Translation Studies

ISSN: 1478-1700 (Print) 1751-2921 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrs20

Alternatives to impossibility: Translation as

dialogue in the works of Paul Celan

Kurt Beals

To cite this article: Kurt Beals (2014) Alternatives to impossibility: Translation as dialogue in the
works of Paul Celan, Translation Studies, 7:3, 284-299, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2013.866904

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2013.866904

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Translation Studies, 2014
Vol. 7, No. 3, 284–299, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2013.866904

Alternatives to impossibility: Translation as dialogue

in the works of Paul Celan
Kurt Beals*

Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

This article critically engages with the pathos of impossibility as it is employed

with respect to translation in general, and to the works of Paul Celan in particular.
I argue that the allegation of impossibility rests on the tenacious persistence of an
equivalence model of translation, despite the anachronism of this model in the
field of translation studies. I demonstrate the endurance of this model by consider-
ing responses to translations of Paul Celan – an author whose works, perhaps
more than any other’s, have been declared “untranslatable”. This claim, I argue,
rests in part on an oversimplified view of Celan’s poetry as a struggle with the
German language, but it also implies a conventional, equivalence-based model of
translation. Drawing on interpretations of Celan by Yoko Tawada, among
others, I argue that Celan’s poetics offers the basis for an alternative model of
translation, one founded on a relationship of response and dialogue rather than
resemblance and equivalence.
Keywords: Paul Celan; Yoko Tawada; untranslatability; dialogue; poetry;
German literature

No discipline is as constantly haunted by the spectre of its own impossibility as

translation.1 The canon of classical music may offer pieces that are widely deemed
unplayable, but few musicians would go so far as to question the possibility of music
itself. Yet any translator who does not admit the a priori impossibility of translation
is vulnerable to accusations of hubris. The title of Walter Benjamin’s “Die Aufgabe
des Übersetzers”, it is frequently observed, can be understood to combine “The Task
of the Translator” with “The Surrender of the Translator”, rendering the two
inseparable (and, of course, untranslatable). But critics who declare translation to be
impossible must have something very different in mind than the actual, concrete
practice of translation, which continues unabated. As I will argue in the pages that
follow, the pathos of impossibility, though frequently invoked, rests on shaky
theoretical ground. In many cases, the standard of judgment is not even clear, but,
when it is, it frequently turns out to be some version of an equivalence model of
translation, one that enjoys no great favour among contemporary theorists.2
Whether the claim of impossibility comes from translators themselves or from
critics, it often amounts to a lament that the translation has failed to say everything
and do everything that the original text did, in the same way that the original text did
it. But to lament the difference of the translation from the original text is not to

*Email: kbeals@wustl.edu
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
 Translation Studies 285

lament the failure of translation; rather, it is to lament the fact that translation –
which assumes difference as its precondition – exists at all.
In order to better understand, and better challenge, this pathos of impossibility,
the following discussion will focus on Paul Celan, an author whose works, perhaps
more than any other’s, have often been declared “untranslatable”. While these claims
of untranslatability are often tied to the particulars of Celan’s biography and subject
matter, they are largely founded on the polyvalence and ambiguity of Celan’s texts –
traits that are hardly unique to him among modern poets. Thus the characterization
of Celan’s work as untranslatable raises doubts about the translatability of other
poetry as well. But the translators and critics who make these claims frequently rely –
implicitly or explicitly – on an untenable equivalence model of translation, a
unidirectional paradigm in which the translation is conceived of as a vehicle for
conveying the meanings and effects of the source-language text to the target-
language reader. In doing so, they overlook an alternative paradigm of translation
suggested by Celan’s own poetics: one that sees the relationship between the original
text and the translation not as resemblance or equivalence, but as response or
dialogue. Drawing on Yoko Tawada’s “Das Tor des Übersetzers oder Celan liest
Japanisch” [The Translator’s Gate or Celan Reads Japanese], I will argue that this
dialogic model offers an alternative to the impasse of equivalence. The implications
of this dialogic model are not specific to Celan’s work; rather, they extend to literary
translation in general, and may offer both translators and critics a more profitable
paradigm for literary translation, one not preordained to end in failure.

Formulas of failure: Celan and the limits of translation

In a 1995 review of John Felstiner’s critical biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor,
Jew, Michael André Bernstein writes: “It is a commonplace, though not an especially
helpful one, that a poet of Celan’s radical difficulty is strictly untranslatable”
(Bernstein 1995, 39). This commonplace has been repeated in many reviews
published over the past few decades, despite the appearance in that time of numerous
translations of Celan – both in English and in other languages – that seem to offer
evidence to the contrary. Mark Anderson, for instance, writes that Celan’s verse
“hovers on the edge of untranslatability” (Anderson 2000); Robert Pinsky notes
“translation’s necessary, severe limitations”, and praises Michael Hamburger for
having “the tact to gesture towards the impossibility of his task” (Pinsky 1989, 37);
and J. M. Coetzee concludes that “translation of [Celan’s] later poetry must always
fail” (Coetzee 2001). Jacques Derrida, too, raises the spectre of untranslatability in
several of his essays and lectures on Celan, though he limits its application, insisting
that “Everything seems, in principle, de jure, translatable, except for the mark of the
difference among the languages within the same poetic event” (Derrida 2005, 29).3
Celan, of course, did frequently mix multiple languages in a single poem, as in
“Schibboleth” [Shibboleth] (Celan 1995, 98–99), one of Derrida’s key examples. But
even aside from these limit cases, a reputation for untranslatability has become a
staple of Celan’s reception in the English-speaking world, where it is frequently
repeated in a tone of awe. These statements could be dismissed as mere hyperbole,
but I believe that they are symptomatic of deeper misunderstandings, both of Celan’s
work and of the aims of translation.
286 Kurt Beals

