I found the following in Pierre Joris's A Nomad Poetics:
6. BAROCCO: We will write in foreign languages (real or made-up ones) in order to come to the realization that all languages are foreigh. And those that are not are uninteresting in their self-reflecting egoism. All live languages are creolized by what Edouard Glissant has called the chaos-world. The first need thus is to have done with the prison-house of the mother ongue, i.e., why should one have to write in the mummy/daddy language, why should that oedipal choice be the only possible or legitimate one, why should it not be my own choice, that moment of one's discovery of the other, that moment when it is our body/mind that speaks and not that of our progenitors. The mother tongue will become the lover's tongue, the other's tongue. A nomadic language of affects, of free lines of erotic flight, that break the triangular (the strongest of shapes, as Bucky Fuller has shown us) strictures of the Freudian scène de famille and of its sociopolitical macroprojection, the nation-state.
The night I met Adam Zagajewski, he told me I should write more in French (I being an arrogant and snotty very young poet at the time, freshly off the plane, replied that I was more interested in writing poetry in many languages; I was also starstruck that night, having seen Adam on French television 2 years before). Somewhere in his book A Defense of Ardor, Adam also writes that irony (& by extension language experiments) is a fine tool to punch holes into the walls of language, but that ultimately, if you punch too many holes, there is no language left. One's language, Adam writes, is something precious that should be preserved and revered.

We have two different positions about language and poetry, and it is evident that I veer more toward Joris's position (even though, I have nothing but respect for Adam), since I write mostly in not-French. I feel that Adam's position is somewhat problematic. Why should there be any prescription about the language a poem is written in? And could this be a more "liberal" version of the SoQ's imperative (oh, I hate this label) that a poem should be written in a "natural language"?

I am not quite sure whether Adam really likes Paul Celan or not. In DoA, Adam admits that Celan might be too experimental for him, but that can be forgiven because of his tragic life. Once again, we are tying one's poetry with their biography, which could excuse Adam's attitude toward language-in-poetry. Adam comes from a time when Polish was under assault from Soviet authorities (again, from DoA and from Two Cities). And we see the current crop of Polish poets much more willing to experiment.

But I still don't think that history should determine the language we write in (which it does anyway) and whether one should or should not experiment. For one, one cannot completely abandon their mother tongue. Heidegger talks about a Erdeverbindung somewhere in his collection of essays Holzwege. Even if I am writing in English, my writing is still inflected by French, the same way that Celan's German is inflected by Yiddish. This is just an excuse for me to quote my favorite Celan:
Nah, im Aortenbogen,
im Hellblut:
das Hellwort.

Mutter Rahel weint nicht mehr.
Rübergetragen
alles Geweinte.

Still, in den Kranzarterien,
unumschnürt:
Ziw, jenes Licht.
Which is also an excuse for me to post gratuitously an image to Paul Celan (Jessica! I changed my mind, I want to be Paul Celan when I grow up).

But actually, in spite of all my gratuitousness, Celan poses the problem of the mother tongue, he being a Rumanian whose mother's tongue was German. And Joris and I are both from Strasbourg, in a region that has always been somewhat trilingual (Alsatian, French, German). Moreover, Joris has lived most of his adolescence in a country (Luxembourg) that has three official languages (Luxembourgian, German, French), while I ... well, let's not even get there.

Somewhere in here, I think I wanted to talk about Levinas and my usual attempts to articulate some form of poetics around him the way Krzysztof Ziarek has done with Celan in his book Inflected Language.

But then I started babbling, getting distracted and well, there was Celan and how can you not love Paul Celan?

Comments

François Luong said…
ronny is talking about walter benjamin?

ok, ridiculous monikers applied to KaBLOW!sts:
-Gelsingery
-Jonny (J.P. Fadely)
-Towny (Tawrin)
-Creamy Berk
-Cici (Claire)
-Cici (Clare)
-Chichi (Chall)
-Jessie (Smith)
-Johnny (Sakkis ... wait, everyone already calls him Johnny)
-Allie (Mr. Al Cohen)
-Frenchie
Someone help me find a silly monicker for Craig ... and there is one KaBLOW!st I've forgotten about. Forgive me, it is early and I've barely started on my cup of coffee.

Now, "Buckminster" is kinda long. I'd write "Bucky" too. I'm all about using foreign languages that use honorific verb tenses, as long as it's not Japanese. Ending every sentence with "-ru de gozaimasu" is kind of a mouthful too. And it's not even the highest honorific form.
Eric said…
Last night at the Armantrout/Browne/Welish reading, it was brought to my attention that I refer to everyone as Mr.__ or Ms.___, which is pretty awesome.

Referring to people by their last names is somewhat akin to speaking in a foreign language. First names are the Mother Tongue.

