Introduction

Jean Daive’s Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan tells of the friendship of the author with Paul Celan, their collaboration in translating each other, their walks, their conversations, their tensions, their silences, and, discreetly, of Celan’s crises and final suicide in 1970.

Part memoir, part prose-poem, it is told through often lyrical fragments. It is autumn. Autumn in Paris. Autumn of ideas. Incessant walks under the dome of chestnut leaves rather than “under the dome” of the Académie Fran�aise, to which Celan was never elected. Paris, the Luxembourg Garden, the Square of the Contrescarpe. And, finally, the question: who are we, and how do we read the unreadable world?

The book blurs the time of these encounters and walks (1965 -1970) with the present of the author writing, 20 years later, on a mediterranean island. He thinks and writes about Celan, about the women that led him to the poet, about other encounters that take place under the sign of Celan.

Under the Dome is an intimate portrait of Celan in his last difficult and increasingly dark years. It is also the encounter of two poets, each with his demons. The encounter of two poets for whom it is a matter of life and death to work language into a grid, a Sprachgitter, that could hold the world.

Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan is volume 5 of the 7-volume work, Condition d’infini.

Rosmarie Waldrop

from Under the Dome: A Memoir of Paul Celan, POL, 1996

translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

A little later, we have winter. It’s snowing on Boulevard Saint-Michel. Dense snow is falling, and we can’t see one meter ahead. The dense white swept by whirlwinds makes walking impossible. We advance in the heart of a hermetically sealed ball.
— In all this snow, the only thing lacking is a white parachute. That alone could help us. Can you imagine, Jean Daive, a parachute opening and floating down through this snow with a man.
— A man.
— A man at the end of his parachute and of our immobile fall.
He laughs. We’re slipping. And he laughs.

I take on delivering four photos of Paul Celan and copy the last.

We are supposed to meet for coffee Rue des Grands-Augustins, at A. du B.’s — which whom he has lunch. I surprise Paul on an impressive Proven�al chair — a throne? — peeling a peach whose juice runs all over him who’s scared of so much abundance. I see his hands embarrassed, his lips the color of peach, his eyes laughing, knife and fork crossed, his hazel eyes, the wrinkles on his forehead and his embarrassment like a sugar cube on the table.

A first portrait. The light really beautiful. He is waiting for me on the sidewalk of Rue d’Ulm. Against the light, I surprise him with his head inclined, listening, his ear glued to an invisible wall: time. He is examining time.

Toward the end of the afternoon, in the shade of a chestnut tree, he says:
— Today we cannot talk. But I wonder how we could not talk.

He holds out his hand, and a golden light falls on our approaching fingers. The light disturbs the distance about to decrease to zero, a handshake, golden yellow. He goes on:
— As soon as we talk the world seems to lose some of its solidity, and it’s this move toward loss that interests us. But we cannot always face it. It requires an availability that burns us. What do you think, Jean Daive?

I repeat a conversation I heard recently. The story is simple:
A designer has a certain number of advertising spots to sell. A client buys a space, and the designer closes the deal by formulating: the client has been millimetered.
I go on:
— According to you, we could possibly millimeter availability. But do you think you could millimeter the sister’s garden?
— The sister’s garden is out of reach, and a millimeter would not be like a file in a wet cloth.
— And man?
— He may give in. Sometimes. Precisely when man becomes the client of the millimeter. But if you put man into the system of the world, the usefulness of the millimeter is naturally reduced to nothing, isn’t it.
— And the Surveyor?
— Yes, but he’s gone to a field which isn’t usually the meter. The Surveyor has to face God, that is, the metaphysical millimeter.
— Checkable.
— To be checked and always uncheckable because Franz Kafka has us read the superposition of yes and no, of the possible and the impossible. Kafka does not write with two hands, but with two pencils in one and the same hand.
— Kafka walks with the Surveyor?
— Kafka walks with the absence of God, hence with the Surveyor. Kafka sleeps and walks. I think I already told you: one night in London, in my hotel room, going to bed, I saw God under the door, a streak of light. I immediately thought of Kafka. There is a God in Kafka and, don’t forget, there is a sister.

I feel the breath of the chestnut tree and its sweetness against us. The air is extremely mild as is the light. I look at our two grayish-pink shadows. We walk on.

