De faced

For the past roughly 12 years I’ve been involved in the publication of literature in translation—beginning with “Exchanges” back in the mid-90s (a journal of translation at the University of Iowa) up to my current work with Zephyr Press and the Zoland Poetry series. Over these years and long before I was even considered, there are certain practical aspects of the finished product – the book itself – that continue to gnaw on my liver’s liver. This delicacy, for whatever has its teeth in me, can be summed up with a few lines from the Heather McHugh/Nikolai Popov introduction to their book of Paul Celan translations – glottal stop.


“Because first and foremost we value the experience of the poetry, we decided not to print the German texts en face. Both of us were reluctant to encourage, in the process of fostering an international readership’s acquaintance with Paul Celan, too early a recourse to the kind of line-by-line comparison that fatally distracts attention from what matters first: the experience of a poem’s coursing, cumulative power. The serious scholar will have no trouble looking up the poetic originals; the serious reader will have no objection to focusing on a poem’s presence and integrity.” [p.xiii]


So, if I’m a serious scholar, and am going to track down the originals anyway, why not provide me with the material. The absence of Celan’s German seems a palsy traffic hump to provide someone eager to delve into both original and translation. Especially when you consider that this particular book of translations has been roundly and deservedly heralded as a stunning transformation of these particular Celan poems into English. This is by far one of my favorite books of translation/poetry, which is perhaps what makes the translators’ excuse about the monolingual aspect of this volume all the more painful.


They say they want to focus on the “coursing, cumulative power”—as if readers would be somehow or other physically or genetically incapable of reading just the English for the English. There is a verso and recto to each spread – German goes on one, English the other. Perhaps an eye patch could have been included at the back of the book. And if they really are so concerned about the book being relegated solely to a scholarly apparatus, then why are there over 32 pages of notes for just over 100 pages of poems? Some breath is not squaring.


There are several mentions of copyright issues that hung up the project – but if this were the only issue, it would have been simple enough to write in the introduction that Wesleyan University Press didn’t have the funds for the German (or else that the rights holder was unwilling to set the German free) – and based on the scope of other Wesleyan projects, an additional 100 pages of text for the German shouldn’t have been a financial problem, especially with the literary world’s continued interest in Celan’s work.


Which seems to return us to the age-old issue of some translators believing that including the original in a volume of translation will somehow taint the book, that it won’t be considered seriously as a book of poetry in English, and/or that it will appear too scholarly or inaccessible on store shelves, with two languages staring back. There are other translators who are painfully concerned about being accepted as poets (read, not just translators). The thinking goes that if the original is also included, then their words will be considered to be nothing more than translation for hire – a Kodak user’s manual from Danish, which is about as far from the truth as one can be when considering the poetry of Paul Celan.

Both serious scholars and readers would benefit from seeing the estranged and lyrical nature of Celan's German. Celan moved between too many languages to be concerned about today's readers moving both horizontally and vertically on the page, across gutters.