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in the poem carry both the connotations of the particular idiom they suggest and also the connotations of idiomatic language per se. These may include the sense that the deepest insights into language and behaviour are to be found in the simplest, most everyday language, a view in which Celan was likely to have been influenced by Brecht and especially by Benjamin’s discussion of Brecht’s use of the notion of “crude thinking”, or “plumpes Denken” (see Benjamin 1971: 59–60) in Dreigroschenroman (Threepenny Novel) (Brecht 1991), a novel which revolves around the life of beggars, as do other works by Brecht. Benjamin notes that “a thought must be crude, in order to be realised in action” (my translation; see Benjamin 1971: 60). The fact that idioms are altered suggests also the poet’s concern with the manipulation possible when language is not questioned, a concern implicit in Derrida’s comment, quoted above, about Celan’s strong sense of German as a language not to taken at face value.

      (2) The poem works on the basis of the conceptual metaphor PEOPLE ARE PLANTS. Conceptual metaphors (written in capitals to indicate mental rather than textual entities) are metaphors assumed to underlie all our thinking (see Lakoff/Johnson 1980) and to play an important role in literary texts (see Lakoff/Turner 1989: 67). Many of our common idioms and models of thought, especially to do with living and dying, are based on this conceptual metaphor: death as the grim reaper is a particularly potent one (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 291ff.). Celan’s great interest in plants is well-known (see Kraft 1986: 6), and in many of his poems, people are represented as flowers. In a striking earlier poem “Espenbaum” (Aspen Tree) (Celan 1952: 15) his mother is presented in contrast to a tree: the tree has a natural, and renewable, life-span, but his mother does not. In fact Celan never knew where his mother died exactly, and he had no grave to visit, so the loss, as is often the case in circumstances of war or disaster, was compounded by the psychological problems that the lack of knowledge of a grave can cause (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 204ff. on the importance of graves; cf. also Hamacher 1994: 221). In this poem, the corpses that have been placed upright are specifically addressed as trees. Here the image of the axe suggests the cutting down of corpses, perhaps of those hanged, and especially the intention to do so (“playing with axes”), and also the cutting down of those who are not actually corpses but the dead who have been made to act as the living, an interpretation suggested by the link between “aufrichten” (to put upright) and “richten” (to judge); see point 5 below.

      (3) Reading the poem we are aware that a traumatised post-Holocaust mind-style is being represented. We see this suggested by patterns of semantic and phonetic repetition. For example, “Axt … Prunk … blinkst” are connected by sound, and “Prunk” and “blinkst” also etymologically and semantically because “Prunk” is a derivation from “prangen” (to shine), which means the same as “blinken”, from which comes the second person verb “blinkst”. There are many other instances of sound repetition, such as “Sieben … Stunden; Nacht … wachen … Schatten; sieben … spielen … liegst”. “Obsessional, compulsive repetition” in Celan’s poems, according to Felman (1992: 29), suggests a way of evoking traumatic experience indirectly, rather than through simple linear narrative.

      (4) Pursuing connections of words that go beyond the surface of the text (as in the case of “Prunk” and “blinkst”) leads the translator as reader into the sort of thought processes that may be assumed to have informed the writing of the poem. We cannot, of course, know what these were, but we can see some of what preoccupied the poet, thus gaining insight into his particular concerns, aided by what we know, or can discover, from research into his background and the context in which he was writing. Studying linguistics in Paris in 1948 and 1949, Celan would have got to know the important work of Ferdinand de Saussure, published in 1916 (Saussure 1916) as well as Roman Jakobson’s work, especially that from the 1920s and 30s on linguistics and poetics (see Jakobson 1990: 541–552). Jakobson said that, contrary to the distinction Saussure made between synchrony (the present state of language) and diachrony (its history and future), in fact a language’s history interacts with its present state, just as possible choices interact with and reflect the one made, and existing words can exhibit parallelism with non-existent ones (Rudy 1997: xiii).

      Here, for example, we might note that “blinkst” in the final line of the poem is related to the English words “black”, “blank” and “blink”, to the German words “blau” (blue) and “Blei” (lead) – another word of great importance in “Todesfuge”, where it is juxtaposed with “blau” – and to the French word “blanc” (white). All these words have their origin in Indogermanic “*bhel” (shine), as Celan, with his great interest in etymology, would have known. We see that, etymologically, white and black are the same, a fact that cannot have escaped Celan’s notice.

      Etymology was important for Celan in part because he was interested in words, their origins, and the ways they naturally change or can be unnaturally made to change. But there is often a sense of obsessiveness about the etymological connections, as though knowing history can help us escape it, which gives an insight into a traumatised mind.

      (5) Etymology is only one way in which words can be linked, and meanings, especially to the traumatised mind, can be seen to be contaminated by connotations. There are thus links of other types that lurk behind the poem. The word “aufgerichtet” in “aufgerichteter Leichen” (of corpses placed upright) is a word that triggers many such connections, especially because it is foregrounded in the poem, that is, it draws attention to itself by being an unexpected word (see Wales 2001: 157). One might expect “auferstanden” (resurrected), but why would corpses be placed upright rather than being raised? One reason might be because they are hanged, a common practice during the Holocaust, both inside concentration camps and in towns and cities. But the word “aufgerichtet” suggests “richten” (to judge), “hinrichten” (to execute) and “Richtbeil” (executioner’s axe), especially given the image of axes in the poem. Though the word “hinrichten” (to execute) does not actually occur in the poem, we read it because of the connotations of the image of hanging, the connotations of judging, the use of the word “axe” and the word “fällst” in the following line, from “fällen”, which means both “to fell”, as in “to fell a tree”, or, in keeping with the conceptual metaphor, “to cut down a person”, and also “to pass” as in “to pass judgement” (ein Urteil fällen). The word “Fallbeil”, a guillotine, is also brought to mind. But the corpses in this poem seem less those of the unavenged dead and more those of their oppressors, who are morally dead, but are given an important role in society. This is a reading which seems natural if we know of Celan’s fear that the problems of the past were hidden, that the oppressors had not been brought to justice, and that, specifically, he could be and was subject to “betrayal” (Hamburger 2007: 412) by publishers who published the work of those who had been complicit. In his late poem, “Wolfsbohne” (Wolf’s Bean), he speaks of those who “permit vileness to slander me” (in Hamburger’s translation 2007: 403) and expresses the fear of having shaken hands with those who had committed evil (Hamburger 2007: 401).

      Having taken these 5 points, and many others, into account in my reading of Celan’s poem for translation, I have built up a picture of a poetic mind-style that reflects a mind obsessed with guilt and punishment, with inaction, with the dead and their ambivalence, and with language itself. Many of the thoughts and considerations that the language of the poem gives rise to lead beyond the text itself. Re-creating the poem in a translation involves allowing these thoughts and considerations to be possible for new readers. That is, creative reading must be possible for them, too.

      4 The Creative Reading of the Translated Poem

      If a process of creative reading for translation has informed the writing of the translated poem, there is hope its readers will be able to engage in a similar way with the poem before them. Furthermore, creative reading of the translated text means that the reader is aware there was an original that gave rise to it. To make such awareness more likely, background for the original poem needs to be supplied so that the new readers’ cognitive context contains at least some elements that were likely to have formed part of the cognitive context of the original readers. I can only

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