Late summer afternoon. Washed-out light through the office windows. Washed-out light and the timbreless sound of a drop splashing on tiles. The drops persist, insist, keep falling. A faucet is leaking, fretting our concentration. Today I superimpose the faucet that does not hold back all the water and the plunge that perhaps dreams of water held in an abyss where the water’s sound is joined by what silence can no longer hold back: life. Could a faucet be an absolute observation post or, rather, could a plunge?

I would like to juxtapose faucet and sugar tongues. Maybe I’ll come back to this one day.

— What?
— You are my torment.

I dial the Rue d’Ulm number:
DAN 07.25. Extension 31-30. Immediately I hear a man sob and weep. This man is crying. I really have reached Paul’s office. I listen: he supplicates. I call: Paul Celan. He does not reply. I tell Gisèle.

The Contrescarpe is a village. Grass on the sidewalks. Moss between the cobblestones. Flowers in the windows, and curtains with little red dots. I walk up Rue Lacépède. The top is a few meters away, a few steps. Then I’ll see the sea.

— Have you seen Gisèle? asks Paul Celan. You called her?
— Yes, I called her and have seen her.
— What is she doing? What did she say? You told her that we had seen each other?
— Yes, I told her we had seen each other and were going to see each other today.
— Ah. It’s good you told her. You’ll tell her that we’ve seen each other, won’t you?
— Yes, I’ll tell her.
— Call me after you called her and we’ll fix a date. Are you free next Saturday?

Place de la Contrescarpe. Our village. We’re sitting on the terrace of La Chope. Ed on my right, a bit frightened of what she has to tell me.

In the distance, in one of the streets of the Contrescarpe I notice Edmond Jabès. He regularly walks for hours in the neighborhood. He walks at first in larger and larger circles, then in smaller and smaller, shorter ones. Hand behind his back. His circles have in fact two centers: the Place de la Contrescarpe and the building in Rue de l’Epée de Bois where he lives.

One evening Ed comes back with her shopping bag full of packages and says:
— I’ve seen him. He circles.

We are side by side in the same café, the Royal Panthéon. Paul asks:
— How did you translate Heimat? Heimat is an untranslatable word. And does the concept even exist? It is a human fabrication: an illusion.

His look and lips sometimes beseeching. More than one entreaty at the bottom of his eyes.

Paul and the neuroleptics.

We are caught in the trap. We look at each other. We are caught in the trap because to measure it is not yet to live it.

The chestnuts are falling. They roll at our feet. Muffled detonations. Far off. It is evening. Autumn. The gleam as they roll and bounce. Spiral depths on the sidewalk.
Like mouths opening. We’re not talking. Paul Celan remains silent, he almost dances among the implosions he lightly steps over. We move in the poem.

I sometimes confuse snow and cotton balls.

I dial Paul Celan’s number at Rue de Longchamp: POI 39.63. With beating heart.

Under the chestnut trees of Avenue des Gobelins, Paul Celan stops, looks me in the eye and says:
— We are together, you see. We are walking together. It is strange, isn’t it, because our geographies, our age, our paths are so different. I was born in Czernowitz. You were born in Bonsecours-lès-Valenciennes. The world will remember it because it always remembers poetry. Sooner or later.

One snowy winter afternoon we are walking in the park of Schšnbrunn, amorously. Greta and I. Suddenly, at the turn of a path, I find myself nose to nose with a block of cement. It’s a pedestal. It carries a sculpture. Greta notices that I am disconcerted:
— Don’t be frightened. It’s Aeneas carrying his father.

I say to Ed that Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, and I, we all walk with our hands behind our back.
119 — Yes, I had noticed and understood that you were all young graybeards!

I dream that I fell asleep for a few minutes, exhausted, and that I am startled awake. I am on an unknown Greek island. Blue sea. Blue sky and white houses under a terrible sky. A path. A donkey comes toward me. He carries a Christmas tree whose needles seem to be painted green. His eyes are deep and gentle. His smile, knowing. I recognize Greta’s eyes. The donkey says to me: “I pine for you.” His nonchalant shaking of the tree makes the green paint drop off the needles which are yellow metal. The Christmas tree is of gold. My hand pets the donkey’s gray coat.