Critics who describe Celan’s work as untranslatable frequently employ one of

two arguments to support their view. The first is a characterization of Celan’s oeuvre
as a protracted confrontation with the German language itself – the suggestion, to
extend Derrida’s reading, that German always represents an untranslatable “mark of
difference” in Celan’s poetry, even absent the admixture of other tongues. The
second is a depiction of Celan’s later poetry as increasingly hermetic, full of obscure
personal references, and largely inaccessible to outside readers. These issues are
summed up concisely in a press release announcing the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize,
which was awarded to Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov for their book of Celan
translations, Glottal Stop:

Paul Celan is arguably the most important European poet of the twentieth century, but
much of his work has seemed too hermetic, linguistically complex, and bound to his
struggle with the German language in the aftermath of the Shoah to be translatable.
(“Anne Carson’s Men” 2001)

Highlighted here is the sense that the difficulties encountered in translating Celan
derive not merely from his poems’ linguistic complexity, but also from causes that
are private or particular to the poet’s experience: either the privacy of meaning
indicated in the description of his poems as “hermetic”, or the particularity of the
poet’s relationship, as a survivor, to the language that he shares with the Shoah’s
perpetrators. The implication is not only that the linguistic means necessary to
render Celan’s poetry into English have been elusive, but also that certain aspects of
his poetry have seemed, at least at times, fundamentally inseparable from the
German language itself and from his experience as a German-speaking Jewish poet
who lived through the Shoah, and thus especially resistant to translation.
However, neither of these critical tendencies provides a sufficient basis for the
claims of untranslatability that they have been used to support. Further, the poetics
that Celan developed later in his career offers the basis for an approach to
translation in which difficulty gives way to dialogue. With respect to Celan’s own
work, this means that his later poems can be read not as hermetically sealed and
resistant to outside overtures, but rather as radically open, inviting translations that
preserve or even multiply this openness. But a dialogic poetics of translation has
implications that go beyond Celan’s own corpus: it offers an alternative to the
equivalence-based model of translation according to which translations (of Celan’s
poetry and others’) are often judged to fail. Seen from this perspective, translation is
no longer rendered impossible by the difficulty of the original; rather, it appears as a
realization of the dialogue that the work seeks to initiate.

“Von Dunkel zu Dunkel” – “From Darkness to Darkness”

I would like to approach this argument by way of an example taken from Celan’s
book Von Schwelle zu Schwelle [From Threshold to Threshold], translated by Michael
Hamburger in Poems of Paul Celan:
Von Dunkel zu Dunkel
Du schlugst die Augen auf – ich seh mein Dunkel leben.
Ich seh ihm auf den Grund:
Auch da ists mein und lebt.
 Translation Studies 287

Setzt solches über? Und erwacht dabei?

Wes Licht folgt auf dem Fuß mir,
daß sich ein Ferge fand? (Celan 1995, 80)4
In Hamburger’s translation:
From Darkness to Darkness
You opened your eyes – I saw my darkness live.
I see through it down to the bed:
there too it is mine and lives.

Is that a ferry? Which, crossing, awakens?

Whose light can it be at my heels
for a boatman to appear? (Celan 1995, 81)5
The poem presents an encounter between two people – an “I” and a “you” – in which
the very possibility of mutual understanding is in question. The speaker initially sees
his own darkness in the eyes of another; but the second stanza draws back from this
momentary identification. The line “Setzt solches über? Und erwacht dabei?” seems
to ask whether this darkness can in fact be conveyed to the poem’s addressee,
whether it can be shared or must be borne alone.
But the German “Setzt solches über?” admits of multiple interpretations.
Although the verb übersetzen [ˈy:bɐzεtsn] means “to ferry across”, übersetzen
[y:bɐˈzεtsn] means “to translate”.6 In the context of the poem, this second meaning
suggests that the vehicle is verbal, that the speaker is seeking the language in which
darkness can be conveyed. For translators, the challenge of this passage is to find a
single phrase in the target language that suggests both meanings: something like
“Does this carry over?” Hamburger, however, leaves this connotation aside, adhering
to a strategy that he lays out in the preface to his volume of translations: “If a crucial
word also has several possible meanings, and not all these meanings can be conveyed
in a translation, it was up to me to find the primary one in the context” (Hamburger
1995, 17). Hamburger’s strategy reflects an admirable commitment to fidelity of a
certain sort – not strict lexical equivalence, but at least resemblance at the level of
larger semantic units. However, even this relatively humble ambition requires
Hamburger to impose specificity precisely at the points where Celan cultivates
ambiguity. Celan’s abstract “Setzt solches über?” – literally, “Does such a thing carry
[anything] across?” – is replaced by a question of identity – “Is that a ferry?” – that
implies the concrete presence of a physical object. Meanwhile, the suggestion of
verbal communication fades from view. Ironically, then, in this poem in which
dialogue plays such a central role, what is lost in Hamburger’s rendering is
translation itself.
To say this is not simply to criticize Hamburger for failing to capture every
resonance of every word in Celan’s poem – by that standard, failure might indeed be
guaranteed. Rather, it is to indicate that his choice, when in doubt, to “find the
primary” meaning of each word bespeaks a dependence upon notions of equivalence
that may be of limited use, particularly in the case of a poet like Celan. The irony is
particularly acute here because if we understand “übersetzen” as a reference to
translation – the sense that Hamburger treats as secondary and dispensable – we can
see that it points towards an alternate understanding of translation, one governed
288 Kurt Beals

