Paul Celan's Translation of Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death—"

Paul Celan. Gesammelte Werke in Fünf Bänden. Suhrkamp 1983.
Der Tod, da ich nicht halten konnt,	Because I could not stop for Death—
hielt an, war gern bereit.	He kindly stopped for me—
Im Fuhrwerk saß nun er und ich	The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
und die Ansterblichkeit.	And Immortality.
Ihm gings auch langsam schnell genug,	We slowly drove—He knew no haste
und ich hatt fortgetan	And I had put away
das Fronen und das Müßiggehn,	My labor and my leisure too,
so freundlich war der Mann.	For His Civility—
Ein Schulhof kam mit kleinem Volk,	We passed the School, where Children strove
das miteinander rang . . .	At Recess—in the Ring—
Es hat das Korn uns nachgeäugt,	We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
wir sahn: die Sonne sank.	We passed the Setting Sun—
Dann hielten wir, da stand ein Haus:	We paused before a House that seemed
emporgewelltes Land.	A Swelling of the Ground—
Das Dach—kaum daß es sichtbar war,	The Roof was scarcely visible—
Das Sims—ein Hügelrand.	The Cornice—in the Ground—
Jahrhunderte seither, doch keins	Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet
war länger als der Nu,	Feels shorter than the Day
da ich mir sagt: Wir halten ja	I first surmised the Horses Heads
auf Ewigkeiten zu!	Were toward Eternity—

P aul Celan (1920-70) is one of the leading German poets of the twentieth century; for despite, or because of, the alleged enigmatic and hermetic quality of his work, international readership is increasing with the appearance of new editions and translations, and the body of scholarship continues to mount. Celan's reputation rests on ten volumes of poetry written between 1945 and his death in 1970, also on his poetics, most notably Der Meridian, and on his translations which have as yet been too little recognized.

Celan, under the influence of Walter Benjamin, moulds his translation into an attempted interpretation, which brings out the potential implications inherent in a text, sets it into his own language and stylistic elements, a process, however, which also functions to change the original meaning. In his translations, Celan typically uses a fractured syntax and ellipses, paratactic constructions as well as idiosyncratic punctuation and frequent caesurae leading to pauses, breaks, and discontinuities. He also includes non-redundant duplication and subtle use of verbal aspect, perhaps influenced by the Russian language.

Celan's rendition of twenty-one Shakespeare sonnets is probably the best known of his translations. Emily Dickinson is the only other English speaking poet whose works Celan translated to any extent—in this case, ten poems that have been published. One can speculate that Celan, despite large differences, was attracted to Dickinson by her themes of time and death as well as by her tone of skepticism and sarcasm, which he intensified to the extreme and thus transformed the poetry into something exceedingly modern. Celan also translated four poems by Marianne Moore, two by Frost, and one each by Donne, Marvell, and Housman, as well as Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," the later in accord with his own sense of word play and neologism.

There is almost no information regarding Celan's preoccupation with Emily Dickinson. In 1961 the German journal Die Neue Rundschau published eight poems, entitled "Acht Gedichte," by the American poet without the original English text, and without naming the sources (Dickinson). Two years earlier Celan's translation of "Because I could not stop for Death—" had appeared in Almanach S. Fischer 73 (1959), followed in 1963 by the publication of the translation of "At Half past Three" in Insel-Almanach. We do not know when Celan became acquainted with Dickinson's poems, or the length of time he spent translating her poems. As long as we are not acquainted with the original texts that Celan might have used, all speculations regarding the affinity between the two poets remain largely unconvincing. In her dissertation, Shira Wolosky discerned "a similarity between their techniques" in the sense that both employ a radically dislocated syntax (Wolosky). This she sees as...