Taormina. I take pictures. I get lost in the corridors of the Hotel San Domenico. Suddenly I stand in front of Andreï Tarkovski. In the dark. His hazel eyes are those of Paul Celan.

We look at each other for a long time. Great silence. Stubborn, absolute silence.

The next afternoon. After the projection of Solaris he is sitting at a table in one of the salons of the Hotel San Domenico. It is warm. Dusk. His skinny body. His tortured face, frightening. An absent look, resigned. I stare at him. He turns toward me. Smiles.

We go to Sicily, to Taormina. We cross the Calabrian countryside. We stop en route. For lunch. The place is shady and calm. Ed puts her two arms on the table, then her head. Ed puts her two arms on the table. They form the letter W. She has fallen asleep. It is noon.

We go to Sicily, to Taormina. I feel it is urgent and do not understand why. We cross the Calabrian countryside. The heat is terrible. Crushing. We stop en route. For Lunch. The place is calm. Shady. Ed puts her two arms on the table. Ed puts her two arms on the table, then her head. her crossed arms form the letter W. She has fallen asleep. It is noon. I wait. The urgency is still there. I am very worried.

We are at Taormina. We are driving. A poster on an electric pole with the glue still wet announces an hommage to Andreï Tarkovski during the Film Festival.

In the car driving across Taormina, a recollection. One stormy afternoon, a peasant takes his donkey inside a chapel above the Aegean sea and lights two candles. The donkey looks at the chaos outside; he keeps it at bay.

It just dawned on me why it felt so urgent. To go down. Down. Down. Why Sicily? Why Taormina? Why down?

I see Andreï Tarkovski again. I see again The Mirror. I see again Stalker. I see again Andreï Roublev.

I go to his press conference in a salon of the Hotel San Domenico. A crucified body. Frightening silence. He answers the questions like a ghost. “Do you have problems with the Soviet authorities?” — “None.”

Taormina. I take pictures. The blue sky. The pink hydrangeas. The sumptuous stairs. I get lost in the corridors of the Hotel San Domenico. I go on. I search. No, I wait. A face. No. Suddenly Andreï Tarkovski. Haggard. His face illuminated. His eyes burning. Again: Paul Celan. Toward me. And his eyes with brownish-auburn reflections.

We look at each other. The dark is heavy with the crushing heat outside. We go toward each other. Slowly. He without a sound. Me with apprehension. We pass each other. Great silence. His whole body clenched. He cannot lift his eyes toward the sky. I cannot lift my eyes toward the ceilling. We stare at each other. He smiles at me. “He shall go in and out no other way, writes Saint John.
Every day I go to the Hotel San Domenico. The festival projects its films in a great red hall with drawn curtains. I see again Andreï Roublev. I see again The Mirror. He is there. Absent. He is there amid an absent audience. Five spectators. Then four. Three. Two spectators. Andreï Tarkovski leads me out. He leads me in.

I surrender to the fire. I surrender to time. I interrupt nothing. I watch Andreï Roublev. I watch Stalker. He films the earth and what the soil keeps of space when the wet sky pours down on us.

God sings the waters left to the emotion of the earth.

I run into Andreï Trakovski alone in the salon of the Hotel San Domenico. The curtains are drawn. The halflight protects us. A magnetic field holds him in the center of an impenetrable force. He smiles at me. “We have to change our lives,” he says to me in English “because people go away without finding harmony, become curt and distressed, and no longer find peace in front of the always new beauty of the universe.”

“People pine for the true life, and I don’t want to live any more,” he says to me.

“Behind the drawn curtains is the blue sea. It is witness to our efforts toward the spiritual, toward the unknowable.”

The Hotel San Domenico is an ancient monastery, and the rooms are the old monks’ cells lined up along the long corridors.

Outside the sea is burning. It is our stake. Behind a table in the red salon sits Andreï Tarkovski. He is the level.

To approach is to move away. The origin remains obscure. I just photographed in full daylight a lit electric bulb.

I want to see again the corridors of the San Domenico and look for Andreï Tarkovsky.

The reason why I came here is equally the reason why I came into the world: Andreï Tarkovski, Paul Celan and …

We know only the outside of the truth, and possibly its system. Not knowledge.