not by a limiting notion of equivalence and fidelity, but rather by a view of

translation as a dialogue with the original that amplifies and multiplies its
complexities.
Indeed, Celan’s later poetry, as well as many of his statements on poetics, offers
the basis for just such a dialogic poetics of translation – and it is for this reason that
the description of these later poems as “untranslatable” seems so thoroughly
misguided. Such a description necessarily overlooks the centrality of dialogue to
these works, and the implications that it has for their translation. Thus what I will
lay out in the following pages is an argument for seeing this complexity not as a
barrier to translation, but rather as a form of openness to dialogue. This argument is
founded on the turn towards dialogue in Celan’s later poetics – a turn which emerges
from his engagement with the work of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. The
dialogic principle that Celan borrowed from Mandelstam provides a key to
understanding Celan’s later poetry not as cryptic or hermetic, but rather as radically
open to a multiplicity of readings. But a poetics of dialogue has implications that
extend beyond Celan’s own work, suggesting that in other cases as well, translation
can be seen as a form of response that recognizes, preserves, and even multiplies the
ambiguities of the original text.

Dialogue and difficulty: Celan reads Mandelstam

Celan’s reading of Mandelstam crucially influenced his later poetics: his borrowings
from the Russian poet included the notion that “There is no lyric without dialogue”
and the metaphor of the poem as Flaschenpost, a message in a bottle (Mandelstam
1977, 62–63, 59). This conception of poetry is elaborated in Mandelstam’s 1913
essay “About an Interlocutor”, which Celan had read in German translation
(cf. Hamacher and Menninghaus 1988, 201). In that essay, Mandelstam had argued
that poetry could not be a dialogue with a familiar interlocutor, whose reaction
could be anticipated and would consequently add nothing to the poet’s own
understanding: “Addressing someone known, we can only say what is known”
(Mandelstam 1977, 61). However, to initiate a dialogue with an interlocutor who is
truly unknown, “to exchange signals with Mars […] that is a task worthy of a lyric
poet” (Mandelstam 1977, 63). The value of dialogue for Mandelstam is that it can
cast the poet’s own words in a new light, rendering them fresh and surprising: “the
only thing that pushes us into the arms of the interlocutor is the desire to be surprised
by our own words, to be captivated by their novelty and unexpectedness” (ibid).
Mandelstam suggests that by casting out a message in a bottle, initiating a dialogue
with an interlocutor who is wholly unknown, the poet allows meanings to emerge
that are likewise unknown and unintended; rather than a monologue in which
meaning is determined solely by the poet, the poem becomes a dialogue in which the
interlocutor – the reader, or perhaps, I will suggest, the translator – can propose
alternate or additional meanings that the poet had never foreseen.
Celan’s adaptation of Mandelstam’s dialogic poetics is less enthusiastic and
more melancholic: in his Bremen speech, Celan describes the poem as a message in a
bottle, cast out “in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief that somewhere and
sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps” (Celan 2002, 396). And in
his 1960 “Meridian” speech – his acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Prize – he
hesitantly offers: “The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other […]. It
 Translation Studies 289

seeks it out, speaks toward it […]. A poem – under what conditions! – becomes […]
conversation – often despairing conversation” (ibid., 409). This passage of the
“Meridian” speech, in which Celan articulates his own conception of poetry as
dialogue, is taken almost verbatim from Celan’s radio essay “Die Dichtung Ossip
Mandelstamms” [The Poetry of Osip Mandelstam], in which he had described
Mandelstam’s work, too, as “conversation” (cf. Pennone 2007, 58). In the
“Meridian” speech, then, Celan not only brings Mandelstam’s poetics into German;
he also implicitly presents his own poetics as a response to Mandelstam’s. His very
act of adapting the Russian poet’s ideas – despite his repeated qualifications and
expressions of uncertainty and doubt – suggests that such dialogue is possible, even
across a gap of decades and languages.
The growing importance of dialogue in Celan’s poetics seems at times to stand in
tension with the evolution of his poetry: even as Celan’s poetics became increasingly
centred on conversation, his poems were becoming less and less loquacious. As
Michael Hamburger writes, beginning with Celan’s 1959 collection Sprachgitter
[Speech-Grille], “the images grow sparser, more idiosyncratic, and more laden with
conflict, the syntax more broken, the message at once more urgent and more
reticent” (Hamburger 1995, 25). This is the period in which Celan’s poetry came to
be seen by many critics as “hermetic”. However, the apparent inscrutability of these
later poems need not be seen as a forbidding barrier to translation; rather, it can be
seen as the replacement of a single, dominant meaning with a more pronounced
openness to multiplicity and ambiguity. As Hans-Georg Gadamer writes of Celan’s
“Atemkristall” [Breath-crystal] cycle: “It is as if the disunity of the words and parts of
speech increases the potency of the elements of the utterance, such that they say
more and radiate in more directions than they could in taut syntactical wrapping”
(Gadamer 1997, 135). This view is manifested in the image that gives the cycle its
title. In the cycle’s final poem, the “Atemkristall” stands against “das hundert-
/ züngige Mein- / gedicht, das Genicht”.7 The neologisms “Meingedicht” and
“Genicht” suggest a garrulous poetry that speaks falsehood, while the “Atemkristall”
represents the smallest possible moment of speech, offering “dein unumstößliches
/ Zeugnis” – in Hamburger’s translation, “your irreversible / witness” (Celan 1995,
230–231). The image of the “Atemkristall” suggests a condensation of language that
does away with extraneous syntax, allowing the words to resonate more freely.
Understood in these terms, Celan’s later, sparser poems appear not as hermetic texts
that resist interpretation, but rather as dynamic force fields that allow a plurality of
readings.
What consequences does this understanding of Celan’s poetics of dialogue have
for the question of translatability or, more concretely, for the practice of translation?
On the one hand, Gadamer’s reading suggests that in order to maintain the potency
of Celan’s words, the translator, too, must leave these words unbound, not filling in
the gaps with syntactic clues, nor attempting to make sense of what Celan has left
ambiguous. On the other hand, this does not mean that the translator should simply
translate each word in isolation, robotically producing a lexical translation in which
the relationships between words are entirely undetermined. Such a procedure is made
nearly impossible from the start by the many polysemies and ambiguities of Celan’s
later poetry, which render a straightforward lexical translation almost unthinkable.
But even if such a translation were possible, it would mean treating each word as
what Celan calls “Ein Wort – du weißt: / eine Leiche” – “A word – you know: / a
290 Kurt Beals

