I wrote that I will continue to write about Celan on Tuesday, and for two full days I felt dumfounded not knowing where to start, having such a heart-shattering work in front of me.
As a person who was born and raised in a country during peacetime, I have been taking peace for granted.
Therefore, I know I should not turn my face away from Celan’s work, as I should regularly revisit the despair of Hiroshima victims by reading important literature by Oe Kenzaburo and others.
Of course, it makes it more difficult for me to read his works due to his inextricable diction and coinage in German, a language I hardly comprehend. However, as Paul Celan himself said, his works come from experience, so it is not impossible for me to revisit his experience, or at least I should give it a try:
At his most difficult, most elliptic and paradoxical, he insisted that he was not a hermetic poet but one out to communicate, describing his poems as “ways of a voice to a receptive you,” a “desperate dialogue,” and “a sort of homecoming.” (p.17, Paul Celan: Poems translated and introduced by Michael Hamburger)
And there are a few key factors I should keep in mind when I read Celan’s works, other than coinage in German such as symbols of hair (mother or me), almonds (Jews), black milk (Nazi) etc., which are repeatedly used, and the ironic fact that Celan had to write in his enemy’s language, German.
Here, maybe I should look at ‘hair’ more deeply.
Hair is undoubtedly organic matter which lives almost perpetually after the human body dies. It represents the state of Celan whose inside was dead while his body was alive.
We were dead and were able to breathe
Memory of France
Or we can recall Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” which shows the mountain of human hair along with piled corpses and gold taken from teeth.
Their state was nothing more than a piece of hair on the dry ground.