A corridor is a path. Without lit electric bulb. Without direction. A tunnel dug into the dark. Without flames, without incandescence, without oak, without voice, without sun, without necessity, without precision, without wall.

Walking through the corridors I construct out of need a scene in my mind: Andreï Tarkovski. With angels, visions, curtains going up, dead souls returning, dreams, rooms, libraries, children, burning houses, black suns, gray dogs, naked men.

“In John, there is no mention that time ran backward. In John, there is no mention that the sun was darkened.”

In a corridor in the Hotel San Domenico I run across Andreï Tarkovski. His deep eye. Its orbit grows large and I lay my head down in it because the hollow is dug by St. John’s head in the cave on Patmos where he writes the Apocalypse. Bluff coast. Facing the blue sea. Sea. Grotto. Cave. Orbit. Corridor. Us. John looks at Andreï Tarkovski, an icon. And I pass by. I dream that the gray dogs gard us.

I am there behind the rock. I am behind the volcano. A simple upright giant. I think of the Russian I heard spoken in the salon of the San Domenico. Then of what Paul told me:
— I was no longer writing. I could no longer write. One day in Brest, seeing a Russian flag out in the ocean I saluted the land of Russia with my hand. That was a jolt. The poetry came back, right …

Why would a ceiling be a source of hot water? A bathtub turned over? Mmmm … I am in the bedroom. I photograph the phosphorescent toothbrush.

Ed opens her big black eyes. She smiles. I ask her to pronounce slowly SPI. NO. ZA. She smiles.

Not a breath of air. We are reduced to inert lumps under a crushing sun. The volcano watches. Ed is crying on the beach. The world is a theorem that nobody wants to prove any more, and I have the feeling the sacred places of the earth are burning before my eyes.

We walk on the beach. We walk in fire. Nothing gives any sign.

I tremble before life. The true laws cannot be known. How weigh tears?

At night a woman terrorizes me in my dreams. I wake up frightened. She barks.

This woman comes back at night in my other dreams. She strikes me. Bullies me. Beats me. She neutralizes me. I am afraid. I am afraid of myself. I wake up. Gray like a dog. I moan. My gums are bleeding.

The next night she makes me go into a submerged chapel. I am a dog whose peasant-master is called Andreï Tarkovski. I bark under water.

One Thursday afternoon Paul Celan drags me almost by force to a movie house in the Quartier Latin. He wants me to discover Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors by Sergeï Paradjanov, who on April 25, 1975 will be sentenced to five years in prison for “traffic in ikons and homosexual practices.” The film has great power over us.

The scorching sun on the beach of Taormina. I walk toward the volcano. I see again Paul in the Ecole Normale in Rue d’Ulm. In the middle of the classroom that serves as his office and sometimes bedroom — he has permanently set up a camp bed near the entrance — he turns in circles, then walks up and down. He has something to tell me. Suddenly he turns to me:
— I have seen Andreï Roublev. It’s very long …
— It’s very beautiful …
— Yes … But Andreï Tarkovski takes the time to tell all. And I think he will one day pay for it, with his life. He should pay for this. Man always pays for this.

Ed in tears, as if somebody in her family had died, washing her hair in the bedroom. The light is black. And the water she pours from a pitcher is black.

The hot water of the building comes from the ceiling.

On a terrace, a little girl on her father’s shoulders: a polyphony.

“Who multiplies knowledge multiplies pain.”

Sumptuous stairs, corridors, thujas, palmtrees, fuchsias, tamarinds, pink hydrangeas. Sun. And the volcano watches. In spite of it all an end-of-the-world landscape. In spite of it all we are eating icecream. I photograph the sea with my first polaroid, and it is black. I photograph a palmtree, and it is out of focus. Ah--

— Why am I hurting and why do I suffer?
— What?
— You are my torment.

“Lord, send me a Master.”

We must not mix up times whereas I found myself simply in the time of those who talked to me.

I look at the Aetna. I recognize the gray dog of my dreams.

When I visit Paul Celan locked up in the psychiatric hospital of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, I notice a strange Russian church that I find again seventeen years later on the occasion of the death of the film-maker: Andreï Tarkovski is in fact buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

Paris. Ed is at the wheel of her yellow Volkswagen and circles dangerously around the Etoile without really deciding where to go, causing general anxiety, that is to say to CRJ in back and me in front. We talk, we circle. We circle. Once. Twice. A third time. We are nervous about her determined indecision that I am familiar with, and which means that she does not want to drive down the Avenue Victor-Hugo. Suddenly CRJ bursts into a huge laugh:
— In the next life, I’ll be able to say that I’ll remember it, this life here.