I am all for using language to maximize the distance between me and the world.
John Sakkis said…
francois,

for poetics/ and Levinas check out Benjamin Hollander's Vigilance (Beyond Baroque Books)...included is an addendum discussion between me and Ben where he outlines his approach to Levinas in his long poem Levinas And The Police...

also, you should order ACTS 8/9 edited by Hollander...a special issue devoted to Paul Celan that's really a treasure trove of critical thinking on Celan by contemporary French and American poets/ scholars...

both are available from Small Press Distribution...
François Luong said…
e: the night i met adam, i was referring to him as "mr. zagajewski" (monsieur zagajewski). even after he told me to call him "adam," i kept calling him "mr. zagajewski."

j: oh, more poets trying to occupy a levinasian space! i thought that frank bidart, claudia rankine and i were the only ones. thanks for the tip.
John Sakkis said…
well, hollander's been occupying the "levinasian space" for quite sometime...and as far as i've read...the most successfully...

are you a friend of claudia's?...if so, tell her i said hello...

johnny
François Luong said…
unfortunately, i am not friends with claudia. i've met her maybe twice, and we've never been formally introduced. i remember how the first time, she, michael dumanis & tony hoagland were panicking because they had lost d.a. powell. claudia is not in houston anymore thought. on the other hand, she directed the theses of my friends todd dillard and amanda auchter.
John Sakkis said…
not in houston anymore? news to me...where'd she go?
François Luong said…
not sure where she went. there were rumors about it before awp, michael dumanis confirmed them & now she is gone. kimiko hahn is also gone, and i hear that nick flynn might also leave.
John Sakkis said…
just spoke with claudia...she took a job at pomona...so, she'll be in LA later this year...which rocks for us california folk/ which esp. rocks for the SoCal scene...
François Luong said…
john: ask her about the time she lost da powell when he came to read at UH!!!
Aaron Lowinger said…
what evidence is there that Celan's German is inflected with Yiddish?

I don't see that, but the poem you copied here is among my favorites in that I always recall the first few lines whenever I think of Celan. I've always found similar intensity and even content in Dickinson.

Another line that sticks : es sind
noch Lieder zu singen jenseits der Menschen.
François Luong said…
aaron: well, in the poem i posted, mostly the word "ziv." and also his tendency to make words, like "Sternwürtzel" in the Heidegger poem for example.
Aaron Lowinger said…
ziv is hebrew, a name for the light of Shechinah, very mystic

and word-compounding thing is very Germanic, but not necessarily Yiddish
François Luong said…
aaron: thanks for the clarification on "ziv." Felstiner has an essay on the translation of that poem in John Biguenet's The Craft of Translation, but does not explain the meaning of "ziv."

as for word-compounding, my bad. i should have thought about similar uses in nietzsche, husserl and heidegger.
Aaron Lowinger said…
Felstiner does describe it in his biography of Celan, which is an excellent book.

Felstiner has a poet's radiant appreciation of poetry, his biography of Celan is glowing and reverent. Creeley deserves such a biography.

His translations are good. With Celan, I like all of his major translators: Hamburger, Felstiner, Joris, all have their idiosyncrasies but do admirable jobs. Joris has the edge.

Do you know of any serious work on Celan's own translations? He translated between something like 9 languages. I get a similar sense in Finnegans Wake as in Celan, that the way the chief(native) language is used is meant to represent an open door between languages.

As Maimonides suggests in the introduction to Guide of the Perplexed

I shall begin to mention the terms whose true meaning, as intended in every passage according to its context, must be indicated. This, then, will be a key permitting one to enter places the gates to which were locked. And when these gates are opened and these places are entered into, the souls will find rest therein, the eyes will be delighted, and the bodies will be eased of their toil and labor.
Aaron Lowinger said…
ziv

jenes licht




what incredible hope
François Luong said…
ugh ... so many reading recommendations, so little room in my abode. i may have to get rid of my comic book collection. or find a larger place.

out of all of celan's translators, i agree that joris has the edge.

i am afraid to read celan's translations, or about them, for fear i might be discouraged.

i am not sure what you mean by "chief (native) language," since it is difficult to talk about a native language when it comes to celan (forgive, it's late, i've just met kho'i). i think you can open a door by writing in the language of the other (cf. Joris's A Nomad Poetics)

Funny that you mention Maimonides, i have a philosophy date a week from now to chat about him, Ibn Sana (Avicenne to us French people and I guess Avicennus to you Americans)
Aaron Lowinger said…
Avicenna

native-language is typically the first language(s) you learn as child, and Celan's family was German-speaking. Muttersprache is a good word because it has mother in it. So this always seems to be lurking whenever Celan uses "mother" But he was immersed in languages from early in life as a result of being his cultural geographic situation. I think he wrote a few things in Romanian right after the war and wrote exculsively in German after that.

In big L literature native language seems to me to be the language the writer feels most comfortable in.
François Luong said…
i know that celan's mother spoke german and taught him the language, but the introduction to joris's selections does not say anything about his father. which, with the early romanian poems, leads me to believe he was raised bilingual.

and we may say that celan was a german writer, but he was never accepted as such by germans during his lifetime.

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