least askew (as when 'schleudernd', 'hurling',
in Deinem, auch Deinem is given as 'strewing', or, in Bergung, the
last sentence's relations are muddled and the reference to a rejection
of a heart transplant is obscured), if from time to time his translations
seem too inward (as when, also in Bergung, 'Selbstherz' is rendered
'idiot heart' because the etymology of 'idiot' can take you to the idea of
'self, 'own'), this is easily outweighed by the convincing unfolding of
poem after poem, and by a number of ingenious and exact local finds
(such as 'punkwood' for 'Zundschwamm' in Auch der Runige). He
sometimes goes for the least obvious solution, as when giving 'Winde' in
Brunnengraber as 'weedbound' in allusion to bindweed, rather than
taking the more likely competing sense of 'pulley' or 'winch', but with
a few exceptions ('curial' in Mapesbury Road is probably one) he has
curbed the proliferation of obscure words that (in my view) spoilt his
version of Fadensonnen, and rhythmically he is surefooted. Lefebvre is
generally more accurate and clearer, but at the cost of spelling things
out. Perhaps he also has a better idiomatic grasp of German (see,
in Du Liegst, the word Rosa Luxemburg's killers used of her: 'die
Sau'/'the sow'/'la salope'; or, in Mapesbury Road, the line 'oder auch

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Translation and Literature 17 (2008)

nirgends'/'or also nowhere '/'ou encore nulle part'). Both editions are
valuable, precisely because they take separate courses so well. And since
both include the German, they can lead back to it in their different
ways.
CHARLIE LOUTH

The Queen's College, Oxford

DOI: 10.3366/E0968 136 108000320

C. P. Cavafy: The Canon; The Original One Hundred and Fifty-Four

Poems. Translated by Stratis Haviaras, edited by Dana Bonstorm.
Pp. 465. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies, 2007.
Pb. £16.95.

Cavafy's complete poems have been translated several times - by John

Mavrogordato (1951); Rae Dalven (1961); Edmund Keeley and Philip
Sherrard (1975, revised 1992); and Aliki Barnstone (2006) - there is a
comprehensive list at http://www.cavafy.com/companion/bibliography/
select.asp. Now this bilingual edition brings face to face with the Greek
the body of translations by Stratis Haviaras first published by Hermes
Publishing in Athens (2004). The appeal of Cavafy's poems for an
English readership is well attested, and its strange survival in English
translation is well enough known. E. M. Forster praised Cavafy's poetic
use of personal experience, Rex Warner his 'discovery of what amounts
to a personal mythology'; W. H. Auden argued that Cavafy's unique
tone of voice made it 'as easy, or as difficult, for a person from an
alien culture to appreciate as for one of the cultural groups to which
the poet happens to belong'. In a foreword to this volume Seamus
Heaney suggests that 'Cavafy's poems survive translation better than
most' because their virtues, their quite distinctive tone, belong not
to the Greek language but to Cavafy himself. And by that route,
the poems come to belong to us all. Forster characterizes Cavafy
as a man 'standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the
universe'. Heaney offers Cavafy's view of the human predicament as
one 'presented neither as divine comedy nor fully blown tragedy,
but . . . seen from a viewpoint located somewhere between Olympus
and Gesthemane'. Stratis Haviaras has pondered Cavafy and Cavafy's
subject matter for thirty years, and in 2003, the seventieth anniversary
of the poet's death (the 140th of his birth), was prompted to prepare
an English of the complete 'canon', the 154 poems approved by
Cavafy for publication and published posthumously in 1935. Further
'unpublished' or 'hidden' poems were published in 1968; 'unfinished'
poems came out in 1994.

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