One afternoon, at the terrace of La Chope, we watch Edmond Jabès approaching, then watch him disappear around the turn of a street. He comes back into view, he moves away. He turns, widening his circle. I am sitting there without moving and stare at a man imprinting his — senseless — rotation on us. I stare at his dance as I stared at Paul’s in his office.
I tell Ed of my fascination:
— Basically there are those who turn in circles and those who think they don’t.
129— Sh …
— Only the Jews know that they turn in circles or that they don’t because …
— Sh …
— Because they know in order to turn in circles you have to be upright, but it is also possible to remain sitting …
— Sh …
— The Jews turn in circles for the sake of circling or the Jews don’t turn in circles fo the sake of …
— Listen … Be quiet!
— In any case, only the Jews do not turn in circles for the sake of turning in circles because they respond to the call of a universal metabolism. They all turn at the same time by not turning.
— Listen … Leave the Jews alone.
— Or else the Jews turn in order to grind a condition of the infinite. You can imagine what an invisible grinder they hold in their hands.
— I forbid you to go on talking to me about those who turn in circles in order not to!

Ten years after Paul Celan’s death we are walking along the Seine on a beautiful spring afternoon, Joerg Ortner and I. No. I must tell our day differently. Joerg comes by very early to see me. The morning passes joyfully, and suddenly I suggest strongly that we go out and, before we reach the quays of the Seine, pass by the church of Saint-Eustache whose strangeness has always troubled me. It is mild. We walk. Joerg is on my right. He begins:
— You know why you are troubled by Saint-Eustache? Because its strangenes, its construction, its rhythm, is you. Jean, sometimes we stand at so complicated and so difficult a crossroad that we stand still for a long time, waiting. And if you do not talk to someone, if you do not address a prayer to someone, you are trapped in a dead-end in the middle of the crossroad. Listen. Are you listening to me? One day, the architect of Saint-Eustache is moping in a café at the market of Les Halles. Imagine him facing a calf’s head. He moves a spoon around in his vinaigrette. He eats and is not hungry. He must make a decision. Nothing is working out. How can he go on building when he, the architect, lives in the most terrible confusion? He calls up Palladio in Italy and explains his problem. Palladio replies: “I’m coming” and hangs up. The next morning the two architects discuss matters in the same café at Les Halles. Palladio draws on the paper tablecloth the fa�ade of Saint-Eustache with its extraordinary rhythm of columns, then leaves. It’s an ingenious idea because each column seems to be the only one, but always hides another and a third, and you have to understand how the columns add or subtract themselves. It’s like your work. If you arrive before the fa�ade and, continuing to walk, look at it sideways, if you mark the farthest column, the column unmultiplies in this rhythm: 1. Then 1, 2. Then 1, 2, 3. Then 1, 2, 3, 4. Continuing to walk around the church you perceive the infinite and start counting it. You understand? And the most ingenious part is that this rhythm of columns is habitable. You said so one day: Saint-Eustache is an example of a habitable fa�ade, of a vertical holy place that is habitable. This means that a repeated column that multiplies the way God unmultiplies can communicate a habitable space. You understand? But why am I saying all this? There was a crossroad. No, I wanted to talk about you. No. Perhaps it’s the Seine that pushed me to say all this … No. Ah yes. It’s because we never talk about Paul Celan since his death.

Again Taormina. It’s evening. The palm trees, the fuchsias and the sea, the long yellow wall of a moviehouse from the fifties where the Festival is projecting Stalker. It is hot. The room is really beautiful with its red velvet seats, and the projection begins. The room, where the child with the yellow scarf sits, trembles. The eyes of the child at the end of the table suddenly flash. Desire? Will? Awareness? A glass also trembles that she stares at, bending her head. The child keeps silent. She keeps her silence as she keeps the glass and the world trembling. Relief comes down, cooling our foreheads. Air comes into the theater, and I see a starry sky reaching as far down as the child who affirms her silence by keeping to herself alone language, that is the trembling of things. God trembles, she seems to tell us, and looking up I see a sliding roof open and push its rectangle into the starry sky. The sky invades the theater and the characters of the film. While I watch the glass trembling on the table I start spontaneously to mumble Letter XII: ”Which kind of infinite cannot be divided into parts or can have no parts, and which, on the contrary, has parts, and that without contradiction. Which kind of Infinite can be conceived as greater than another Infinite, without any complication, and which cannot be so conceived.”