corpse” (Celan 1995, 92–93) – dampening the resonances of each word by ignoring
the charged relationship in which it stands to the words nearby.8
Thus, while translation inevitably entails compromises, it is difficult not to
experience frustration when Hamburger opts for the “primary” meaning, or Felstiner
writes: “Now, with inscrutable poems or lines, I gladly pass them along to the reader
within the full stream of Celan’s writing” (Celan 2002, xxxi). Hamburger’s and
Felstiner’s solutions seem not merely to retain this inscrutability, but to compound
it: meanings that are latent, if unrecognized, in the German original may be entirely
unavailable to readers of the English translation. But Celan’s view of the poem as a
site of dialogue offers an alternative: rather than preserving the poem’s opacity, the
translator can engage constructively with the poem’s complexity. Such a translation
would not deny the ambiguities of the original poem, nor would it attempt to resolve
them into unambiguous meanings. Rather, it would seek to preserve or expand upon
the possibilities of meaning present in the original poem, avoiding any clear
resolutions that would put an end to the dialogue.

“Ich kenne dich” – “I know you”

To take an example from the “Atemkristall” cycle, the poem “Ich kenne dich”
[I know you] receives widely divergent treatments in translations by John Felstiner,
Pierre Joris, and the team of Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh, as follows:
(ICH KENNE DICH, du bist die tief Gebeugte,
ich, der Durchbohrte, bin dir untertan.
Wo flammt ein Wort, das für uns beide zeugte?
Du – ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich – ganz Wahn.) (Celan 1983, 2:30)
Felstiner:

(I KNOW YOU, you’re the one bent over low,

and I, the one pierced through, am in your need.
Where flames a word to witness for us both?
You – wholly real. I – wholly mad.) (Celan 2002, 245)9
Joris:

(I KNOW YOU, you are the deeply bowed,

I, the transpierced, am subject to you.
Where flames a word, would testify for us both?
You – all, all real. I – all delusion.) (Celan 2006, 105)10
Popov/McHugh:

(I know you: you’re the one who’s bent so low.

You hold me – I’m the riddled one – in bondage.
What word could burn as witness for us two?
You’re my reality. I’m your mirage.) (Celan 2000, 19)11
Like “Von Dunkel zu Dunkel”, discussed above, “Ich kenne dich” is centred on the
question of whether communication between two figures – an “I” and a “you” – is
possible at all. The question “Wo flammt ein Wort, das für uns beide zeugte?” hints
at the fear that no such word exists, that the speaker and the addressee cannot find
 Translation Studies 291

their common ground in language.12 It is telling that this question should be raised in
a rhymed, metrical quatrain, in the midst of a cycle of poems that is otherwise so
spare and fragmentary – the most conventionally “poetic” of these poems is precisely
the site at which the poet confronts his doubts as to whether poetry can communicate
at all.
The central images of this poem – a hunched female figure and a “pierced” or
“riddled” male figure – are open to multiple interpretations. Gadamer (1997, 122)
reads this passage as an allusion to the Virgin Mary bent over the pierced body of
Christ in the Pietà – an interpretation that is certainly compatible with the brief
descriptions of the figures, but is by no means overwhelmingly persuasive. First of
all, in Celan’s poem it is not clear that the female figure is bent over the male figure –
the phrase “bin dir untertan” suggests a figurative, not a physical subordination of
the “I” to the “you”. Second, while the word “durchbohrt” does appear in some
twentieth-century German translations of the Bible as a description of the pierced
body of Christ, it was not used in this context in the 1897 copy of the Luther Bible
that Celan possessed; in fact, it was not introduced in this context in the Luther Bible
until the 1984 revision.13 Thus, although a suggestion of the Pietà may be found in
the figures described in the poem, this interpretation is not wholly compelling.
In addition, biographical information suggests another interpretation for this
scene. As several interpreters have noted, Celan wrote “Ich kenne dich” for his wife
Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, whose etchings had helped him find the strength to write
again in the midst of a psychological crisis (see Lyon 1987, 186–189; Carson 1999,
112–114). The posture of the female figure has often been understood as a gesture of
protection, but the “tief Gebeugte” could also be Celan-Lestrange bent over her
work. In that case, the phrase “das für uns beide zeugte” would suggest a second
meaning of “zeugen” – to beget or procreate – alluding to her creative process and
Celan’s own return to writing. This reading is supported by allusions to etching in
other poems throughout the “Atemkristall” cycle. I do not wish to propose this as a
definitive interpretation of this poem to the exclusion of all others; rather, I wish to
open up a possible interpretation that could be considered in place of, or as a
supplement to, Gadamer’s. The reading that I have suggested has the added benefit
of emphasizing the importance of dialogue between the two figures in the poem, an
element which is absent from Gadamer’s Pietà reading.
I would now like to turn to the translations themselves. In the first place, it
should be noted that only Joris translates the poem in the context of the entire
“Atemkristall” cycle, whereas Felstiner and Popov/McHugh remove it from this
context in their selections from Celan’s work. While this means that resonances the
poem has with other poems in the cycle will inevitably be lost, it is not necessarily a
betrayal of the original text – in some cases, a translator’s selection might reveal or
create new connections among the poems, as in Celan’s own translations of a
selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets (cf. Koster 2000, 209–212). On a thematic level,
Felstiner and Joris – perhaps taking an interpretive cue from Gadamer – both
translate “durchbohrt” with variations on “pierced”, a word that brings up strong
associations with the description of Christ’s body in the King James Version of the
Bible (and in many other translations): “But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced
his side […]. They shall look on him whom they pierced” (John 19:34–37). The
consequence is to encourage a Christological interpretation at the risk of over-
determining the poem’s meaning and excluding other readings.
292 Kurt Beals

