Miszellaneen zu Celan: Entwürfe zu Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie by Yoshihiko Hirano (review)

Yoshihiko Hirano's extensive study of Paul Celan's poetry, essays, and translations is organized around four thematic principles, paired together under two broader categories. Plants (plantae) and animals (animalia) are grouped together as natural history (historia naturalis). Insanity (alienatio) and death (mors) are paired under anthropology (anthropologia). Hirano's choice of these four topics reflect Celan's own interests and recurring thematic constellations in his body of work.

Though it would appear that each of the four sections stands on its own, Hirano develops linkages among the four themes, describing a kind of natural history of plants and animals and human beings intrinsic to understanding Celan's poetry and work. Two "Überleitungen," for example, draw a connection between the plant and the animal sections and between the insanity and death sections, providing deeply layered multilingual investigations of Celan's work as a translator. These two sections are a good example of how Hirano weaves sources from multiple languages into his readings of Celan's works, moving among primary and secondary sources in German, French, English, and Hebrew as well as considering how Celan's poetry is deeply influenced by authors and philosophers such as Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Kafka, Hölderlin, Büchner, and Shakespeare, for example. In the first "Überleitung," Hirano compares Celan's translations of Shakespeare's Sonnet III with those by Stefan George and Karl Kraus, finding in Celan's choices the poet's particular emphasis on agrarian imagery and natural cycles present in Shakespeare's sonnet. Hirano notes, for example, Celan's choice to translate Shakespeare's "For where is she so fair whose uneared womb/Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry"? as: "Wo wäre eine, die veröden wollt,/kämst du daher, ihr Feld zu pflügen?" He notes that Celan's choice to use the word Feld in place of Shakespeare's womb leaves the metaphorical significance of the word Feld somewhat ambiguous and open to a different reading: "Die Metapher für Eros bei Shakespeare wird bei Celan in die Metonymie für Thanatos verwandelt" (116). The second "Überleitung" considers Celan's translation of ten poems by Emily Dickinson. Hirano's careful reading of Celan's translation of Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" considers the implications of Celan's Meridian-Rede for his particular interest in Dickinson's poetry. According to Hirano, Celan sees the shocking implications of Dickinson's poem, that a glorious personal immortality is subsumed in the coldness of eternity. As Celan writes in the Meridian-Rede, poetry is "Unendlichsprechung von lauter Sterblichkeit und Umsonst" (289).

In each of the sections devoted to the four main themes, the author takes into consideration a wide range of entry points into each poem. He carefully analyzes the linguistic intersections of Celan's extensive and personal vocabulary, using multiple reference works to fully expand the meaning of Celan's deliberate word choices. Perhaps most importantly, the author pays considerable attention to Celan's extensive use of cross-reference in his poetry by delving into Celan's personal library and finding there sources of interest to the poet that resonate in his poems. Further, Hirano provides plenty of social-historical context to ground Celan's work in post-Holocaust Europe and the poet's lifelong questioning and exploration of (his own) Jewish identity. Hirano's reading of "Zähle die Mandeln," for example, opens up a multivalent understanding of the word Mandeln that considers its linguistic source as well as its cross-linguistic potential, noting that the Hebrew word for almond tree translates into German as "Wachenbaum," linking the imagery of the "Mandelbaum" with not only the well-known properties of bitter almond but also with the waking metaphor in the poem (40). Hirano finds within this poem contemporary social-historical connections such as Celan's identification with and translations of poetry of the Jewish-Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who was murdered in a Russian concentration camp in 1938. Hirano...