Snow Part / Schneepart, and: Partie de neige (review)

Schneepart was the first publication from Paul Celan’s literary remains. It came out in 1971. But it wasn’t his first posthumous collection: Lichtzwang, the previous one, appeared not long after his death in April 1970, though every aspect of it apart from the final checking of proofs was attended to by Celan himself. Nearly the same is true of Schneepart – though he didn’t send it to his publishers, he completed a fair copy for Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, his wife, in September 1969, just before his only visit to Israel, and there is also a contemporary and near-identical typescript. This resembles the orderly care he dispensed on his other collections, and it had become his custom to prepare his volumes well in advance of sending them to press, but traces in these copies and elsewhere suggest some uncertainty or hesitation on Celan’s part as to whether the fifth and last cycle of poems belonged with the others. A notebook shows he at least considered putting some of them together with other poems which overlap chronologically with the latter phases of the composition of Schneepart as we have it, which was written between 16 December 1967 and 18 October 1968. They included poems marked ‘not to be published’; but they have been, and Ian Fairley translates some of them as a supplement in his book.

Now we have, appearing almost simultaneously, two translations of Schneepart entire, both with facing (or in the case of the French edition skulking-at-the-bottom-of-the-page-in-small-print) German. Ian Fairley is following up his complete version of Fadensonnen (as Fathomsuns, 2001), and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre his of Atemwende (as Renverse du souffle, 2003). To have the two side by side permits a double focus on the strangeness of Celan’s German, creating two different refractions of a language that is already in itself troubled and inflected by other tongues, and, spinning out a characteristic of language in general, intrinsically involved in acts of translation.

This begins with the title, Schneepart. Like the titles of all Celan’s collections from Die Niemandsrose onwards, it is a composite neologism in which concrete and abstract, a natural element and a human one, are put together to forge a largely poetological image (Sprachgitter, the name of the collection before Die Niemandsrose, provided the prototype, but was still an accepted word and lacked the natural element). Schneepart is made up of a German word and another originally borrowed from the French, not Celan’s borrowing only, but not one, either, that has quite established itself as a native in German, despite having been around since at least Luther’s time. Part, as both Lefebvre and Fairley tell us, means in modern German primarily the part played by an actor, or taken by a musician, and Fairley insists that its meaning is not ‘portion’ or ‘piece’. Schneepart goes uncomplicatedly and necessarily into Snow Part (into two words however, as Fairley notes, perhaps as a form of resistance against the inevitability – Fadensonnen remained one word, Fathomsuns, but could and probably should have been Threadsuns), and so this stricture needn’t matter, but Lefebvre, at the fork of part and partie, is forced to make a choice, and he implicitly concurs with Fairley by going for Partie de neige. This seems problematic not just because Partie de neige summons up a snowball fight or a skiing trip (by analogy with classe de neige), or perhaps something more like what is evoked in Derek Mahon’s poem ‘The Snow Party’ (by analogy with partie de chasse), but because Celan’s usage isn’t confined by current norms, and reaches down through the strata of words (where Part in German certainly has the main French sense of a share or portion), and, even more importantly in this case, obliquely out...