Popov and McHugh present a strikingly different alternative. By interpreting

Celan’s “ich, der Durchbohrte, bin dir untertan” as “You hold me – I’m the riddled
one – in bondage”, they recast this image as a torrid love affair. Perhaps an
undertone of erotic submission can be seen in Celan’s poem for his wife, but for
Popov and McHugh this element comes clearly to the fore. With their translation of
the final line – “You’re my reality. I’m your mirage”. – they reinforce the idea that
this is a poem driven by romantic passion. Meanwhile, other interpretations that are
suggested by Celan’s German are not even alluded to in this translation. Celan’s “Ich –
ganz Wahn”, for example, can easily be read as a reference to Celan’s struggles with
depression and paranoia, a sense that comes through most clearly in Felstiner’s “I –
wholly mad”. A reader would be hard-pressed, however, to find this implication in
Popov and McHugh’s “I’m your mirage”.
To their credit, Popov and McHugh admit that their approach to Celan’s poems
is an unconventional one. In their introduction to Glottal Stop, they write: “[W]e
often sought higher levels of fidelity than those of the word, the line, or the
individual poem” (Popov and McHugh 2000, xii). Nevertheless, their creative
engagement with Celan’s work cannot be seen as a truly open dialogue. Rather
than preserving or multiplying the ambiguities and complexities of this text, they
reduce them to a single meaning, all too easily exhausted. In this, their practice
approaches Don Paterson’s model of the “poet’s version”, with all the risks that
Lawrence Venuti sees it entailing. As Venuti writes:

The version would thus seem to assume an ethics of sheer self-interest, where poetic
license has been redefined as the privileging of the poet’s interpretation according to the
strength of its originality autonomous from the source text – an originality that can only
remain dubious, however, insofar as it rests on the use of previous translations and
deploys the poetic conventions of the language in which the poet is writing. (Venuti
2011, 232)

It might be argued that Popov and McHugh could afford to grant themselves such
licence because Joris’ translation had already introduced English-language readers to
the poem (though Felstiner, whose translation was published even later, did not
choose the same path).14 But as Venuti suggests, this licence easily gives way to a
practice in which the original poem serves only as a jumping-off point for inventions
that bear little relation to the original text, and that could hardly be said to engage it
in any form of dialogue.
With these risks in mind, perhaps we can more clearly define what a dialogic
model of translation would and would not mean. It would not mean abandoning the
literal sense of the original text, casting it off as an unwelcome constraint: in order
for a dialogue to take place at all, each party must listen carefully and attempt, as far
as possible, to discern the other’s meaning. But it also would not mean adhering
strictly to the “primary” meaning while neglecting ambiguities and insinuations.
Instead, practising or reading translation as dialogue would mean attending to
precisely these ambiguities, exacerbating these tensions rather than resolving them. If
Hamburger, Felstiner and Joris occasionally settle for a single, primary meaning or a
straightforward lexical translation when Celan’s poems seem to resist conclusive
interpretation, Popov and McHugh allow themselves greater liberty in responding
to the challenges of his texts. In the process, however, they run the risk of
 Translation Studies 293

circumventing those challenges entirely. If a “higher level of fidelity” to Celan’s

poetry is sought, it cannot be arrived at through this strategy of avoidance. Rather, it
requires a translation practice that enters fully into conversation with Celan’s work,
neither taking it only at its word, at a loss to go beyond, nor seeking to fill in the
gaps to provide a clear and straightforward interpretation.
One model for this dialogic approach to translation can be found in Celan’s own
renderings of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The extent of Celan’s transformation of these
sonnets has already been observed by many critics, most notably by Peter Szondi in
his discussion of Sonnet 105. But whereas Szondi grounds the difference between
Shakespeare’s sonnet and Celan’s in a different “intention towards language” (Szondi
borrows, but reinterprets, Benjamin’s term “Intention auf die Sprache”; cf. Szondi
1978, 325), the departures of Celan’s translations from lexical equivalence can also
be seen as a form of dialogue with Shakespeare’s poems. This is perhaps clearest in
Sonnet 65, in which only the poet’s craft, in Shakespeare’s poem, can render love (or
the beloved) immortal: “That in black ink my love may still shine bright”. Celan’s
translation reads: “Aus meiner Tinte Schwarz, draus leuchtest du” (1983, 5:334–335).
One difference between the versions is clear: the phrase “my love”, which
equivocates in Shakespeare’s text between the emotion of love and the person of the
beloved, here becomes clearly identified with the latter, the poem’s addressee, who is
addressed directly in Celan’s version. But this should not be read as a collapse of
ambiguity into a single interpretation. As Cees Koster (2000) has observed, the
second-person singular pronoun, which is wholly absent from Shakespeare’s poem,
also occurs in two other places in Celan’s text, each time identified with an inanimate
object: “Du trotzt nicht, Felsenwand” [You, rock face, do not stand firm] and “Der
Zeit Juwel – nein, du bewahrsts nicht auf” [The jewel of time – no, you do not
preserve it].15 Rather than simply identifying “my love” with the beloved, then,
Celan multiplies the addressees. As Koster argues, “By including in the text world
multiple possible referents, Celan brings into light the problem of reference itself”
(ibid., 229). In particular, Celan raises the question of the identity of the “you” – a
question that cannot be avoided in reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, though it is not
expressly voiced in the original version of Sonnet 65. While deviating from a
narrowly faithful translation, then, Celan retains the thematic centre of Shake-
speare’s sonnet, even adding to its complexity by interrogating the role and the
identity of the addressee. Celan’s translation not only engages in a dialogue with
Shakespeare’s poem, it even makes explicit the implicitly dialogic structure of the
original text. As Felstiner writes, “Here in the sonnets, German verse has a
contrapuntal force that turns the act of translation into vehement dialogue”
(1990, 174).