The world communicates a trembling, but we too tremble. We speak and we are trembling. The glass trembles. “The question of the Infinite has always seemed insoluble to all, because they did not distinguish between what must be infinite because of its own nature or in virtue of its definition, and that which has no limits, not indeed in virtue of its essence but in virtue of its cause. And also because they did not distinguish between that which is called infinite because it has no limits, and that whose parts we cannot equate with or explain by any number, although we know its maximum and minimum. And lastly because they did not distinguish between that which we can only understand but not imagine, and that which we can also imagine.”

Who are you, Spinoza? You transmit a trembling to our night that goes on, and
a shakey glass upsets our peace.

We are walking, and the shade of the trees covers us with a dome, wherein we move and wherein we direct our words. Paul manipulates words while looking, on the imaginary screen of trees he always keeps his eyes on, at his mind’s operating field, enlarged or not according to a causal scale that I can sometimes anticipate.

The sky is there, always there for the taking, he thinks, across the chestnut foliage.

Huge bouquet of leaves with the sky moving across. A matter of seeing, not taking.

Paradise is there:
— I’m entitled to it, he repeats, I’m entitled.

Today Gisèle is selling the apartment in Rue de Longchamp, on the fifth floor without elevator. I see again the living room with Paul’s desk, his bookcase with its peculiar arrangement, and the dining room that serves as the couple’s bedroom.

She moves close to my place, Rue Montorgueil.

I am critical of André du Bouchet, sometimes severe. Extremely. Paul bows his head. He knows and does not want to hear the arguments. I don’t let go; he smiles. We are in Rue d’Ulm or under the chestnut trees of the Avenue des Gobelins or on the Place de la Contrescarpe or in the gardens of the Palais Royal. I insist. He waits out the storm. One day he says to me very calmly:
— André is someone who knows the Littré by heart, he knows the definitions of every word.
And I reply, out of patience:
— But that’s not where the problem is …

It is, however, where the problem is, because the man who lives and entertains all the tensions of a wavering language turns from almost biological need toward the man who locks words in their most radical definitions.

Example: hour — twenty-fourth part of a day.

I especially go back to the remark of somebody I love: words are part of our metabolism.

Contraction of language.

How contract language? Can a definition contract, constrain language?

The stages (“I have to pitch my tent”) or stanzas (“I hold my breath”) of Paul:
The Bukovina— the work camp — Bucarest — Vienna — Paris.

Rue de Longchamp and variants — Rue d’Ulm and variants — Hospitalization and variants — the Seine.

I look at his immense forehead and his ironical smile:
— I am lecturer in German at the Ecole Normal, right …

What does he lay on this “right …,” this n’est-ce pas … that keeps coming tirelessly, and that he attenuates, weakens, from fear? There is great fear there and terror, as if he were aware that he can and no longer wants to convince one last time.

Hands in the pockets of his charcoal jacket, he walks on my left.

It’s the autumn of leaves and rakes in the Luxembourg gardens:
— There was immediatlely … from the publication of “Todesfuge” on, a misunderstanding with Germany. When I went for a reading, right, they all came to meet me at the station, the Germans and the others, the journalists, the Jews and rabbis. Imagine, Jean Daive … the rabbis came to wait for and welcome me … Hosanna, right … Germany’s bad conscience had finally found someone to talk to … and no mistake … to talk to … Celebrity is a two-edged weapon because it also puts you under surveillance … and anybody can get it into his head to keep an eye on you and finally say anything … Take the journalists … when they don’t know … they just make it up …

“Jean Daive, I modestly want to tell you this: my parents died deported … right …
They died over there … and I am here … alive.” At the Royal Panthéon.

He orders a third cup of coffee for himself and me.

