between the collection and the individual poem

the first book I read in 2021 was the collection of Pierre Joris’s translations of Paul Celan’s early poems called Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech. it was the first time I had read Celan’s earlier poetry collections in their entirety. (I’ve always read selected poems from the early collections; the later collections I usually managed to find whole.) in selecting from Celan’s earlier books many translators and editors choose the same poems for their collections: ‘Death Fugue,’ ‘Psalm,’ ‘Tenebrae,’ and so on. in so doing, the importance, uniqueness, and significance of Celan’s poetry is emphasized and we see easily how he is considered one of the most important poets of the last century. but this process also lifts his individual poems from their context — a context Celan himself gave them by choosing to publish them with the other poems in those collections. what struck me about reading the collections in their entirety was the clear development of his poetics. Celan’s poems did not fall from the sky wholly made, but came about through a process of articulation whose course can be traced at least partly in the collections as a whole. let me rephrase this: perhaps more than any other poet, Celan’s poems have been treated, because of their significance with regard to history and to the development of modern poetry and art, as singles, that is, as poems that stand radically alone. of course, these poems can be treated as such; there is, after all, perhaps no single poem that grapples with the horrors of particular historical events as well as ‘Death Fugue.’ but to read these poems in their context shows that Celan’s poems and his poetics were in constant development. his poems move from what we might term a more familiar kind of poetry in the early collections to a more abstract poetry in the later. Joris’s publication (and there have been others before, of course; this is the record of my own itinerary, obviously) helps us see this. we can, and many of us will, continue to focus on the individual poems Celan wrote that speak so powerfully, but it is good to have recourse to the full body of work. to remember that Celan was a working poet. that his poetry developed.

text referenced: Celan, Paul. Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech. translated by Pierre Joris. Farrar Straus and Giroux. 2020.