Opening the door: Tawada reads Celan

It might be argued that Shakespeare’s sonnets, however richly layered their con-
struction, are rarely as opaque as Celan’s own poems often seem on first reading.
Perhaps a vision of translation as dialogue is more easily realized when the original
work is more accessible, when its meaning is more easily identified and even
paraphrased. But Yoko Tawada, in her essay “The Translator’s Gate or Celan
Reads Japanese”, offers evidence that some form of dialogue between languages may
be possible in translations of Celan’s works as well. Discussing Mitsuo Iiyoshi’s
294 Kurt Beals

Japanese translation of the cycle “Sieben Rosen später” [Seven Roses Later] from
Celan’s Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, Tawada writes that the ideogram for “gate”
occurs frequently, either alone or as a component of other ideograms; in fact, it
appears precisely seven times. As Tawada writes, “The poet must have felt the gaze
of the translation, directed from the future back onto the original text. […] If I
imagine a poem as a receiver, it is foolish to seek something ‘typically German’ in a
German poem. After all, it always receives something different, never itself” (1996,
126–127).
This figure of the poem-as-receiver resonates with Gadamer’s claim that words
freed from their syntax can “say more and radiate in more directions than they could
in taut syntactical wrapping” (1997, 135). In Gadamer’s description, the poem is
sending the signals, while in Tawada’s, the poem is receiving. Together, they form a
dialogue. This, Tawada writes elsewhere, could be the “exchange [of] signals with
Mars” that Mandelstam had imagined (Mandelstam 1977, 63): “Sometimes I have
the feeling that Celan considered the translators he could not know at all as
interlocutors from Mars, and left numerous signals behind for them” (Tawada
2007, 81). In addition to considering the poem as a receiver, Tawada uses her
discovery of the recurring ideogram for “gate” in Iiyoshi’s translation as the basis for
a reconsideration of the role of the word in Celan’s poetry. Comparing Celan’s
words themselves to gates, Tawada (1996, 130) writes: “Celan’s words are not
containers, but openings”. Rather than approaching the word as a closed box, she
argues, the translator may approach it as a gate, a figure of openness and possibility.
Tawada also draws attention to the role of translation in Celan’s “Von Dunkel
zu Dunkel” – the poem in which, as I argued above, Hamburger’s ferry fails to carry
over the importance of translation itself. She writes that in the second stanza

The question is raised whether such a thing (darkness) can be ferried over (translated) at
all, and whether it awakes in the process. It is a nice idea that something can awake
through translation. Until the translator (boatman) is found, the author stands there
disoriented, alone and uncertain. (Tawada 1996, 133)

The poem, in her reading, waits for the translation that will complete it. Like “Ich
kenne dich”, “Von Dunkel zu Dunkel” is a poem about conversation, dialogue. Both
poems ask whether such communication is even possible: “Does this carry over?”
“Where flames a word to witness for us both?” The flaming word, the ferryman’s
light, are a reaching through language, between languages, from an “I” to a “you”.
The possibility of translation is central to Celan’s poetic project – it requires an
approach to translation that enters into dialogue, that both radiates and receives.

Conclusions: Translation as dialogue

A conception of translation as a form of dialogue with the original text has
important implications for how we think about translation in general, not only about
the translation of especially difficult, polyvalent texts such as Celan’s. Many critics,
including Lawrence Venuti, have criticized conventional models of translation that
posit as their ideal or goal some form of equivalence between the original text and
the translation. This equivalence model is frequently tied to the assumption that
translation is a form of mediation, bringing something that already exists in one
 Translation Studies 295

language into another. But as Venuti argues, “[W]e must jettison what I shall call the
instrumental model of translation, the notion that a translation reproduces or
transfers an invariant that is contained in or caused by the source text, whether its
form, its meaning, or its effect” (2011, 234). The dialogic model offers an alternative
to the “instrumental model” that Venuti rejects: rather than claiming to be equivalent,
identical or at least similar to the original text, a translation that responds to the
original in the spirit of dialogue, in Mandelstam’s sense, would have to acknowledge,
and might even celebrate, the difference and the distance between the original and
the translation. The “desire to be surprised by our own words” that Mandelstam
attributes to the poet might be best fulfilled in translation, provided that that
translation does not merely strive for equivalence, but rather engages the original in a
dialogue in which the “novelty and unexpectedness” of the poem can emerge.16
Douglas Robinson has made a similar argument in The Translator’s Turn,
likewise rejecting “instrumentalism” in translation (cf. Robinson 1991, 50–54,
109–117) as well as the standard of equivalence, arguing

that in hermeneutical dialogue with the [source-language] author, the translator

invariably turns the original, turns away from it into the [target language]; and that
instead of pretending […] that the translator constructs a stable one-to-one pattern of
correspondence or equivalence between the [source-language] and the [target-language]
text […], we should recognize and, contextually, encourage the translator’s poetic
creativity. (Ibid., xv; see also 136)