Words rise to the surface: war, revolt, riot, police action, civil war, State crime, ethnic cleansing, guerilla, disobedience, insubordination, resistance, uprising, dissidence, trouble, agitation, open war, sexual harassment, persecution, slave, maternal corruption, mmmm …

Muffled steps. Steps in the snow. White is not spoken. Neither at the height of summer nor in the depth of snow.

Muffled steps. Steps among leaves. Autumn is not spoken. Neither at the heart of darkness nor at the heart of fall.

Village of the Contrescarpe, village of Avenue Emile-Zola. He just showed me the empty space of the apartment he just moved into. We make the round. Empty living room. Empty bedroom. Empty kitchen. Empty bathroom. The tub is half full of water and laundry soaking. We go do an errand. Black coats and pants, radishes, salad.
Greengrocers’ windows with bananas and peaches, faces in make-up, red lips and rosy cheeks. We walk silently. Paul carries an empty netbag.

Dry sentences, no larger than a — folded — handkerchief. Why?

Difficult to think of snow in the heat of a premature summer, which is what I am doing now, what I do often on the Dodecanese Islands: the wind becomes a snow I can think. I walk there. I unfold my handkerchief and walk. A white wall at an angle is drying like a handkerchief in the sun: I walk there. Snow thus fitted with a screen to view all of time corresponds no doubt to the shade of trees — the Celanian dome — or the curtain of the double agent. The man who speaks in one language is no longer the one who writes in a different language. Just open Schneepart and make a flat count of all the war and espionage terms that Paul read on the “snowy” screen of his mind — (Everything double: Alles doppelt): shelter — spike — transit - bullet — vat — debris — rubble — uprising — detector — barricade — tank — microphone — negotiation table — at half-mast — wound — explosive — general strategic situation — warrant of arrest — cables laid, luckily — ammunition — rescue — hatchway — goniometric sights.

The time of Schneepart is the perpetual winter of one year: begun on October 18, 1968 it was finished on December 22, 1969. A year, a winter when alles doppelt: the actual riot puts in perspective the riot of language across stammers. The actual rubble is also he rubble of verse. This man chews his writing. This man confronts war because he has swallowed the verb. This man, that is, the hang-dog, the epileptic, moves through a density of words from which the verb is absent.

One summer I reread Lichtzwang. He wrote this book with a Driver’s Manual in his hand.

In late afternoon we go into a café. Our table faces a mirror. Paul Celan:
— Do the mirrors bend over us, over our distress? Man is no longer man. Man no longer speaks. Man is no longer. Man is no longer upright. He is no longer anywhere. The poet can only qualify him.
— That’s why you tell me that mirrors bend over man. the mirrors bend over adjectives that account for absence …
— of a trace … of a memory. Yes, man is gone along with the verb. All that’s left are nouns, substantives. The subject remains, but the subject is almost no longer conjugated.
— You mean to say that you turn the noun into a verb?
— Yes. The noun reflects man.
— The subject includes the verb, and the subject is the mirror of man.

Paul looks at the café mirror. He lowers his eyes. Again, his stubborn silence.

Later. Avenue Emile-Zola. Empty apartment. Light and emptiness. The long table. We go out. The farmer’s market. Sidewalks, streets, on them legs and black stockings. We clear a path. Paul walks holding his netbag with five grapefruit scrupulously selected by their stamp: Jaffa.

The stamp at the bottom of the net turns on his hand.

Remark: five grapefruit in his net and five floors to climb in Rue de Longchamp.

Commotion in the trees. Commotion behind the fence of a garden going to seed.
Paul resumes:
— How to open up to the light the Old and New Testaments? How unify them into One? The poem should say, should show this superposition.
— Messiah or Savior, they ride on vision, that is, the poem.
— You notice I used the word ajourer, to open up, break open, to the light.
— Yes, I heard … the sacred texts are pierced in different ways by the light.
— The sacred texts and the figures in the sacred texts are pierced in different ways by the light … I mean that luminous, miraculous punctures, the stigmata of sacred texts, reach even the poem. We write with luminous wounds that illuminate our hands.
— But what do you see through the openings?
— The effects of double language. The effect of my resistance to the language I am now speaking with you, which is not that of the poem. My resistance makes gaps of light in the sacred text.
— Mmmm … I wonder if we need a double language in order to read the Old Testament and the New?
— Mmmm … a double language in order to understand, to take two lives: the Old and the New. The poem is a wheel that makes the two others turn round.