However, this image of the translator’s “turning away from” the original might be
misleading: to the extent that the translation is undertaken in the (not always greatly
hopeful) belief that dialogue with the original is possible, it requires the translator to
turn towards the original text, even at the cost, perhaps, of turning away from readers
in the target language. Indeed, this is one of the difficulties raised by a dialogic model of
translation: if the translation engages in a dialogue with the original, only those who
have access to both texts will be privy to the whole of the dialogue.
This model is not without precedent. As Daniel J. Pinti writes in a discussion of
medieval translation practices,

given what must have been, within the learned population, a large number of bilingual
or trilingual readers in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, the translator had to
recognize and, in some sense, to write for this audience. It is such a reader, after all, who
would best be able to judge the value of the translation itself, and who would most fully
recognize and appreciate the kind of textual mediation in which the translator was
engaged. (1995, 110)17

And Clive Scott has recently written that

familiarity with the source text is indispensable, simply because the significance of
translation lies not in the demonstration of a skill of substitution, but in the fruitfulness
of the relationship established between the source text and the target text, and what that
relationship sets in creative motion. (2011, 215)

Clearly this model is not universally applicable: there are many cases in which, for
pragmatic reasons, a translation exists primarily to be read by an audience that has
no access to the original text. But there are other cases in which translations can and
296 Kurt Beals

do engage in a dialogue with the original text that can be appreciated and
understood by a bilingual (or multilingual) audience: Celan’s own Shakespeare
translations must certainly be included in this category.
The importance of a dialogic view of translation is perhaps most clearly seen in
the context of translation practice and criticism, where outmoded standards of
equivalency often silently continue to hold sway. The persistent conception of the
translator’s task as one of carrying meanings across from one language to another
can only end in surrender, in judgments of impossibility. But the poetics that Celan
developed in dialogue with Mandelstam’s work – and that Gadamer, Tawada and
others have pursued in dialogue with Celan’s – can serve as the basis for a model of
translation in which the texts respond to one another, multiplying meanings and
ambiguities. Mandelstam’s signal from Mars, Gadamer’s radiant words and
Tawada’s receiver are all figures of this interplay in which translations might
engage. The impossibility of translation thus gives way to the multitude of
possibilities that emerge in this exchange.

Notes
1. I gratefully acknowledge the publishers of the works cited in this article for kindly
granting me permission to reproduce excerpts from their publications. The individual
acknowledgements appear in an endnote the first time each work is cited.
2. I do not mean to draw a clear-cut distinction here between translators and literary critics,
on the one hand, and academic translation theorists, on the other. Such a distinction
would be inappropriate for many reasons, foremost among them the fact that many
individuals play both roles at different times. However, the rhetoric of failure seems to
surround the discipline of translation more persistently in non-academic writing; the
distinction is thus one of genres, not of persons.
3. As Derrida writes in another essay, it is precisely the difficulty of translating poetry –
Celan’s poetry, but also poetry in general – that makes this translation necessary: “The
poem is not only the best example of untranslatability. It also gives to the test of
translation its most proper, its least improper, place. The poem no doubt is the only place
propitious to the experience of language, that is to say, of an idiom that forever defies
translation and therefore demands a translation that will do the impossible, make the
impossible possible in an unheard-of event” (Derrida 2005, 137). With the exception of the
special case, not infrequent in Celan’s work, of “the multiplicity of languages in the same
poem” (ibid., 22), Derrida can thus be read as generally insisting on the possibility, or
even necessity, of translating the very works that most nearly approach untranslatability.
4. Acknowledgement: “Von Dunkel zu Dunkel” and “Nächtlich geschürzt”: Paul Celan, Von
Schwelle zu Schwelle, © 1955, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe
Random House GmbH.
5. Acknowledgement: all excerpts from Michael Hamburger’s translations in Poems of Paul
Celan are copyright © 1988, 2002 by Michael Hamburger. Reprinted by permission of
Persea Books, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.
6. It should be noted that “übersetzen” is an inseparable-prefix verb, so the conjugated form
is “übersetzt,” whereas “übersetzen” is a separable-prefix verb, with the conjugated form
“setzt … über”. Thus, the literal meaning “to ferry across” is correct in this context.
However, the more common “übersetzen” is unmistakably implied as well, as Derrida
(2005, 55) also notes. This doubling also occurs in a poem from Celan’s collection
Atemwende – “sie setzt / Wundgelesenes über” (Celan 1983, 2:24) – which Felstiner (2001,
217) translates as “it bears / wound readings across”. The argument for a reading of “Von
Dunkel zu Dunkel” that emphasizes the role of communication, dialogue and even
translation is strengthened by the fact that this poem itself forms part of a poetic dialogue
between Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Celan’s 1948 poem “Corona”, in which he writes
“wir sehen uns an, / wir sagen uns Dunkles” – in Hamburger’s translation, “we look at
 Translation Studies 297

each other, / we exchange dark words” (Celan 1995, 48–49) – is echoed in Bachmann’s
1952 “Dunkles zu sagen” (Darkness spoken), which begins “Wie Orpheus spiel ich / auf
den Saiten des Lebens den Tod / und in die Schönheit der Erde / und deiner Augen, die
den Himmel verwalten, / weiß ich nur Dunkles zu sagen” – in Peter Filkins’ translation,
“Like Orpheus I play / death on the strings of life, / and to the beauty of the Earth / and
your eyes, which administer heaven, / I can only speak of darkness” (Bachmann 2006,
10–11). Celan’s “Von Dunkel zu Dunkel”, in its turn, adopts a number of motifs from
“Dunkles zu sagen”, including the river, which in Bachmann’s poem is a clear reference to
the Styx. Given this context, Hamburger’s emphasis on the ferryman is certainly justified.
However, what his translation loses is the parallel drawn between the act of ferrying and
the function of translation and dialogue. I am grateful to Maya Barzilai for drawing this
intertextual reference to my attention, and for her many other helpful comments on this
article. Acknowledgements: “Corona”: Paul Celan, Mohn und Gedächtnis, © 1952,
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH.
Ingeborg Bachmann, excerpt from “Darkness Spoken”, translated by Peter Filkins, from
Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. Copyright © 1978, 2000
by Piper Verlag GmbH, München. Translation copyright © 2006 by Peter Filkins.
Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Zephyr
Press, www.zephyrpress.org.
7. This undeniably difficult passage is translated by Felstiner as “the hundred- / tongued
My- / poem, the Lie-noem” (Celan 2002, 247); by Hamburger as “the hundred- / tongued
pseudo- / poem, the noem” (Celan 1995, 231); and by Pierre Joris as “my hundred- /
tongued perjury- / poem, the noem” (Celan 2006, 107). Each of these translations is an
attempt to convey the two meanings implicit in “Mein- / gedicht”: on the one hand, “my
poem”, and on the other, “perjury poem”, a play on the German “Meineid”. “Genicht” is
a neologism that suggests the reduction of the poem (“Gedicht”) to nothing (“Nichts”).
8. Yoko Tawada (2007) makes a similar observation regarding the translation of punctu-
ation in Celan’s poems. Although punctuation marks are, in principle, perfectly
translatable, Tawada writes, “that means that they do not open up in the process of
translation; rather, they move with closed bodies from the original into a translation”
(Tawada 2007, 39; see also 71; this translation and those that follow are mine, unless
otherwise noted).
9. Acknowledgement: reprinted from Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated
by John Felstiner. Copyright © 2001 by John Felstiner. With permission of the publisher,
W. W. Norton.
10. Acknowledgement: excerpts from Collected Later Poems of Paul Celan, by Paul Celan,
translated by Pierre Joris. Translation copyright © 2013 by Pierre Joris. Reprinted by
permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
11. Acknowledgement: excerpt from Glottal Stop: 101 Poems ©1983 Paul Celan, English
translations © 2000 by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh. Reprinted by permission of
Wesleyan University Press.
12. Anne Carson, in her reading of Celan’s poem “Sprachgitter”, detects a similar
“estrangement” or “intimate alienation” that “cleanses us of the illusion that we could
talk” (Carson 1999, 33).
13. The obvious biblical reference point would be John 19:34–37: “But one of the soldiers
with a spear pierced his side […]. They shall look on him whom they pierced”. In the 1545
Luther Bible, this passage reads “Sondern der Kriegsknechte einer öffenet seine Seite mit
einem spehr […]. Sie werden sehen in welchen sie gestochen haben”. The 1912 revision
preserves this wording with only minor changes in spelling. In the 1984 revision, the word
“durchbohrt” appears in this passage: “sondern einer der Soldaten stieß mit dem Speer in
seine Seite, und sogleich kam Blut und Wasser heraus. / ‘Sie werden den sehen, den sie
durchbohrt haben.’ ” This is not the first translation to use “durchbohrt” to describe
Christ’s body: the 1951 revision of Franz Eugen Schlachter’s translation reads: “sondern
einer der Kriegsknechte durchbohrte seine Seite mit einem Speer, und alsbald floß Blut
und Wasser heraus. […] ‘Sie werden den ansehen, den sie durchstochen haben.’ ” Thus,
Celan could conceivably have consulted translations in which the word “durchbohrt” is
used with reference to the body of Christ. Nevertheless, the fact that this translation was
298 Kurt Beals

not used to describe Christ’s body in the Luther Bible until a later revision (and thus not
in Celan’s own copy) deprives Gadamer’s argument of any compelling lexical support,
and would justify caution in translation to avoid overemphasizing this Christological
interpretation. (Celan’s copy of the 1897 printing of the Luther Bible by the Preußische
Haupt-Bibelgesellschaft is housed in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.)
14. André Lefevere has suggested, to the contrary, that later translators may feel freer to
adhere to the poetics of the original, rather than adapting it to the poetics of the “receiving
system” (Lefevere 1982).
15. The translations of Celan’s German here are mine. The corresponding passages in
Shakespeare’s sonnets are “When rocks impregnable are not so stout” and “where, alack, /
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?” Celan’s translation also adds a second-
person plural pronoun, transforming Shakespeare’s “Nor gates of steel so strong but time
decays” into “Und Tore, ehern, ihr steht nicht inmitten” [And gates, iron, you do not
stand in the way] (Celan 1983, 5:334–335).
16. As Derrida writes of Celan, “Translation is desired by the poet – he wants to be read, to
be translated” (though Derrida adds, “but I recognize that there is aggression and hand-
to-hand struggle”; Derrida 2005, 168).
17. Pinti’s discussion draws on Bakhtin’s understanding of dialogism, which I have not
addressed here due to space considerations. For other discussions of translation and
dialogue from a Bakhtinian perspective, see Robinson 1991; Emerson 1983; Green-
all 2006.

Note on contributor
Kurt Beals is assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Languages &
Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his PhD from the
University of California, Berkeley, in 2013. Along with translation, his research
interests include avant-garde and experimental poetry and its relationship to media
history and information theory. He has translated a number of works from German
into English, including books by Anja Utler and Regina Ullmann.

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