Long silence and silent observing of each other. Paul closes in on himself, silently touches the depth of his meditation. His fingers tremble, his lips tremble. Paul goes on:
— Have you ever observed a ruined wall and how a ruined wall turns into a living heap of stones and pebbles, as if the ruined wall became for us the form, the life we lack?
— Mmmm …
— And yet this life is lifeless. The wall is in ruins and the heap is in ruins, two parallel and empty lives. It’s as if I compared a ruined wall with a niche … Have you ever observed a niche?
— Mmmm …
— Well, the niche remains empty. There is a dog in the bedroom, and the child in his dream manipulates this stage house: he sits in front of the niche and, in his head, barks. I’ve often noticed that a taciturn object — the house for the child — leads us to a luminous object — the niche. Two roofs maintain an emptiness that chases the sky out of the house or encases it in the niche.
— Mmmm …
— A hospital helps you look at, think the world beyond the wall, beyond the hedge. All you need is to jump, and you cannot do it: the medication plasters you to the floor. There used to be walls and hedges. You noticed that at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois there are not even any hedges any more: just a large circular meadow and around it a wire at knee-height. You cannot walk long on the meadow, let alone step over the wire. You still can think.
— Of privet hedges that grow oranges.
— That’s when we must carry the world, sitting on a chair or head on a pillow. Suddenly you carry the world without arms, with just smoke. Then suddenly the world bounces before you on the grass, over the wire.
— Mmmm … You think the world carried this way can be a guide?
— The poem is not necessarily a provisional guide like the world.
— Mmmm …
— Don’t forget. Somewhere there’s a wolf, and the wolf devours everything: the provisional, the guide, the crutch, I mean the provisional or even the crutch of the provisional, and the guide’s crutch. You know, the wolf does not stutter.
— Mmmm … If I understand right, you are looking for an occasion for yourself and the wolf.
— We are the wolf because we no longer stutter while eating nor perhaps while speaking.
— I expected you to say while writing.
— We still stutter in writing …
— … because the wolf does not write.
— We have come to superimpose the wolf and the guide and to hear the guide in the wolf’s belly stutter the provisional. He strikes with his crutch. He strikes and counts the blows and stutters, and the crutch is the occasion of the stutter, and I answer you: I am the occasion of the wolf and the occasion of the stutter.
— You are not the occasion of the guide because the crutch …
He interrupts:
— Because the crutch is a writing tool in snow, in grass, in sand. There is, isn’t there, writing that is stutter and limp. Let me tell you that there is writing that is crutches.
His smile is luminous, radiant. He goes on:
— Stuttering presents our asymmetry of the world and to the world. It is the
birthmark on the rosy cheek of the sleeper. Stuttering is the occasion of speech, an occasion gambled, really gambled with dice by the moment of speech. There is … how say this?... an interruption … or a … switching … commuting a switch … Crutches interrupt the current … the current life … absent the current life. The stutter cuts and can reestablish the current and is in itself an outlet of current, but also a draft of air in our current life. Have you ever noticed the ramp that parallels an escalator, I mean the handrail … there, limping disturbs the occasion of the handrail: it stops, marks a stop at the moment the wounded foot limps, when the wound imposes its time on the step … the handrail marks and misses our time … because the handrail … it’s you or me … and my hand gripping the handrail is the memory of the intermittent wound of the world set down on the ramp … the hand of stutter and limp.
— So poetry is not the handrail.
— Poetry does not run or rail, and poetry does not rail with or on hands.

With these words, Paul Celan shuts down. He is silent. We fix a date. We separate.

Notes

André du Bouchet: important French poet, editor of the magazine L'Ephémère, where the first excerpt from Jean Daive's first book, Décimale blanche, is published.

Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, Paule Celan’s wife, at this point separated from her husband.

Joerg Ortner, Austrian painter and friend of Paul Celan and Jean Daive.

The translation of the quotations from Spinoza is from The Correspondence of Spinoza, translated and edited by A. Wolf, New York: Lincoln MacVeagh: The Dial Press, 1927.

“the Littré:” the Dictionnaire de la langue française of Emile Littré is the French equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary.